Last fall, the Canadian Space Agency asked students to design a simple science experiment that could be performed in space, using items already available aboard the International Space Station. Today,
Commander Chris Hadfield conducted the winner for its designers: two tenth grade students, Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner, in a live feed to their school in Fall River, Nova Scotia. And now, we finally have an answer to the age-old question,
What Happens When You Wring Out A Washcloth In Space? [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 18, 2013 -
63 comments
The concept of nothing is as old as zero itself. How do we grapple with the concept of nothing? From the best laboratory vacuums on Earth to the vacuum of space to what lies beyond, the idea of nothing continues to intrigue professionals and the public alike.
Join moderator and Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson as he leads a spirited discussion with a group of physicists, philosophers and journalists about the existence of nothing. The event, which was streamed live to the web, took place at the American Museum of Natural History on March 20, 2013.
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posted by lazaruslong
on Mar 25, 2013 -
32 comments
The Timeline of the Far Future is a Wikipedia article which serves as a gateway to a ton of fascinating scientific topics on the far edge of human understanding: ~50,000 years from now the Earth will enter a new
Glacial period; ~100,000 years from now the Earth will likely have experienced a
supervolcanic eruption; ~10,000,000 years from now the
East African Rift divides the continent of Africa in to two land masses; ~20,000,000,000 years from now the Universe effectively dies due to
The Big Rip.
posted by codacorolla
on Jan 22, 2013 -
93 comments
The Nature of Computation -
Intellects Vast and Warm and Sympathetic: "I hand you a network or graph, and ask whether there is a path through the network that crosses each edge exactly once, returning to its starting point. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Eulerian' cycle.) Then I hand you another network, and ask whether there is a path which visits each node exactly once. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Hamiltonian' cycle.) How hard is it to answer me?" (
via)
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posted by kliuless
on Dec 1, 2012 -
19 comments
In case you needed
another reason to love/fear them:
With a tone that sometimes rings condescending or conspiratorial but always wonderfully flippant, the best minds of cracked.com discuss the
grandest extremities of modern physics.
posted by es_de_bah
on Jul 22, 2012 -
8 comments
Morton and Vicary on the Categorified Heisenberg Algebra - "In quantum mechanics, position times momentum does not equal momentum times position! This sounds weird, but it's connected to a very simple fact. Suppose you have a box with some balls in it, and you have the magical ability to create and annihilate balls. Then there's one more way to create a ball and then annihilate one, than to annihilate one and then create one. Huh? Yes: if there are, say, 3 balls in the box to start with, there are 4 balls you can choose to annihilate after you've created one but only 3 before you create one..."
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posted by kliuless
on Jul 21, 2012 -
78 comments
The Flame Challenge: The Center For Communicating Science asked scientists to answer the question, "What is a flame?," in a way that 11-year-olds would understand. Ben Ames won. In addition to his
winning video, you can see the runners-up.
posted by OmieWise
on Jun 8, 2012 -
56 comments
Late in life, Claude Monet had surgery to remove the lens of his left eye as a remedy for cataracts, and found that as the lens was no longer blocking them,
he could now see ultraviolet light.* When Alek Komarnitsky, engineer and self professed geek,
had the natural lens replaced in one of his eyes due to cataracts, he found that he, too could see UV. Naturally, he decided to test the limits of his newfound ability, and to show others
what it's like to have ultraviolet vision.
(*via Kottke)
posted by ocherdraco
on Apr 17, 2012 -
39 comments
Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, in which the author, Erik Andrulis, proposes an "axiomatic, experimentally testable, empirically consistent, heuristic, and unified theory of life." He also claims to be able to unify physics.....ahem. All this is done using the chemistry notation you learned in highschool.
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posted by AElfwine Evenstar
on Jan 27, 2012 -
53 comments
Professor Brian Cox (previously 1 2) goes unplugged in a specially recorded programme from the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In his own inimitable style, Brian takes an audience of famous faces, scientists and members of the public on a journey through some of the most challenging concepts in physics.
[more inside]
posted by lazaruslong
on Jan 14, 2012 -
40 comments
CERN has begun webcasting a public seminar in which there may or may not be some announcement regarding the significance or otherwise of recent observations regarding the possible existence of something that might be the Higgs boson. I am not a nuclear physicist, so I will try and keep up but will mainly be trying to catch the significance of the observations they have collected so far. In case these are talked about in terms of sigmas (there's scuttlebutt going around that this is a 3.5 sigma event),
here's a table of sigma and probability.
[more inside]
posted by carter
on Dec 13, 2011 -
85 comments
One of my favorite
blogs happens to be local to me. Eric Berger, the Houston Chronicle's "SciGuy" usually reports on the
weather. But he also posts entertaining and serious stuff as well.
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posted by PapaLobo
on Nov 22, 2011 -
3 comments
Three years ago, a question was posed to two
Internet forums. Could you build a wind powered vehicle that could travel downwind, faster than the wind? The lines were quickly drawn and the battle was on, including
here on the blue. It took nearly two years for the debate to be settled, and on July 2, 2010, what seemed impossible was
achieved. The answer is
yes,
you can.
posted by smoothvirus
on Oct 11, 2011 -
96 comments
TV Fact Checkers "Behind every smart TV show, there is a tireless script coordinator, technical adviser, researcher or producer who makes sure the jargon is right, the science is accurate and the pop culture references are on-point." This week, Wired "is speaking with fact-checkers behind the fall TV season’s geekiest shows."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 22, 2011 -
72 comments
Old Theories As Limits of New Ones -- Theoretical physicist, Lubos Motl, takes a brief tour through the history of physics, and explains the simple mathematical relationship of old theories to the theories that replace them.
posted by empath
on Aug 5, 2011 -
16 comments
