Here’s Are Some Websites To Explore.  

Basic Argument for an Intellectual Revolution

See on Scoop.it - Philosophy everywhere everywhen

Here is an outline of the argument for the urgent need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, its whole character and structure, so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom rather than just acquiring knowledge. Academia as it exists today is the product of two past great intellectual revolutions. The first is the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, associated with Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Newton and many others, which in effect created modern science. A method was discovered for the progressive acquisition of knowledge, the famous empirical method of science. The second revolution is that of the Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment, in the 18th century. Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the other philosophes had the profoundly important idea that it might be possible to learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world. They did not just have the idea: they did everything they could to put the idea into practice in their lives. They fought dictatorial power, superstition, and injustice with weapons no more lethal than those of argument and wit. They gave their support to the virtues of tolerance, openness to doubt, readiness to learn from criticism and from experience. Courageously and energetically they laboured to promote reason and enlightenment in personal and social life.

See on ucl.ac.uk

I sure could really use a Home_Computer with a 10 or 1,000 Core CPU and at least 8_GBs of Dual_Channel or Quad_Channel Random_Access Memory! 

I would sure like to see something like The Hyperloop or Evacuated Tube Technology come to be a common form of Long-Distance Travel someday!  

MIT Reveals its Version of Hyperloop Transit Pod 

Tired of being stuck in traffic on the highway or waiting endlessly for a delayed subway? Almost three years ago, Elon Musk envisioned the Hyperloop, a new type of public transit that would whisk commuter-filled pods efficiently across hundreds of kilometers in a matter of minutes via tubes; and of course, only second to teleportation in terms of overall coolness.

Among a number of startups trying to get in on the competition sponsored by Musk’s company SpaceX, a student team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology emerged earlier this year as the front-runner when it won the competition’s design phase. On Friday, MIT finally unveiled the prototype pod that it will test this summer at a 1-mile racetrack near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. 

Photograph by MIT

It's not quite warp drive, but researchers are hot on the trail of building nuclear fusion impulse engines, complete with real-life dilithium crystals. Read this article by Amanda Kooser on CNET.

Different Types of Supernovae are the Primary Origins of Different Classes of Chemical_Elements.

You Are Made of Stardust

Though the billions of people on Earth may come from different areas, we share a common heritage: we are all made of stardust! From the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.

The building blocks for humans, and even our planet, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for stars. If we could rewind the universe back almost to the very beginning, we would just see a sea of hydrogen, helium, and a tiny bit of lithium.

The first generation of stars formed from this material. There’s so much heat and pressure in a star’s core that they can fuse atoms together, forming new elements. Our DNA is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. All those elements (except hydrogen, which has existed since shortly after the big bang) are made by stars and released into the cosmos when the stars die.

Each star comes with a limited fuel supply. When a medium-mass star runs out of fuel, it will swell up and shrug off its outer layers. Only a small, hot core called a white dwarf is left behind. The star’s cast-off debris includes elements like carbon and nitrogen. It expands out into the cosmos, possibly destined to be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. New life may be born from the ashes of stars.

Massive stars are doomed to a more violent fate. For most of their lives, stars are balanced between the outward pressure created by nuclear fusion and the inward pull of gravity. When a massive star runs out of fuel and its nuclear processes die down, it completely throws the star out of balance. The result? An explosion!

Supernova explosions create such intense conditions that even more elements can form. The oxygen we breathe and essential minerals like magnesium and potassium are flung into space by these supernovas.

Supernovas can also occur another way in binary, or double-star, systems. When a white dwarf steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance too and lead to another kind of cataclysmic supernova. Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study these stellar explosions to figure out what’s speeding up the universe’s expansion. 

This kind of explosion creates calcium – the mineral we need most in our bodies – and trace minerals that we only need a little of, like zinc and manganese. It also produces iron, which is found in our blood and also makes up the bulk of our planet’s mass!

A supernova will either leave behind a black hole or a neutron star – the superdense core of an exploded star. When two neutron stars collide, it showers the cosmos in elements like silver, gold, iodine, uranium, and plutonium.

Some elements only come from stars indirectly. Cosmic rays are nuclei (the central parts of atoms) that have been boosted to high speed by the most energetic events in the universe. When they collide with atoms, the impact can break them apart, forming simpler elements. That’s how we get boron and beryllium – from breaking star-made atoms into smaller ones.

Half a dozen other elements are created by radioactive decay. Some elements are radioactive, which means their nuclei are unstable. They naturally break down to form simpler elements by emitting radiation and particles. That’s how we get elements like radium. The rest are made by humans in labs by slamming atoms of lighter elements together at super high speeds to form heavier ones. We can fuse together elements made by stars to create exotic, short-lived elements like seaborgium and einsteinium.

From some of the most cataclysmic events in the cosmos comes all of the beauty we see here on Earth. Life, and even our planet, wouldn’t have formed without them! But we still have lots of questions about these stellar factories. 

In 2006, our Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth containing tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away – the first star dust to ever be collected from space and returned for study. You can help us identify and study the composition of these tiny, elusive particles through our Stardust@Home Citizen Science project.

Our upcoming Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies, all while exploring many other cosmic questions. Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Publishers are giving away Bestselling Books for Free!  

Last year, Random House decided to give away Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, for free for one week. The eBook freebie ran on the 10-year anniversary of The Da Vinci Code, and a few weeks before the release of Brown’s new book, Inferno.

Why did Random House give away a...

Here’s what David Brin has to say about:

The Rise of The Internet.

Three planets with sizes and temperatures akin to those of the Earth and Venus are circling a dwarf star 40 light-years away. The star in question, named TRAPPIST-1 after the telescope used to observe it, is weaker and cooler than the Sun at the heart of our solar system. "With such short orbital

NASA’s Cassini_Mission to Saturn will be Retiring soon.  

Future_Missions to Saturn will someday follow in its’ footsteps.  

Cassini’s Retirement

What were you up to back in 1997? It was an exciting year. Titanic was setting box office records, Dolly the sheep was getting cloned, and the very first Harry Potter book was hitting shelves. It was also the year that a bus-sized NASA spacecraft named Cassini launched. Carrying the ESA Huygens probe, Cassini set off for Saturn to learn all about the lovely ringed planet.

After almost 20 years, Cassini is entering its last phase, building up to the “Grand Finale” that will culminate in September 2017 (if all goes well).

~ Scientific American

Also check out: https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

The Search for Evidence of Space_Mining Operations in Other Solar_Systems.