The real facts about Uranus

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and the third biggest (by diameter). Uranus is bigger in diameter but smaller in mass than Neptune. Uranus is composed mainly of rock and various ices, with only about 15% hydrogen and a little helium (in compare to Jupiter and Saturn which are mostly hydrogen). Uranus (and Neptune) is in numerous ways alike to the cores of Jupiter and Saturn minus the huge liquid metallic hydrogen envelope. It appears that Uranus does not have a stony core like Jupiter and Saturn but rather that its material is more or less consistently distributed.

Like the other gas planets, Uranus has bands of clouds that carry around rapidly. But they are very faint, visible only with radical image improvement of the Voyager 2 pictures (right). Recent observations with HST (left) show bigger and more pronounced streaks. Additional HST observations show even more activity. Uranus is no longer the ordinary boring planet that Voyager saw! It now seems understandable that the differences are due to seasonal effects since the Sun is now at lesser Uranian latitude which may because more pronounced day/night weather effects. By 2007 the Sun will be unswervingly over Uranus's equator.

Like the additional gas planets, Uranus has rings. Like Jupiter's, they are extremely dark but like Saturn's they are composed of quite large particles ranging up to 10 meters in diameter additionally to fine dust. There are 11 recognized rings, all very faint; the brightest is identified as the Epsilon ring. The Uranian rings were the first after Saturn's to be discovered. This was of great importance since we now know that rings are a common feature of planets, not a peculiarity of Saturn alone. Uranus' fascinating field is odd in that it is not centered on the center of the planet and is tilted almost 60 degrees with respect to the axis of rotary motion. It is almost certainly generated by motion at relatively shallow depths within Uranus.

The real facts about Neptune

Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun and the fourth largest (by diameter) of the planet. Neptune is smaller in diameter but bigger in mass than Uranus. Neptune's composition is almost certainly alike to Uranus': various "ices" and rock with about 15% hydrogen and a little helium. Like Uranus, but unlike Jupiter and Saturn, it can not have a distinct internal layering but rather to be more or less uniform in composition. But there is most expected a small core (about the mass of the Earth) of rock-strewn material. Its atmosphere is generally hydrogen and helium with a minute amount of methane.

Neptune's blue color is mainly the result of absorption of red light by methane in the atmosphere but there is a number of additional as-yet-unidentified chromophore which gives the clouds their rich blue tint. Like Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune has an inner heat source -- it radiates more than, twice as much energy as it receives from the Sun.

Neptune also has rings. Earth-based observations showed just faint arcs rather than complete rings, but Voyager 2's images showed them to be entire rings with bright clumps. One of the rings looks to have a curious twisted structure (right). Like Uranus and Jupiter, Neptune's rings are extremely dark but their composition is unknown.

Neptune's rings have been noted names: the outermost is Adams (which contains three important arcs now named Liberty, Equality and Fraternity), next is an unnamed ring co-orbital with Galatea, then Leverrier (whose outer extensions are called Lassell and Arago), and lastly the faint but broad Galle. Neptune's magnetic field is, like Uranus', oddly oriented and most likely generated by motions of conductive material (probably water) in its middle layers.

Cookie

In the United States and Canada, a cookie is a tiny, round, flat cake. In most English-speaking countries outer North America, the most common word for this is biscuit; in many regions both terms are used, while in others the two words have diverse meanings—a cookie is a bun in Scotland, while in the United States a biscuit is a kind of quick bread not unlike a scone.

Cookies can be baked until crisp or just long enough that they stay soft. Depending on the kind of cookie, some cookies are not cooked at all. Cookies are made in a broad variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts or dried fruits. The smoothness of the cookie may depend on how long it is baked.

Mainframes

Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are huge and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for mission critical applications, usually bulk data processing such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and financial transaction processing.
The term originated during the early 1970s with the introduction of smaller, fewer complex computers such as the DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11 series, which became known as minicomputers or just minis. The industry/users then coined the term "mainframe" to describe bigger, earlier types (previously known simply as "computers").