Science park
A research park, science park, or science and technology park is an area with a collection of buildings dedicated to scientific research on a business footing.
Study: Wisconsin Has the Worst Science Education Standards in the Country
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The grades are out – Wisconsin is the worst in the United States when it comes to science curricula in the classroom. In the words of a recent study, our state’s science standards are “simply worthless.” A 2012 report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute gauged the strength of science programs across the nation. With several different approaches to teaching science in the classroom, every state presented a different challenge to students and analysts. This study, authored by a cabal of notable researchers, broke down the difference in science standards throughout the country. Without a “Common Core” of data standards...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- The Belt of Venus Over Mercedes, Argentina
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Although you've surely seen it, you might not have noticed it. During a cloudless twilight, just before sunrise or after sunset, part of the atmosphere above the horizon appears slightly off-color, slightly pink or orange. Called the Belt of Venus, this off-color band between the dark eclipsed sky and the blue sky can be seen in nearly every direction including that opposite the Sun. Straight above, blue sky is normal sunlight reflecting off the atmosphere. In the Belt of Venus, however, the atmosphere reflects light from the setting (or rising) Sun which appears more red. Below the Belt of Venus,...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Dust of the Orion Nebula
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Explanation: What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula -- dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust. Opaque to visible light, dust is created in the outer atmosphere of massive cool stars and expelled by a strong outer wind of particles. The Trapezium and other forming star clusters are embedded in the nebula. The intricate filaments of dust surrounding M42 and M43 appear brown in the above image, while central glowing gas is highlighted in red. Over the next few million...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Lunation
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Explanation: Our Moon's appearance changes nightly. This time-lapse sequence shows what our Moon looks like during a lunation, a complete lunar cycle. As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth. The Moon's apparent size changes slightly, though, and a slight wobble called a libration is discernible as it progresses along its elliptical orbit. During the cycle, sunlight reflects from the Moon at different angles, and so illuminates different features differently. A full lunation takes about 29.5 days, just under...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Comet Garradd and M92
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Explanation: Sweeping slowly through the constellation Hercules, Comet Garradd (C2009/P1) passed with about 0.5 degrees of globular star cluster M92 on February 3. Captured here in its latest Messier moment, the steady performer remains just below naked-eye visibility with a central coma comparable in brightness to the dense, well-known star cluster. The rich telescopic view from New Mexico's, early morning skies, also features Garradd's broad fan shaped dust tail and a much narrower ion tail that extends up and beyond the right edge of the frame. Pushed out by the pressure of sunlight, the dust tail tends to trail the...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Inside the Eagle Nebula
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Explanation: In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This remarkable false-color composite image revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly, including the famous pillars and other structures near the center of the scene. Toward the other extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, XMM-Newton's X-ray vision reveals the massive, hot stars of the nebula's embedded star...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- La Silla Star Trails North and South
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Explanation: Fix your camera to a tripod and you can record graceful trails traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. If the tripod is set up at ESO's La Silla Observatory, high in the Atacama desert of Chile, your star trails would look something like this. Spanning about 4 hours on the night of January 24, the image is actually a composite of 250 consecutive 1-minute exposures, looking toward the north. The North Celestial Pole, at the center of the star trail arcs, is just below the horizon in this southern hemisphere perspective. In the foreground,...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Red Aurora Over Australia
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Explanation: Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. Last week's solar storms, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth's atmosphere. As the excited element's electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow. Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth's atmosphere excited, the glow would be predominantly green. Pictured above, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week near Flinders, Victoria, Australia. The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects, including the central disk of...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- The Helix Nebula from the VISTA Telescope
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Explanation: Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 700 light-years away towards...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
California Researchers Hoping To Reveal Secrets of Anti-Gravity
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A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) say they are close to determining whether or not anti-matter exerts a sort of “anti-gravity” in much the same what that ordinary matter exerts regular gravity. In an article published Friday, BBC News reports that, while it is well known that normal matter attracts all other matter in the universe, scientists currently do not know if anti-matter would attract other matter, or repel it.
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Blue Marble Earth from Suomi NPP
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Explanation: Behold one of the more detailed images of the Earth yet created. This Blue Marble Earth montage shown above -- created from photographs taken by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on board the new Suomi NPP satellite -- shows many stunning details of our home planet. The Suomi NPP satellite was launched last October and renamed last week after Verner Suomi, commonly deemed the father of satellite meteorology. The composite was created from the data collected during four orbits of the robotic satellite taken earlier this month and digitally projected onto the globe. Many features of North...
Published on Tuesday 7th of February 2012 11:05:11 AM
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