Explorific

It was 1993. Kathleen Elmore was driving through an intersection and a truck came at her from the left. “That doesn’t look good,” she thought.  “Dying does not hurt,” Elmore said as she recounted the experience at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference this year.  “That whole immense, huge impact felt like somebody just kind of tipped me on the shoulder, and I went straight up.”

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one's own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon.

Nothing that enters a black hole ever comes out. But one astrophysicist has stepped inside and created striking visualizations of passing the event horizon, carried on a waterfall moving faster than the speed of light...

Every three hours, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope scans the entire sky and deepens its portrait of the high-energy universe. Every year, the satellite's scientists reanalyze all of the data it has collected, exploiting updated analysis methods to tease out new sources. These relatively steady sources are in addition to the numerous transient events Fermi detects, such as gamma-ray bursts in the distant universe and flares from the sun...

What is awe? IONS' research team invites you to participate in a study on awe.

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), as it is called, is a bizarre phenomenon all by itself. But there is nothing like taking the bizarre and making it even more so. A group of researchers has shown that, under the right conditions, this second light field doesn’t have to hit the substance to make EIT work—it only has to have the potential to be there. My response: OMFG, that is too cool to be true...

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/09/06/Canada-psychic-says-may-take-1M-challenge/UPI-52581315349612/#ixzz1XE0OgeGK

The world's most-wanted particle continues to elude the world's most powerful particle accelerator. A sign that the elusive Higgs boson doesn't exist? Not so fast. For now, there are good reasons to assume the Higgs is just hiding...

Astronomers have discovered the densest extrasolar planet yet: A Jupiter-mass remnant of a carbon- and oxygen-rich star that measures no more than 55,000 kilometers across. The odd world, whose density is on average at least 23 grams per cubic centimeter (or about twice that of lead), is probably crystalline and possiblylargely composed of ultradense diamond....

A giant black hole in the constellation Draco bit off more than it could chew. On 25 March, NASA's Swift satellite detected an x-ray flare when a black hole 3.9 billion light-years from Earth tore a passing star to shreds. The flare arose because friction and gravity roasted the star's remains...

Gaia’s Dreams is a website designed as an online repository of nightly dreams from people worldwide. Each person entering the dream can categorize the dream along a number of different variables...

The Spectrogram Calendar displays data from the magnetic field detector developed by the Global Coherence Initiative research team to monitor the resonances occurring in the plasma waves constantly circling the earth in the ionosphere. These daily spectrograms show the activity occurring at the various resonant frequencies from 1 to 50 Hz. Within the spectrogram, the power, or intensity level of each frequency is displayed as a color, with yellow being the most intense. The Schumann resonances appear as the horizontal lines at 7.8,14, 20, 26, 33 & 39 Hz. In this calendar, each day begins at midnight UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

The particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider is now making its connection with the arts official: it is launching Great Arts for Great Science, its cultural policy for engaging with the arts...