PlaNet

Aquí hay otra herramienta de Google basada en inteligencia artificial que está empezando a sorprender. Se llama PlaNet y lo que este programita esta aprendiendo a hacer es reconocer cualquier lugar del mundo con solo ver una foto. No, no necesita GPS. Si, necesita conexión a internet para consultar su base de datos, lo que le quita un poco el chiste (pues si depende de internet podría igualmente usar el GPS).

Aún así me sigue sorprendiendo como puedes hacer a un programa aparentemente omnisciente, mucho más capaz en algo de lo que cualquier persona podría, si lo alimentas con suficiente información como Google lo hace. Los millones de datos -o de imágenes en este caso- con que alimentan diariamente a este programita harán que PLaNet pronto conozca localidades de todo el mundo como la palma de su mano y con solo ver la totalidad o pare de ellas. Y lo va a hacer mucho mejor de lo que cualquier viajero o grupo de viajeros podrían viajar y conocer en varias vidas…

In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine that specializes in figuring out where a photo was taken—using nothing but the image’s pixels.

Today, MIT Tech Review reports on a new effort led by Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, to create a computer that sees a photo and can instantly figure out where in the world it’s from. The system was fed over 90 million geotagged images across the planet, and trained to spot patterns based on location.

http://on.mash.to/1VlKHP3

PlaNet

SOLARBEAT

Cómo sonarían el sistema solar si fuera un gran instrumento musical. Esto es lo que se planteó el diseñador e ingeniero inglés Luke Twyman, con este sitio que muestra una musicalización sonora y visual de los planetas de nuestro sistema solar al desplazarse en sus órbitas.

Me gustan mucho ese tipo de proyectos musicales donde cualquier cosa es convertida en sonido (música = matemáticas = universo)…

This is a seriously cool visualization of the solar system. What if you turned the planets into a sort of music box? That’s the point of Solarbeat, which turns the movement of the planets into music.

Solarbeat actually launched five years ago in 2010, but the designer Luke Twyman decided to revamp the website recently in light of the New Horizons and Dawn missions…

http://bit.ly/1iNcqcb

Earth Flag

No se si algún día todas las personas lleguemos a vernos mutuamente como una sola especie que comparte y vive en un mismo planeta (ojalá lo hagamos). Pero por si ese día llegue aquí ya tenemos un propuesta de cual puede ser la imagen que nos represente en otros mundos, es decir la bandera de la tierra.

La propuesta comenzó como el proyecto de tesis de un universitario sueco llamado Oskar Pernefeldt, y es resultado de todo un trabajo de vexilología (precisamente la ciencia que estudia a las banderas), algo mucho más complejo de lo que podríamos creer, por todas las regulaciones internacionales que hay que cumplir para ser “oficial”, y por toda la asesoría que se tuvo durante el proyecto: astrónomos, científicos, diseñadores, marcas como LG, y hasta la misma NASA.

Parecería que por ahora el tener un bandera mundial será de poca utilidad para la mayoría de las personas. No todos vamos a la luna o fuera del planeta muy frecuentemente. Pero hay que pensar que es un paso importante hacia una conciencia global sobre nosotros mismos.  ¿O acaso existe alguna bandera que sirva para alguna otra cosa? No amigos, el valor de esta y cualquier otra bandera, y cualquier otro símbolo patrio no puede ser más que simbólico. Y ojo, eso no le quita valor (al contrario), pues la hace formar parte lo que algunos historiadores llaman “realidades imaginadas”, algo primordial para entender el fenómeno de la cultura y la civilización humana en general.

Sólo un consejo más: La bandera es de todos; úsenla con sabiduría…

Current expeditions in outer space use different national flags depending on which country is funding the voyage. The space travelers, however, are more than just representatives of their own countries. They are representatives of planet Earth.

Purpose of the flag:

1. To be used while representing planet Earth.

2. To remind the people of Earth that we share this planet, no matter of national boundaries. That we should take care of each other and the planet we live on…

http://bit.ly/1H9AxN1

Your name in mars

En estos días todos quieren presumir que fueron los primeros en “hacer algo” (como si eso diera algún tipo de prestigio).
Aquí hay una buena oportunidad: ser el primero en mandar tu nombre a otro planeta. Gracias a la NASA por esta iniciativa, que forma parte de próxima misión a Marte, llamada proyecto Orion…

Since Richard Branson hasn’t gotten around to offering Mars vacations yet (he’s still working out that whole suborbital thing), we’re all pretty much stuck here on Earth for the time being. But NASA understands the human desire to write our names upon the stars, so it’s giving everybody a chance toshoot their names up into space on the first Orion mission, scheduled to launch December 4.

The collected names will be included on a microchip the size of a dime. The first trip will be on board NASA’s initial test flight for the new Orion spacecraft. It’s set for a 4.5-hour mission in orbit around Earth. It will then take a flying leap back through the atmosphere and land in the Pacific Ocean.

That’s a pretty cool journey for your name to take, but NASA has bigger plans. Orion isn’t just for toodling around the Earth. It’s designed to one day carry astronauts on long missions to visit asteroids and Mars. When you sign up to send your name off into space on Orion, you’re signing up to send your name to Mars at some future time…

http://cnet.co/1nZSnsE

Your name in mars

Kappa Andromedae

Que tal esto! un planeta nuevo, mas grande que todos los que se han conocido -13 veces mas el tamaño de Jupiter- y con una masa tan espectacular que casi obliga a redefinir las la categorías de “planeta” y “estrella” conocidas, o a crear una nueva…

 

Scientists using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii have discovered a “super-Jupiter” orbiting around the bright star Kappa Andromedae. The planet, which is about 13 times the size of Jupiter, glows with a reddish color and skirts the line between planet and star on account of its tremendous mass. Moreover, its parent star now holds the record for the most massive sun known to host a directly imaged planet or lightweight brown dwarf companion.

Called Kappa Andromedae b (or ‘Kappa And b,’ for short), it is 170 light-years away and sits in an orbit about 1.8 times farther than Neptune’s. It’s also quite young, as its parent star is only 30 million years old (compared to our sun’s 5 billion years).

But more interestingly, the object is sitting on the dividing line that separates the most massive planets from the lowest-mass brown dwarfs — a so-called “failed star” that’s not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion in its core. Because the astronomers are not sure how to classify it, they’re dubbing it a “super-Jupiter.” Subsequently, it could represent a celestial “bridge” between planets and stars…

http://bit.ly/QWwWbm 

Kappa Andromedae

Un aborto estelar

La estrella TYC 8241 2652 1 pensó que estaba “embarazada" (o al menos nos hizo pensarlo). Pero algo salió mal. No todos los soles son fértiles, otra cosa que agradecerle a nuestro sistema solar…

For a long while, it looked like the young star known as TYC 8241 2652 1 was getting ready to make some planets.

The sun-like star, located about 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus was encircled by a disk of warm, brightly glowing dust located about as far away from the star as Mercury orbits the sun.

But something strange happened between 2008, when the star was observed by a powerful ground-based infrared telescope in Chile, and 2010 when NASA’s WISE infrared space telescope took a look: The dust was gone.

The dust that once orbited around the star likely came from two small rocky bodies that were destroyed when they smashed into each other. Astronomers have found no evidence of any planets around the star.
As far as what happened to the dust, no one knows. One theory is that friction with intervening gas caused the dust to slow and fall onto the star, lured by gravity. Another idea is that the dust grains continued crashing into each other until, too small to remain in orbit, they got blasted out of the system. But whatever happened, happened fast...

http://bit.ly/P9TYsQ 

Un aborto estelar

Earth 2.0

Es casi imposible no echar a volar la imaginación con este tipo de noticias: acaban de confirmar la existencia de un planeta con condiciones bastante similares a las que hacen posible la vida en la tierra. Se llama Kepler 22-b y está aproximadamente a 600 años luz de nosotros…

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the “habitable zone” around a star not unlike our own.

The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C.

It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours – an “Earth 2.0”.

However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid.

During the conference at which the result was announced, the Kepler team also said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets – nearly doubling the telescope’s haul of potential far-flung worlds.

Kepler 22-b was one of 54 exoplanet candidates in habitable zones reported by the Kepler team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other telescopes…

http://bbc.in/vlEpBO

Earth 2.0

Pluto is not a planet

(Discovery News) Why? What rules have we applied to Pluto to forever condemn it to the back seats of the solar system rankings?

For a celestial body to be considered a planet, it must:

1) be in orbit around the sun.

Clearly, Pluto is in orbit around the sun, but so do thousands of asteroids. As far as this criterion is concerned, Pluto is still hanging on by the skin of its teeth.

2) have sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium.

This is just a posh way to say it is pretty much spherical in shape. Note the careful use of the phrase ‘pretty much’; no planet is a perfect sphere. Due to their rotation, often they are a little squashed along the polar axis.

This criterion is just saying they that they must have sufficient gravity to have overcome other forces and mould a more-or-less sphere-shaped body. Pluto maintains hydrostatic equilibrium, whereas many of the asteroids and other minor planets are quite oddly shaped.

3) have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

That’s the nail in the coffin for Pluto. This final criterion requires that it must have cleared its orbit of all other objects of comparable size, other than its own satellites. This means “a planet” must be gravitationally dominant in its orbit and this is where Pluto fails. Pluto not only shares its orbit with a number of other Kuiper Belt objects, but it also flies inside the orbit of ice giant Neptune!

The small print here says that if it fails on this point alone, then it must be classified as a dwarf planet. And so the case against Pluto finally got laid to rest in 2006 when the IAU voted to “demote” Pluto to the status of dwarf planet…

http://t.co/c4hdsyS

Pluto is not a planet