Science blog

Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7. Their "old new year" is a week later, on January 14. It is all Julius Caesar's fault ... The Romans sometimes neglected to introduce an extra month every two years to amortize the difference between their lunar calendar and the natural solar year. Julius Caesar decreed that the year 46 BC should have 445 days (some historians implausibly say: 443 days) in order to bridge the yawning discrepancy that accumulated over the preceding seven centuries. It was aptly titled the "Year of Confusion". To "reset" the calendar, Julius Caesar affixed the New Year on January 1 (the day the Senate traditionally convened) and added a day or two to a few months. He thus gave rise to the Julian Calendar, a latter day rendition of the Aristarchus calendar from 239 BC. After his assassination, the month of Quintilis was renamed Julius (July) in his honor. The Julian calendar estimated the length of the natural solar year (the time it takes for the earth to make one orbit of the sun) to be 365 days and 6 hours. Every fourth year the extra six hours were collected and added as an extra day to the year, creating a leap year of 366 days. But the calendar's underlying estimate was off by 11 minutes and 14 seconds. It was longer than the natural solar year. The extra minutes accumulated to one whole day. By 325 AD, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 21st on the Julian Calendar - instead of March 25. The First Ecumenical Council met in Nicea in 325 and determined that the date to celebrate Pascha was on the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the Spring Equinox on March 21st. In other words, it enshrined the Julian calendar's aberration. Thus, by 1582, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 11. Half-hearted measures by Popes Paul III and Pius V failed to restore the essential correspondence between the calendar and the seasons. Pope Gregory XIII decided - in his tenth year in office - to drop 3 leap years every 400 years by specifying that any year whose number ended with 00 must also be evenly divisible by 400 in order to have a 29-day February. This would have the effect of bringing the Julian calendar closer to the natural length of the solar year - though an error of 26 seconds per year would still remain. To calibrate the Julian calendar with the Gregorian one and to move the Spring Equinox back to March 21, 10 days were dropped from the civil calendar in October 1582. Thursday, October 4 was followed by Friday, October 15. People rioted in the streets throughout Europe, convinced that they have been robbed of 10 days. But this was merely a convenient fiction. The Spring Equinox in the Gregorian calendar was, indeed, celebrated on March 21 in perpetuity. But, according to the Julian calendar, in the 17th century it arrived on March 11th, in the 18th century on March 10th, in the 19th century on March 9th, and in the 20th century on March 8th - 13 days earlier that even the erroneous date adopted by the Nicea Council. The Gregorian calendar was controversial in Protestant countries. Britain and its colonies adopted it only in 1752. They had to drop 11 days from the civil calendar and move the official new year from March 25 to January 1. For centuries, dates followed by OS ("Old Style") were according to the Julian calendar and dates followed by NS ("New Style") according to the Gregorian one. Sweden adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1753, Japan in 1873, Egypt in 1875, Eastern Europe between 1912 to 1919 and Turkey in 1927. In Russia it was decreed by the (bourgeois) revolutionaries that thirteen days would be omitted from the calendar, the day following January 31, 1918 becoming February 14, 1918. It was Pope Pius X who, in 1910, changed the beginning of the ecclesiastical year from Christmas Day to January 1, effective from 1911 onwards. All that time, the Christian Orthodox continued to observe the Julian calendar. In 1923, a Conference of Orthodox Churches in Constantinople reduced the number of leap years every 900 years and attained a discrepancy between the calendar and the natural solar year of merely 2.2 seconds per year. According to this calendar, the Spring Equinox will regress by one day every 40,000 years. They, too, had to drop 13 days to bring the Spring Equinox back to March 21st. Hence the gap between December 25 (Gregorian calendar) and January 7 (revised Julian-Orthodox calendar).

A microscope is a device which allows one to view something which is too small to be seen by the naked eye. Items which are often studied under a microscope can include a single hair, blood or skin cells. With the naked eye these are hard to see, and impossible to view in any detail. However, by using a microscope the intricacies of these and any other object are much more clearly revealed. This kind of detail is often required in science and so those who use microscopes most in their work are often scientists of some shape or form. Knowing what a microscope is used for is only half of the story though. It is also interesting to consider how the technology works. The technical alignments of the components of a microscope are very detailed and can be incredibly hard to get right. However the basic principles of the function of a microscope are actually surprisingly simple. A magnifying lens is situated in the part of the microscope which is placed near to the object being studied. This lens creates an enlarged image of the subject just inside the tube from the light which it reflects. This is quite a complex area of physics but the image of the object which is created inside the microscope is what is actually enlarged to enable a more in depth view of the subject. Most microscopes actually contain two lenses, one at each end of the eye tube. Between them is an air separated couplet. This is known as a compound lens microscope. The image of the subject is created between the two lenses. The one closest to the subject is used to bring the image into focus while the one closest to the eye is used to help the eye focus on that image. When viewing an object through a microscope correctly your eye should be focused to infinity. For those who use a microscope frequently, or for prolonged periods of time, and experience headaches or tired eyes it is usually as a result of incorrect focusing of the microscope. If it is focused correctly there should be no adverse affects to using a microscope often and for long periods at a time. The invention of the microscope is shrouded in mystery as many have claimed to have been responsible for it but there is no real evidence to confirm any one individual. Names such as Galileo Galilei and Zacharias Janssen have been suggested but nobody knows for certain who it should be attributed to.

Nothing is more exciting than expecting a baby and many expectant mothers and fathers can’t wait to hear the sound of their child’s heartbeat. Parents who cant wait and parents who want to share the amazing experience of listening to the beating sound can buy a baby heart monitor known as a fetal Doppler. The purpose of this article is to help you to the next level and show you what this amazing subject has to offer. A fetal Doppler uses sound waves to notice the sound of the infant’s cardio activity. The sound waves bounce off of the little ones heart and are sent back to the listener. The baby heart monitor sends these sounds, also known as high frequency waves into an inquiry badge close to the device. The high frequency waves don’t trek very well so it is necessary to use a gel or oil to help things along. The sound conductor is practical straight to the mothers belly and the baby heart monitor is located over the matter and enthused until sound is detected. The little heartbeat is larger through an earpiece and orator built right into the baby heart monitor. The role wearing the earphones can hear the infants beats and like every precious instant, at slightest until somebody else asks for a chance. During the next part, we must change to a more serious side to fully communicate the subject matter in a way for all to understand. The baby heart monitor is very reliable to use. It has been tested and released by the United States governmental agencies responsible for such regulations. No negative affects have been found in over thirty living of use. The baby heart monitor is the same technology worn in hospitals everyday on thousands and thousands of patients. Some claim that there are great benefits for with the badge while others think that too many sound waves can not be good for the developing fetus. The Food and Drug Administration recommends that you gossip to your physician and get permission before with a home baby heart monitor. This is forever good procedure. Since the baby heart monitor can be fairly a posh investment for such a short-term ingress many parents prefer to rent one. Renting a baby heart monitor is really less posh and the parents can forever change their minds and asset the part if they so decide. The renting choice is an appealing aspect unfilled by the manufacturers and the variety to asset the entry gives parents even more incentive to try the device. After all, most families have a baby in their coming plans, whether immediate or extended. A baby heart monitor is a great entry to have. If you could take the main ideas from this article and put them into a list, you would a great overview of what we have learned.

The Cassini-Huygens exploration of Saturn, a seven-year joint venture of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, is getting a closer look at its current subject of attention, the small moon of Enceladus. Enceladus is one of the most innermost moons of Saturn which scientists had assumed to be largely dead. With a very bright surface it reflects nearly 100 per cent of its heat and thereby has a very cold temperature, minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit. A surprising discovery was that Enceladus, unlike nearby similar moon Mimas, is geologically active due to the emission of ice particles propelled by water vapor into the atmosphere from its south pole. Enceladus is a small moon of approximately 300 miles radius and the existence of any geological activity for a moon that size has scientists pleasantly baffled. Discovery of geological activity on any moon has been a rare phenomenon so far. The wonderful unexplained mystery behind Enceladus is the cause of the tremendous heat source that is warming the ice. Scientists can only guess that it is due to tidal activity or radioactive mechanisms for now. At one time it was believed that the heat was being emitted from the mid-latitude tectonic gashes that circumscribe the south polar region. This was what Cassini’s approach in July seemed to imply. However in contrast to that orbit of 286 miles, Cassini’s more recent closer approach of 109 miles confirmed that the heat was actually being emitted from what are known as the tiger stripes of Cassini. The tiger stripes of Cassini are 80 mile long fissures running parallel to each other spaced about 25 miles apart. Cassini is only 314 miles across. The hottest spots were found in the south polar region of the tiger stripes. Cassini determined there were two types of ice on Enceladus. An older amorphous variety was due to the constant characteristic of the surface of the planet. However the ice particles vented through the tiger stripe fissure were fine crystalline particles. This ice averaged ten microns in size. It is these tiny ice particles escaping the moon’s atmosphere that are making up the composition of Saturn’s broadest ring, the E ring. In March of 2008, Cassini is scheduled to visit Enceladus again. Perhaps then more light will be shed on the mystery behind Enceladus. 1) Enceladus Erupting – A Nasa Report – 12-7-05 2) Enceladus Plume – Jet Propulsion Laboratory – 12-6-05 3) Possible Source of E Ring – Bill Arnett – 2-17-05 4) Saturn: Moons: Enceladus – Nasa: Solar Systems Exploration – 10-6-03 5) Enceladus’s Tiger Stripes are Really Cubs – Nasa Release