Funny or Die pokes fun of those who like listening to stories over understanding science in its latest: Creationist Cosmos. It’s like the new Neil DeGrasse Tyson Cosmos reboot TV show only made for Creationists. So instead of explanations about the universe, we get very unscientific reasons of why things exist. It’s all in silly fun.
The Cosmos reboot
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The first thing you’ll see tomorrow night when you tune in to Cosmos won’t be Carl Sagan, or even Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’ll be President Obama, kicking off the series premiere with a statement that "invites a new generation to embrace the spirit of discovery and inspires viewers to explore new frontiers and imagine limitless possibilities for the future." Maybe he took Bill Nye’s plea to fund planetary exploration
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When we found out that Seth MacFarlane—a man known more for fart jokes than a passion for science—was behind the reboot of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (premiering this Sunday at 9 pm EDT on Fox), we were understandably a little concerned. Fortunately, we were also totally wrong. If the first episode is any indicator, with Neil deGrasse Tyson at the reins, the followup to Carl Sagan’s otherworldly masterpiece is in very capable hands.
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That top image is pretty, but the only way to see this incredible combination of dust and gas is to take in the whole image below. Holy crap, right? This picture, which was created in 2005 using Hubble data and digitally assigned colors, shows the Eagle Nebula
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San Diego Comic-Con is a white-hot furnace in which projects are made, or destroyed. Some emerge from the flames stronger, with invincible buzz levels, while others are melted down. Here’s our list of the people and projects that gained buzz from Comic-Con, and the ones that lost some of their buzz.
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As if there were any question about who held the modern-day astrophysics badass crown, the first trailer for Neil deGrasse’s Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series looks absolutely incredible.
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I’ve never been exactly sure of how the universe came to be—big bang boom thang a lang—but I’m certainly glad it shaped out the way it has. If you want to finally understand the beginnings of our universe, watch the video by CERN physicist Tom Whyntie above. Cosmologists and particle physicists try to trace back our universe’s footsteps by replicating the heat, energy and activity of the first few seconds right after the Big Bang. [TED-Ed via Geekosystem] More »
Are animations of Curiosity’s Mars landing not enough to feed your space exploration appetite? Try this on for size: a group of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have generated what’s billed as a full-fledged simulation of the universe. Arepo, the software behind the sim, took the observed afterglow of the big bang as its only input and sped things up by 14 billion years. The result was a model of the cosmos peppered with realistically depicted galaxies that look like our own and those around us. Previous programs created unseemly blobs of stars instead of the spiral galaxies that were hoped for because they divided space into cubes of fixed size and shape. Arepo’s secret to producing accurate visualizations is its geometry; a grid that moves and flexes to mirror the motions of dark energy, dark matter, gasses and stars. Video playback of the celestial recreation clocks in at just over a minute, but it took Harvard’s 1,024-core Odyssey super computer months to churn out. Next on the group’s docket is tackling larger portions of the universe at a higher resolution. Head past the jump for the video and full press release, or hit the source links below for the nitty-gritty details in the team’s trio of scholarly papers.
Filed under: Science
Scientists create simulation of the universe, reenact 14 billion years in a few months (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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