“Super Moon” November 14, 2016

According to his biographer, 24-year-old Abraham Lincoln had to settle a financial dispute by betting a gambler he could lift a barrel of whiskey off the floor and hold it while taking a ‘drink out of the bunghole.’ If he lost, the gambler got a fur hat; if he won, the gambler got nothing. So Abe dropped to a squat, lifted the barrel to his mouth, performed a reverse keg-stand, and won the bet. Source

Stephen Hawking says humans have 1,000 years to leave Earth

Famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has  grim news for humanity: We have 1,000 years to get off Earth or we’re totally screwed. The 74-year-old  delivered a speech on Tuesday at the Oxford Union in which he said “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” He believes it will become impossible for us to keep living here.

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Some meteors from the Geminid Meteor shower in Banff, Alberta

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If a person has experienced just one episode of depression in their lifetime, there’s a 50% chance they will have a second. If that happens, they become 80% more likely to endure it a third time. Source

The Orion Nebula and The Running Man 

 Last night I was able to finally resolve some issues I’ve been having with my new CCD and get a decent image comprised of Luminance and RGB color channels shot through a filter wheel. 

Although I’ve done Orion before this image is substantially higher resolution, incredibly low noise, extremely well color balanced, and far more detailed than any previous attempt. This is a work in progress until I can get another hour or two worth of exposure to reveal Orion in all it’s beauty.

 Why Are We Ticklish?

A new study from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin has found how “ticklishness” is represented in the rat brain. The study has been published on 11th November 2016 in Science.

Of all physical sensations, ticklishness is perhaps the most mysterious. Why do we laugh in response to tickling? Why are certain body parts more ticklish? Why cannot we tickle ourselves? Indeed, the mystery of ticklish perception has been discussed for more than two millennia by great intellectuals including Aristotle and Charles Darwin. Despite such long-standing interest, the mechanism of ticklishness remained elusive.

The new study investigated tickling in rats. Earlier work had shown that young rats respond with 50 kHz ultrasonic “laughter-calls” to tickling by humans. In the novel study rats also reacted enthusiastically to the tickling: they emitted numerous calls. As judged by their calls, rats were most ticklish on the belly and underneath their feet. Rats often performed unsolicited joy jumps (Freudensprünge) after tickling, a behavior that can be seen in joyful subjects in various mammalian species. Rats also played with the researcher’s hand and chased it, and emitted similar calls during play.

“Neural correlates of ticklishness in the rat somatosensory cortex” by S. Ishiyama and M. Brecht in Science. Published online November 11 2016 doi:10.1126/science.aah5114

47 Tucanae

The Cone Nebula from Hubble

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Pluto, 2006 (Red Filter).

Credit: NASA, ESA, A Stern, H Weaver and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team