Check out this video on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/7IL-OTSAerU
Monday, March 30, 2015
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Fwd: Shock wave deflector
'Tillotson's invention is a device that would heat the air in front of the spot where the bomb goes off. In one version, a detector "sees" an explosion before the shock wave hits. The detector is connected to an arc generator, basically two ends of a circuit connected to a large power source. When the system generates enough current, an arc of electricity jumps between the two ends of the circuit, like a bolt of lightning.
That arc heats and ionizes, or charges, particles of air. The heated air would work as a shield by changing the speed at which shock waves travel, and therefore bending them around a protected soldier, Tillotson said.'
Friday, March 20, 2015
Fwd: Self-Driving
'Elon Musk Says Self-Driving Tesla Cars Will Be in the U.S. by Summer
Tesla is not alone in pushing the envelope. Chris Urmson, director of self-driving cars at Google, raised eyebrows at a January event in Detroit when he said Google did not believe there was currently a "regulatory block" that would prohibit self-driving cars, provided the vehicles themselves met crash-test and other safety standards.'
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Fwd: Science
'A new twist on an old tool lets scientists use light to study and control matter with 1,000 times better resolution and precision than previously possible.
Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated "ponderomotive spectroscopy," an advanced form of a technique that was born in the 15th century when Isaac Newton first showed that white light sent through a prism breaks into a rainbow.
Spectroscopy is essential to many branches of science. The term broadly refers to the use of light, often from lasers, to observe, measure and manipulate matter. With it, scientists can detect trace amounts of pollutants. They can identify elements in the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system. And they laid the groundwork for computing and information processing. Those are just a few examples of how it has been used.
The new high-resolution spectroscopy allows researchers to peer more deeply into the structure of atoms and direct their behavior at a much finer scale. It could have applications in quantum computing, which aims to use particles such as atoms or electrons to perform information processing and memory tasks. Quantum computers could offer big boosts in computing power because they'd carry out scores of calculations at once. Their purported ability to factor numbers much faster than their conventional counterparts could bring improvements in computer security as well.
In addition, measurements that the new spectroscopy makes possible could lead to new understandings of fundamental physics, said Kaitlin Moore, a doctoral student in applied physics in the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
"The freedom of access our technique offers could be game-changing for characterizing atoms and molecules, as well for all the physics that stems from these kinds of measurements," Moore said.'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150302123341.htm
'Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), which are made from carbon-containing materials, have the potential to revolutionize future display technologies, making low-power displays so thin they'll wrap or fold around other structures, for instance.
Conventional LCD displays must be backlit by either fluorescent light bulbs or conventional LEDs whereas OLEDs don't require back lighting. An even greater technological breakthrough will be OLED-based laser diodes, and researchers have long dreamed of building organic lasers, but they have been hindered by the organic materials' tendency to operate inefficiently at the high currents required for lasing.
Now a new study from a team of researchers in California and Japan shows that OLEDs made with finely patterned structures can produce bright, low-power light sources, a key step toward making organic lasers. The results are reported in a paper appearing this week on the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150302122456.htm
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Fwd: big
'Researchers from Australia and China have turned up an unfeasibly large black hole that almost dates back to the beginning of time.
At 12 billion times the Sun's mass, and in a quasar that was a million billion times as energetic as the Sun, it's not actually the largest black hole ever spotted. However, its redshift indicates that it's a black hole from very early in the universe.
That's the problematic part, according to Dr Fuyan Bian from the ANU's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who in a press release said: "Forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with current theories".
At a redshift of greater than 6.30, the quasar, designated SDSSJ010013.021280225.8 (SDSS J0100+2802 in short) is one of only around 40 with that redshift, indicating that they formed in a much younger universe. This particular quasar formed when the universe was less than a billion years old, the researchers say.
Its huge size and age means it must have "gained enormous mass in a short period of time", Dr Bian said. However, as we currently understand black hole formation, this quasar shouldn't have had enough time to get so big.'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/25/ancient_fatty_surprises_astroboffins/
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Re: Cell phones causing breast cancer.
Interesting.
Ionizing radiation can knock electrons out of their atomic orbits creating ions, or free radicals, which can damage the cell of the body. If they damage the genetic code of a cell then this can lead to cell death or cancer.
Ionizing radiation is of 3 types: Alpha particles, beta particles, and photons. I think that all three are given off by nuclear reactions or radioactive decay, but we also have devices that give off photons.
Photons are considered a form of radiant energy, electromagnetic radiation, which means that they are force carrying particles. Electromagnetic radiation (photons) includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation X-rays and gamma rays. The higher the frequency, the more energy the photons have and the more likely they could be ionizing. Radio waves are below the energy level of visible light therefore are not considered ionizing. I have heard that a tiny fraction of the energy could be absorbed by the body, but the only effect would be that the body part absorbing the energy would feel warmer.
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 1:41 PM, Geneva wrote:
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Monday, February 16, 2015
Oh-My ... particle
in other words, a subatomic particle with kinetic energy equal to that of 50 Joules, or a 5-ounce (142 g) baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph)
... The energy of this particle is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator.
Such a particle would all by itself pack quite a wallop. I have read that if you could stick your hand in the proton particle stream of the Large Hadron Collider, you would no longer have a hand.
The universe as we know it is full of violent events, but it is hard to see how a natural event could create this without us detecting the event itself. This makes me wonder if the particle could have been shot out by some alien spaceship electromagnetic propulsion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Electromagnetic_propulsion. All the energy used to propel the particle would propel the spacecraft in the opposite direction, i.e Newton's third law of motion. The only problem with this idea is that our current methods of accelerating particles to very high speeds require many miles of equipment costing billions of dollars.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Fwd: Measles
'Before the introduction of a live measles vaccine in 1963, the average yearly number of measles cases was 549,000. (Nearly 500 deaths per year were attributed to measles).
Once the measles vaccine was introduced (it was a one-dose shot), there was a huge drop in measles cases.
Then, between 1989 and 1991, there was a resurgence in measles cases. There were 55,000 cases and 123 deaths reported during that period.
Those getting sick were mostly unvaccinated children. But there were also people who had the vaccine and were getting the disease anyway.
In 1989, the medical community's recommendation was updated to recommend a two-dose vaccination regimen.
The use of two doses was effective. In 2000, endemic measles was declared "eliminated" from the United States. '
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/02/health/measles-how-bad-can-it-be/
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
Fwd: new
'Bacteria Turn Sunlight to Liquid Fuel in 'Bionic Leaf'
Researchers have paired a solar-powered catalyzing device with genetically engineered bacteria to convert water and carbon dioxide into an alcohol-based liquid fuel. The system, dubbed a "bionic leaf," is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The process is modeled after the way in which plants use photosynthesis to turn CO2, H2O and other ingredients into energy, but with some novel chemical twists. One of the researchers, Harvard's Dan Nocera, has been working on artificial leaf systems for more than a decade. "The catalysts I made are extremely well-adapted and compatible with the growth conditions you need for living organisms like a bacterium," Nocera said in a news release.
The catalyst uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then a strain of bacteria known as Ralstonia eutropha combines the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make isopropanol — the main ingredient in rubbing alcohol.
Another member of the research team, Harvard Medical School's Pamela Silver, said the experiment was a "proof of concept" for solar-to-chemical conversion. The next step is to boost the system's energy efficiency rate from its current level of nearly 1 percent to a goal of 5 percent.
Strong as Titanium, Cheap as Dirt: New Steel Alloy Shines
The strength of steel is proverbial, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved. It's heavy, after all, and there are stronger metals out there. But researchers in South Korea have created an alloy that's as strong as titanium, lighter than ordinary steel, and cheap to boot. The new alloy, described in the journal Nature, is created by allying the steel with aluminum — this lightens the steel, but also makes it weak. To counter that weakness, the team added a dash of manganese and a sprinkle of nickel, while modifying the way the metal crystals form at the nanometer scale. This new alloy has no flashy name just yet but is referred to as High Specific Strength Steel. It has an even better strength-to-weight ratio than the far more expensive titanium. '
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/bacteria-turn-sunlight-liquid-fuel-bionic-leaf-n303186
Fwd: Temperature adjustment
'When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically "adjusted" to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
Two weeks ago, under the headline "How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming", I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record. '
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Fwd: Big bang
'Scientists crushed as 'Big Bang' evidence evaporates on further analysis
It was supposed to be a revolutionary breakthrough: last March, a team of scientists found what are known as primordial gravitational waves, or ancient ripples in space-time that would have been produced just moments after the Big Bang, stunning direct evidence of a theory most scientists already hold true.
Or had they? On Jan. 30, two teams of scientists — one operating a European Space Agency telescope and the other the team that submitted the original paper — have decided it was all just a mirage kicked up by ordinary space dust in our galaxy, thus debunking what had been one of the biggest discoveries of 2014, according to a report by the Economist.
Such gravitational waves had long been sought by astronomers, as it would confirm that long-held theory that the universe suddenly expanded rapidly just instants after it exploded into existence, inflating at faster than the speed of light.
Most scientists hold that it is true based on indirect evidence, but so far, no one had been able to provide hard, direct evidence that this is what happened.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)