Physics: At the Heart of Everything

oplik: Pics I’ve taken at the observatory. A 4 second exposure...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:57:32 +0100

M42 - Orion Nebula

M81 - Cigar Galaxy

M51 - Whirpool Galaxy

M3 - Globular Cluster

M104 - Sombrero Galaxy

Pics I’ve taken at the observatory. A 4 second exposure on a 14” reflector (yeah we have a really old TV). Click pics for descriptions if you please

spaceplasma: Electric discharge showing the lightning-like...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:25:31 +0100

spaceplasma:

Electric discharge showing the lightning-like plasma filaments from a Tesla coil.

GIF from photos courtesy of Dan McCauley

spaceplasma: Kirlian photography Kirlian photography is a...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:24:31 +0100

spaceplasma:

Kirlian photography

Kirlian photography is a collection of photographic techniques used to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges. It is named after Semyon Kirlian, who, in 1939 accidentally discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a high-voltage source, an image is produced on the photographic plate.

Kirlian photography is a technique for creating contact print photographs using high voltage. The process entails placing sheet photographic film on top of a metal discharge plate. The object to be photographed is then placed directly on top of the film. High voltage is momentarily applied to the metal plate, thus creating an exposure. The corona discharge between the object and the high voltage plate is captured by the film. The developed film results in a Kirlian photograph of the object.

Color photographic film is calibrated to faithfully produce colors when exposed to normal light. Corona discharges can interact with minute variations in the different layers of dye used in the film, resulting in a wide variety of colors depending on the local intensity of the discharge. Film and digital imaging techniques also record light produced by photons emitted during corona discharge (see Mechanism of corona discharge).

Photographs of inanimate objects such as a coins, keys and leaves can be made more effectively by grounding the object to the earth, a cold water pipe or to the opposite (polarity) side of the high voltage source. Grounding the object creates a stronger corona discharge.

Kirlian photography does not require the use of a camera or a lens because it is a contact print process. It is possible to use a transparent electrode in place of the high voltage discharge plate, allowing one to capture the resulting corona discharge with a standard camera or a video camera.

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:16:48 +0100

futurist-foresight: The problem of space junk or space debris...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:13:56 +0100

futurist-foresight:

The problem of space junk or space debris is increasing. And with out greater dependence on satellites is a grave problem.

spaceplasma:

There’s a lot of debris floating around in space, and researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab are using supercomputers, optical sensors and other technology to track even small objects that could damage important satellites.

John Henderson, a space scientist at LLNL, explains:

“Everybody uses GPS to get from here to there. We have satellite television, we have weather reports, farmers use satellite data for monitoring crops. If you have a piece of satellite debris whacking into a satellite, in the worst case you now lose that capability. In February of 2009, that actually happened where there was an Iridium communications satellite that collided with a dead Russian Kosmos satellite and so that basically took out a $100 million dollar satellite.

There’s somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 pieces of debris that we would like to be tracking. And so the supercomputing capabilities that we have here at Livermore are one way to keep track of that.”

thatscienceguy: This is a simulation of a rotating 4...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:10:54 +0100

thatscienceguy:

This is a simulation of a rotating 4 dimensional Cube, otherwise known as a Tesseract.

What you are seeing is it Rotating. It is not being distorted, reshaped, or anything like that. it is simply Rotating - It appears to be distorted because you are only seeing the ‘projection’ of it. similarly if you rotated a 3D cube infront of lamp the shadow you would see would appear to distort.

Photo

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:46:45 +0100

so-do-it: oH MY GOD YOU GUYS

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:04:00 +0100

so-do-it:

oH MY GOD YOU GUYS

kqedscience: Safety first! (via Buzzfeed on G+)

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:56:38 +0100

kqedscience:

Safety first!

(via Buzzfeed on G+)

jtotheizzoe: We never sit here under the weight of all this...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:27:49 +0100

jtotheizzoe:

We never sit here under the weight of all this air, the 5 x 10^18 kg of atmosphere that sits above everyone on Earth, and say “Gosh, that sure is heavy!”

You don’t realize just how powerful that 1 bar (~100 kPa) of pressure is until a train car is filled with steam, allowed to cool, and then implodes ohmygod did that just happen?

For more implosion goodness, check out this awesome video from Veritasium.

stellar-indulgence: Stellar Archaeology Traces Milky Way’s...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:54:29 +0100

stellar-indulgence:

Stellar Archaeology Traces Milky Way’s History

Unfortunately, stars don’t have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star’s age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. But Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Astrophysical Sciences, both in Baltimore, Md., has found the next best thing to a star’s birth certificate.

Using a new technique, Kalirai probed the burned-out relics of Sun-like stars, called white dwarfs, in the inner region of our Milky Way galaxy’s halo. The halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding our galaxy’s disk. Those stars, his study reveals, are 11.5 billion years old, younger than the first generation of Milky Way stars. They formed more than 2 billion years after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Previous age estimates, based on analyzing normal stars in the inner halo, ranged from 10 billion to 14 billion years. Kalirai’s study reinforces the emerging view that our galaxy’s halo is composed of a layer-cake structure that formed in stages over billions of years.

White dwarf stars have remarkable properties, yet they are very simple. These stripped cores of normal hydrogen-burning stars are about 1 million times denser than matter on Earth. This means that a tablespoon of material from a white dwarf’s surface would weigh as much as a school bus on Earth. White dwarfs also have no fuel to generate energy, and most of their atmospheres contain a single atom, hydrogen.

The second figure illustrates the spectral features of a white dwarf, in comparison to the Sun and a blue giant. The white dwarf spectrum is simple, containing only absorption lines from the hydrogen atom. But, unlike the same lines in the blue giant spectrum (a bloated star with a low density), the features in the white dwarf are broadened due to the intense pressure on the surface of the star (essentially, the energy levels of the atom are being perturbed). This broadening of the lines, as well as their depth, is directly related to the mass and temperature of the star. Unlike for most stars, astronomers can therefore reliably establish fundamental properties for white dwarfs from their spectra.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild and J. Kalirai (STScI)

"At its best, philosophy can aid understanding. At its worst, its jargon supplies a handy toolkit for..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:51:38 +0100

“At its best, philosophy can aid understanding. At its worst, its jargon supplies a handy toolkit for charlatans to bamboozle the innocent.”

- Richard Dawkins (via imagineatoms)

Science is awesome pass it on

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:51:10 +0100

Quick clarification

Fri, 17 May 2013 23:52:24 +0100

imagineatoms:

If light has no mass how can it be affected by gravity?

Because it has momentum

But momentum is mass x velocity so how can it have momentum?

Because language can sometimes bring more problems than answers. Light does not obey the same laws as ordinary matter. To help show this I’ll use equations.

(this is the full version of the famous E=mc²)
E=energy
P=momentum
c=speed of light
m=mass

So if we assume m=0 then we get E=Pc

We can find the energy of a photon by frequency x Planck’s constant (E=fh)

So if we know the energy and the speed of light (which is constant) then simple division will give us the momentum of the photon.

E/c=P

So gravity is related to momentum and not to mass?

Gravity is still determined by mass but in Relativity mass is determined by a stress-energy-momentum tensor. This tensor is what gives rise to the famous “curved spacetime”. If you would like to know about all of this and more in greater detail here is a fantastically well written Wikipedia article on General Relativity

Let's agree that we're in agreement about the climate and move on

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:35:11 +0100

jtotheizzoe:

An international team of scientists recently surveyed almost 12,000 climate science research publications to gauge the consensus on manmade global warming among people who know lots about climate science. They did this because some people still like to pretend like there’s plenty of skepticism and doubt about what’s causing all this.

What did they find? Well, of the 4,000 papers that declared a position on the cause of global warming since 1991, 97.1% of them agreed that humans were causing a majority of global warming. The rest? Most of them didn’t claim a position because it’s so well-accepted that they didn’t want to waste the space.

And just how small is the leftover, even if it was real doubt (which it isn’t)? That 2.9% remainder is less than:

The percentage of Americans who think we never landed on the moon (6%)

The percentage of Americans who think a UFO landed in Roswell (21%)

The percentage of Americans who believe in Bigfoot (14%)

The percentage of Americans who think airplane contrails are chemicals secretly released by the government to control our minds (5%)

The percentage of Americans who think lizard people secretly control the government (4%)

The percentage of Americans who think Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 (5%)

Can we start accepting how much everyone who understands the science is in agreement and work on fixing it and adapting to it? The doubt is not real. Just like the Loch Ness Monster.

Read more about the climate research survey at Smithsonian.com. Read more about the crazy psychology behind conspiracy theories here (which is all I am willing to call climate science denialism from here on out).

So there.

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Racism & Prejudice

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:07:42 +0100

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Racism & Prejudice:

andyjaydee:

ikenbot:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured.

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

Full Article: Recommended Full Read

This won’t cause any trouble at all. Nope.

thenewenlightenmentage: Charted: Extraterrestrial Driving...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:36:52 +0100

thenewenlightenmentage:

Charted: Extraterrestrial Driving Records

NASA has just released this cute chart depicting the various distances traveled by wheeled machines on other worlds (click to enlarge).

The comparison was put out in honor of the agency’s Opportunity rover, which has been on Mars since 2004, beating NASA’s previous distance record-holder, the Apollo 17 moon buggy. During its nine years of operations, Opportunity has roved 35.760 kilometers, edging out the Apollo astronaut’s 35.744-kilometer drive.

The champion for driving on another surface still goes to the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 37 kilometers across the moon in 1973. Of course, Opportunity still has the *ahem* opportunity to overtake the international record holder since it’s continuing to rove around the rim of Endeavour crater on Mars. The little robot has been exploring that area since 2011 and has uncovered some of the most unambiguous evidence for water on ancient Mars. Though NASA’s celebrated Curiosity rover has only gone less than one kilometer since landing in August, it has nuclear batteries that could last 14 years at minimum — ample time to beat all competitors.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

colliderblog: Some photos of XENON100 at Gran Sasso National...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:34:03 +0100

XENON100 Experiment

XENON100 Experiment

XENON100 Experiment

XENON100 Experiment

Good luck figure on the XENON100 Experiment

XENON100 Experiment

colliderblog:

Some photos of XENON100 at Gran Sasso National Laboratory.

The XENON100 dark matter experiment is currently the most sensitive experiment in the global race for the first direct detection of WIMP dark matter.

The XENON experiment is dedicated to the direct detection of the dark matter in the Universe. Astronomical evidence indicates that about 22% of the Universe is made up of non-baryonic dark matter. Several lines of arguments indicate that dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), exotic relics of the Big Bang that exist till today due to their weak interactions with ordinary matter.

Take notice to the Chinese figure for good luck.

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:23:07 +0100

astronemma: Curiosity at ‘Cumberland’ NASA’s Mars rover...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:22:25 +0100

astronemma:

Curiosity at ‘Cumberland’

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity used its front left Hazard-Avoidance Camera for this image of the rover’s arm over the drilling target “Cumberland” during the 275th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (May 15, 2013).

The rover team plans to use Curiosity’s drill to collect a powdered sample from the interior of the rock for analysis by laboratory instruments inside the rover. This is the mission’s second rock-drilling target. The rover drove from its position beside the first drilling target, “John Klein,” to its position beside Cumberland with drives of 121 inches (308 centimeters) on Sol 273 (May 13) and 26.6 inches (67.5 centimeters) on Sol 275. Curiosity’s total odometry on Mars is now 2,385 feet (727 meters).

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech