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I don't wanna be human . I want to see Gamma Rays . I want to hear X-Rays and I wanna smell Dark Matter . I wanna reach out with something other than these paws. And feel the solar wind of a Super Nova . So lamented Brother Cavil in Battlestar Galactica, to his creator. Now, thanks to University of Cardiff, you will at least be able to see Gamma Rays and X-Rays. In their new site ( link to the site ) you can see the result of the brand new Planck Satellite' ( link to the site ) full sky scans in different wavelengths. They are gorgeous!

I seriously think humanities delusion of self-importance and arrogance will be its end. These two fantastic videos allow me to demonstrate my point. This video demonstrates the proportions of the Earth, the Sun, the Solar System, Milky Way, other galaxies, and the known Universe. I don't think any human language has a word capable describing how small our planet earth is (*). Seen from a cosmic scale, our little blue world is vanishingly insignificant. This is the first part of mans misplaced notion of self-importance. If our world were the only significant object in the Universe, humanity might have been justified in feeling important. After all, we would be the "owners" of the universe. But this is not the case, we are the inhabitants of an insignificant rock formation in the universe, which is unspeakably bigger in scale. However, it is precisely this spatial insignificance that makes this rock formation revolving around the sun so important. As far as we know, we are ...

The revolutionary idea of Newton was not finding out there is a force pulling the apple that fell on his head. It was all to obvious. What he found, and made the thinkers of his time so upset -the science was about to be born, it was called natural philosophy back then- was that the same set of rules govern the celestial bodies such as stars and planets -which were perfect and eternal,- and moral bodies such as an apple or humans. He was able to explain the astronomical laws that Kepler derived based on the painstaking observations by Tycho Brahe, with the laws he derived from everyday objects. The world and the skies were never to be seen as different spheres anymore. This year marks also the 400th anniversary of Galileo's observation of the stars and the planets, and the birth of modern astronomy. Following the path he opened, that is using publicly available observations, we are able to construct a fairly complete model of the history of our universe since -and before- its birth...

This is from the avesome blog Pharyngula . Click to zoom. On the left is a timeline of universe, with Human involvment in it. Just in case you still think we play an important part in the Universe. On the right the same timeline from a young earth creationist point of view, which takes Genesis in Bible literally. Yes, there are still some crackpots out there.

400 years ago Galileo Galilei first gazed at the skies through a telescope. He was probably the first human to gaze at the brilliant moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn and many unseen stars and galaxies. But more than what he saw anything, how he saw what he saw, and how he used these observations have literally changed the world. Instead of submitting to dogma about how objects -or generally the world- should behave, he relied on observations, and a methodology to understand the behavior of objects. He was probably the most important figure in the development of science as we know it. He was also the first astronomer in the Western civilization. In honor of this great mind, UNESCO named 2009 the World Astronomical Year. I have 2 great sites in the spirit of this year: * Galaxy Zoo : The number of galaxies in the observable universe are thought to be in 100 billion range. Organizing, and classifying them is a galactical task. It turns out that human eye and mind are far better than ...

I had written previously about the blurry nature of the answer to the question "What is it that makes us human?" To me it seems like science, arts, and philosophy may be the three truly human activities. Had I been brave enough to pursue my " Teenage Dreams ," I would have been a theoretical physicist, and rather than getting excited about what I read in popular science magazines, I would be working on these topics. Lately, my favorite reading on the Internet are the 3 "Dark Mysteries" of cosmology. Let me introduce you to the three biggest issues that challenge our understanding of the universe: Dark Matter This is the most "basic" problem, in the sense that it can be understood by employing basic Newtonian physics. If you ever had a long key chain, I am sure you did spin the key chain. Given a constant spinning force, the velocity with which the keys spin depend on the length of the chain, and the mass of the keys. It is not trivial to extend t...

Don't miss out this collection of heritage pictures from the Hubble telescope. If this is interesting, make sure you visit this site which features a stunning astronomy picture everyday, along with explanations: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Being a materialist (as opposed to a dualist, not in the bling-bling sense of the word) one of the topics that come out often in discussions with dualist or dualist-leaning friends is the limits of observation. The argument goes, what if there is some form of matter that you cannot observe? Well the answer is, there is such matter, which does not interact with the electromagnetic radiation, and thought to be made out of particles that are not included in the current standard model of particle physics. But their mere existence should be detectable by some means. This means is the gravity that they cause. As a matter of fact their existence were first postulated by observations of the rotational speeds of the galaxies and their distribution in the cosmos, which required more matter than the observed matter within the galaxies. A new study of the collision of galaxy clusters -nor galaxies but their clusters- provided more evidence on the properties and the existence of dark matter. When ...