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I Cut Like A Buffalo (Skream Remix) by The Dead Weather.
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I Cut Like A Buffalo (Skream Remix) by The Dead Weather.
Galileo's fingers to be displayed in Florence science museum →
Two of Galileo’s fingers, removed from his corpse by admirers in the 18th century, have gone on display in a Florence museum now named after the astronomer.
The Museum of the History of Science had shut down for two years for renovations. It reopened on Tuesday, calling itself the Galileo Museum.
Last year, the museum director announced that the thumb and middle finger from Galileo’s right hand had turned up at an auction and were recognised as being the fingers of the scientist, who died in 1642. The fingers are now displayed in slender, glass cases. Also on display is his tooth. A third finger was already in the museum.
In 1737, admirers of Galileo Galilei removed the three fingers, plus the tooth and a vertebra, from his body as it was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb – opposite that of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence.
The vertebra is kept at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught for many years.
The tooth, thumb and middle finger were held in a container passed from generation to generation in the same family, but in the early 20th century all traces of the relics disappeared. The container turned up at auction late last year, and detailed historical documents and the family’s own records helped experts to identify them, according to museum officials.
A wooden bust of Galileo tops the container in which the relics had long been kept.
Visitors can also view what the museum says are the only surviving instruments designed and built by Galileo, including two telescopes and a lens he used to discover Jupiter’s moons.
The Vatican condemned Galileo for contradicting church teaching, which held at the time that the Earth, not the sun, was the centre of the universe. Two decades ago, Pope John Paul II rehabilitated the astronomer, saying the church had erred.
Giulia and I, such a perfect day, this photo sums it up nicely!
Tweets from inside the Mars500 box →
Diego Urbina and Romain Charles will be tweeting (relayed via mission control) throughout their 520 day stint in the European Space Agency experiment, Mars500, the first ever full-length simulation mission to the Red Planet.
More info here.
I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences – Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism – there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier.
Mars 500: Countdown starts for gruelling mission in Moscow car park →
Tomorrow six men will be sealed inside a mock-up spaceship in Moscow, where they will spend the next 520 days testing how well humans cope with the stress of a return trip to Mars. After a year of strenuous astronaut training, six men will clamber into a capsule tomorrow afternoon for a journey like no other. Their mission? To boldly go – well, nowhere.
The men, who were chosen from thousands of highly qualified applicants, are the crew for a simulated round-trip to Mars, a mission that requires them to be sealed for 520 days inside a mock-up spaceship that sits in a Moscow car park.
The European Space Agency (Esa) experiment, called Mars 500, is designed to explore how humans cope with the stress, confinement and severely limited company that will confront future astronauts on missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system. To keep the would-be astronauts on their toes, agency officials will simulate equipment failures and medical emergencies. Regular medical checks and psychological appraisals will reveal how well – or how badly – the men are faring.
The crew, three Russians, two Europeans and one Chinese, will spend most of their 18-month stay in the “habitable module” of the spaceship, a steel capsule the size of a bendy bus that has six sparsely furnished bedrooms built into it. Another capsule attached to the living quarters contains a gym, an artificial greenhouse and space for supplies such as food and water. A third capsule is the medical room.
The crew will spend 250 days performing flight tasks and experiments on their “journey to the Red Planet” before climbing into a mockup of a landing module, from which they will step out in spacesuits onto a simulated Martian surface. After 30 days working on the surface – essentially a large sandpit – the crew face a 240-day “return trip”.
The only contact the men will have with the outside world will be via a radio link to the space agency’s “ground control” staff. To make the trip more realistic, their conversations will have a built-in time delay of up to 20 minutes: the time it takes for radio signals to reach Mars from Earth.
Space agencies have simulated long missions before, though not always successfully. An experiment at the same Moscow facility in 1999 descended into chaos when a Russian captain forced a kiss on a female Canadian crew member, and two other Russians got drunk and ended up in a fist fight that left blood spattered over the capsule walls.
