I watched this documentary on Netflix streaming. I really enjoyed it. Maybe it airs on PBS occasionally.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
I have a deep interest in physics
I watched this video twice to try to understand it. I will probably watch it a third time. The math is way beyond my level. If I were to work hard enough, maybe I could learn the mathematics, but it wouldn't be worth the effort.
Since I like physics so much, maybe I should have made that my profession. However, I think that I like computer programming even more. In the very early days of micro-computers, back in the 1970's, I seemed to have a talent for programming in the same way I had a talent for chess.
I think that my interest in physics comes from wanting to understand how the universe works. However, there are subtleties in the physical universe that are too deep for anybody but a physicist to understand.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Beyond the Higgs: What's Next for the LHC?
This may not interest anybody as much as it does me, but I like it when one video explain
s
all of physics: Sunday, July 1, 2018
Fwd: Active Antarctic Volcano
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies atop a major volcanic rift system, but there had been no evidence of current magmatic activity, the URI scientist said. The last such activity was 2,200 years ago, Loose said. And while volcanic heat can be traced to dormant volcanoes, what the scientists found at Pine Island was new.
"You can't directly measure normal indicators of volcanism — heat and smoke — because the volcanic rift is below many kilometers of ice," Loose said
But as the team conducted its research, it found high quantities of an isotope of helium, which comes almost exclusively from mantle, Loose said.
"When you find helium-3, it's like a fingerprint for volcanism. We found that it is relatively abundant in the seawater at the Pine Island shelf.
"The volcanic heat sources were found beneath the fastest moving and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, the Pine Island Glacier," Loose said. "It is losing mass the fastest."
He said the amount of ice sliding into the ocean is measured in gigatons. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons.
https://today.uri.edu/news/
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Fwd: Infared stealth blanket
Less than one millimeter thick, the sheet absorbs approximately 94 percent of the infrared light it encounters. Trapping so much light means that warm objects beneath the cloaking material become almost completely invisible to infrared detectors.
Importantly, the stealth material can strongly absorb light in the so-called mid- and long-wavelength infrared range, the type of light emitted by objects at approximately human body temperature.
To trap infrared light, Jiang and colleagues turned to a unique material called black silicon, which is commonly incorporated into solar cells
https://www.sciencedaily.com/
Fwd: Using wireless signals to set humans through walls
MIT has given a computer x-ray vision, but it didn't need x-rays to do it. The system, known as RF-Pose, uses a neural network and radio signals to track people through an environment and generate wireframe models in real time. It doesn't even need to have a direct line of sight to know how someone is walking, sitting, or waving their arms on the other side of a wall.
Friday, May 18, 2018
Fwd: World's Strongest Bio-Material Outperforms Steel and Spider Silk
The scientists started with commercially available cellulose nanofibres that are just 2 to 5 nanometres in diameter and up to 700 nanometres long. A nanometre (nm) is a millionth of a millimetre. The nanofibres were suspended in water and fed into a small channel, just one millimetre wide and milled in steel. Through two pairs of perpendicular inflows additional deionized water and water with a low pH-value entered the channel from the sides, squeezing the stream of nanofibres together and accelerating it.
This process, called hydrodynamic focussing, helped to align the nanofibres in the right direction as well as their self-organisation into a well-packed macroscopic thread. No glue or any other component is needed, the nanofibres assemble into a tight thread held together by supramolecular forces between the nanofibres, for example electrostatic and Van der Waals forces
Measurements showed a tensile stiffness of 86 gigapascals (GPa) for the material and a tensile strength of 1.57 GPa. "The bio-based nanocellulose fibres fabricated here are 8 times stiffer and have strengths higher than natural dragline spider silk fibres," says Söderberg. "If you are looking for a bio-based material, there is nothing quite like it. And it is also stronger than steel and any other metal or alloy as well as glass fibres and most other synthetic materials." The artificial cellulose fibres can be woven into a fabric to create materials for various applications. The researchers estimate that the production costs of the new material can compete with those of strong synthetic fabrics
https://www.rdmag.com/news/
Sunday, April 8, 2018
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Monday, March 5, 2018
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Fwd: Alzheimer's
Researchers have found that gradually depleting an enzyme called BACE1 completely reverses the formation of amyloid plaques in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease, thereby improving the animals' cognitive function. The study raises hopes that drugs targeting this enzyme will be able to successfully treat Alzheimer's disease in humans.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Saturday, February 3, 2018
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