Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state.
Physical laws such as Newton’s second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object’s mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and the University of Leicester in England. Living things as diverse as bacteria, birds and humans can interact with the forces upon them. There are examples of non-living active matter, too. Nanoparticles known as “Janus particles,” are made up of two sides with different chemical properties. The interactions between the two sides create self-propelled movement.
To explore active matter, Brilliantov and his colleagues used a computer to simulate particles that could self-propel. These particles weren’t consciously interacting with the environment, Brilliantov told Live Science. Rather, they were more akin to simple bacteria or nanoparticles with internal sources of energy, but without information-processing abilities.
On February 18, if all goes according to plan, Perseverance, NASA’s latest-and-greatest rover, will land on Mars. Around 3 PM EST, Percy will attempt its tricky Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) maneuver. If it survives the experience, Percy will join the Curiosity rover as humanity’s foremost interplanetary explorers.
To get this tricky orbital choreography just right, NASA pushed forward with the $2.7 billion mission despite the spread of the novel coronavirus. “It’s very expensive if we have to take Perseverance and put it back in storage for a period of two years,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, said at a June 17 press conference.
Perseverance wasn’t the only mission hoping to take advantage of the orbital alignment. China National Space Administration rover (and orbiter) Tianwen-1 arrived at the Red Planet last week, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars orbiter arrived as well. ESA and Roscosmos were supposed to launch their ExoMars rover, dubbed Rosalind Franklin, in summer 2020, but work was delayed due to the spread of the coronavirus and the agencies postponed the launch. The rover will blast off in about two years.
NASA hopes that its newest rover, designed and developed in cooperation with partners from the European Space Agency, as well as researchers from Norway, Spain, and France—will be the first to find evidence of life outside of our pale, blue dot.
If you sit at a desk all day, stretching your arms up to the sky has likely become one of those mid-meeting tics that you don’t even realize you’re doing… until one day, you reach toward the ceiling, and your shoulder pings with pain. It’s one of the tell-tale signs that you’re dealing with inflammation and a cue that you should start treating your body to some shoulder impingement exercises before it gets any worse.
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“A shoulder impingement is an acute weakness and pain in the front and side of the shoulder, especially while the arm is in motion,” says Joey Cifelli, the assistant fitness manager at Crunch Union Square in New York City. It can happen for a number of reasons, including poor posture or simply going too hard on shoulder day. No matter how it started, though, trainers agree that you’ll want to nip it in the bud. Scroll on for everything you need to know about shoulder impingement, plus the exercises you can do at home to make those Zoom stretch sessions painless.
What is shoulder impingement?
Shoulder impingement happens when the tissues and tendons in your shoulders stop doing their jobs properly. Usually, these two elements act as a sort of protective cushion between your joints and muscles, absorbing the force of your movements so that you can raise and lower your arms without pain. “Usually, when we’re doing something like trying to lift our arms overhead, our muscles will transfer the force to a tendon, which helps transfer the movement from muscle to bone,” says athletic trainer Cristian Plascencia, CSCS. “But when people experience shoulder impingement, this ability to transfer and absorb force is compromised due to high amounts of inflammation in the shoulder joint.” The result: You’re not able to move through your full range of motion without feeling pain, which can lead to issues both on the mat and in your everyday life.
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NASA’s Perseverance rover is ready to make its debut on the Red Planet. The intrepid spacecraft is designed to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, collect geologic samples for return to Earth and send the first helicopter into the skies of another world. That’s just the beginning. For the first time ever, two microphones aboard the spacecraft—the Entry Descent and Landing Cam microphone and the SuperCam Microphone—will sample Mars’ sonic landscape. It could reshape our understanding of the Red Planet. It’s a project that has been decades in the making. One that traces its origins back to the mid-90s and the Mars Polar Lander Mission.
In the mid-1990s, a group of scientists from the Planetary Society and the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley hatched a daring plan to send a microphone to record the sounds of Mars. At first, NASA wasn’t really interested.
As the agency planned its Mars Polar Lander mission, the Planetary Society asked the Russian space program to attach a dime-sized microphone to a Russian instrument already scheduled to go on the spacecraft.
“It was, in essence, a free ride because they agreed to do it and NASA agreed to look the other way, so to speak. Once the Russian instrument was installed on the Lander, so were we.”
97 years to the day from the time that news outlets called Pennsylvania, and the presidential race, for Joe Biden, a 34-year-old Adolf Hitler bursts through the doors at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, Germany, one of the biggest beer halls in the city. He fires one shot from his pistol into the air as he announces that a revolution against the Bavarian government is taking hold. His men hold the beer hall overnight and try to claim the rest of Munich’s government buildings. The police approach. Gunfire rings out.
When all is said and done, Hitler’s sloppy attempt at a coup d’état using military force is stymied in under 24 hours. After two days on the run, he is caught, convicted of treason, and sentenced to Landsberg Prison. He had failed his first attempt at seizing power.
However, though the execution was disastrous, the plan was not altogether unsuccessful. Many were inspired by what he had preached at his increasingly popular speeches. Feeling that their hero had been denied his rightful position of power, they turned Hitler into a martyr and anxiously awaited his return.
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Pushing fake conspiracy theories about the election, the GOP flirted with fascism in 2020. Will they do it in the future?
“The butterflies have already started,” said Rod Scurry on April 18, 1981, in anticipation of his first major league start the following day in Houston. The season was almost two weeks old, and Scurry had yet to make an appearance on the mound. In fact, he hadn’t pitched more than four innings in a single outing in two years. He was only getting the break now because Pirates ace Jim Bibby was injured; still, Scurry was excited and was hoping not just to start but also to finish his own game. “I’ll be trying to go nine,” he said.
Growing up, Rod Scurry never doubted he would play in the majors, if not as a pitcher then as a hitter. In high school, he once hit a five-hundred-foot home run. But despite his batting prowess, he had always been a pitcher at heart. In the 1960s, when he was just a child, he stacked mattresses against the wooden fence in the backyard of his Nevada home and hurled fastballs at them. He had always had power. But then there was the hook. He could sweep his curveball in at such an angle the ball would bend between a batter’s legs. Frequently compared to the preeminent lefty of all time, Sandy Koufax, Scurry drove himself to live up to the compliment. This desire propelled him out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to jog to school through high mountain air and sometimes freezing temperatures just so he could get extra pitching practice in at the Hug High gym before the opening bell rang. On game days, when his teachers believed him to be studiously tending to his work in the classroom he would in fact be poring over index cards he had made that listed the tendencies of the opposing team’s big hitters.
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Pittsburgh, where baseball was changed forever. Photo by Andrea Evangelo-Giamou/EyeEm/Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Photo: Getty Images/Travel Couples
Pushing fake conspiracy theories about the election, the GOP flirted with fascism in 2020. Will they do it in the future?
James' World 2 