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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
kenobi-wan-obi CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
Dino-DNA Art Honors the 20th Anniversary of ‘Jurassic Park’ Today
“DINO-DNA: A tribute to Jurassic Park” is an online art tribute to Michael Crichton’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s movie masterpiece, which premiered 20 years ago on this date in 1993. The show is curated & presented by Chogrin (Facebook.com/chogrinart), who’s love for Jurassic Park was born in a movie theater back in 1993.
All of the art above (and on the Dino-DNA blog) can be purchased through the Dino-DNA exhibit site where you’ll find artist information and e-mail addresses to contact them and purchase a print.
(via FirstShowing)
kenobi-wan-obi
National Geographic: A Velociraptor Without Feathers Isn’t a Velociraptor by Brian Switek
Jurassic Park is the greatest dinosaur movie of all time. Aside from being an exceptionally entertaining adventure, the film introduced audiences to dinosaurs that had never been seen before – hybrids of new science and bleeding-edge special effects techniques. The active, alert, and clever dinosaurs that paleontologists had recently pieced together were revived by way of exquisite puppetry and computer imagery, instantly replacing the old images of dinosaurs as swamp-dwelling dullards. Despite the various scientific nitpicks and some artistic license overreach – let’s not talk about the “Spitter” - Jurassic Park showed how science and cinema could collaborate to create something truly majestic. That’s why it’s so disappointing to hear the the next Jurassic Park sequel is going to turn its back on a critical aspect of dinosaur lives. In Jurassic Park 4, the film’s director has stated, there will be no feathery dinosaurs.
crownedrose
Justine Johnstone Wagner (1895-1982) appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and was a called the most beautiful blonde on Broadway. She also appeared in a handful of silent films before retiring from acting to attend Columbia University. At Columbia she was part of the team to develop the first IV drip. Justine was third author after Samuel Hirshberg and Harold T. Hyman on the paper announcing this development in 1931. Justine later had a personal laboratory built in her cellar where she researched endocrinology, cancer, and syphilis
Mars Curiosity & James Cameron: Largest Earth Science Meeting Set to Begin
Thousands of Earth scientists are descending on San Francisco this week for the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest geosciences meeting of the year, where new findings on topics ranging from Mars to volcanoes to global warming will be presented.
Advance press releases for the 2012 AGU meeting, held at the Moscone Center, have touted findings in numerous areas, including climate change and Martian geology, and include briefings from some big-name scientists like Mars rover principal investigator, Steve Squyres, and Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Another big name that will be present at the meeting is James Cameron, who will be talking about his deep-sea dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on Earth, last year, and what he saw while he was down there.A briefing on the latest results from the Mars Curiosity rover mission that will be conducted at the meeting has been the subject of rampant speculation in the press, and NASA has tried to manage expectations, saying that the findings aren’t earth shattering.
Scientists will be presenting findings in hundreds of talks and posters throughing the duration of the meeting, which runs from Monday, Dec. 3, through Friday, Dec. 7. Press conferences from the meeting will be webcast live — you can see a full schedule and watch them here. You can also follow along with news from the meeting by checking out the hashtag #AGU12.
(via kenobi-wan-obi)
Is ‘Looper’-like Time Travel Possible? Scientists Say Maybe
Time travel is a staple of science fiction, with the latest rendition showing up in the film “Looper.” And it turns out jumps through time are possible, according to the laws of physics, though traveling into the future looks to be much more feasible than traveling into the past.
“Looper” stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, an assassin who kills targets sent back in time by the mob. Things get complicated when Joe is assigned to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis..
In this imagining, time travel has been put to nefarious uses by people operating outside the law. But could such a thing ever happen in real life?
“It’s actually consistent with the laws of physics to change the rate at which clocks run,” said Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. “There’s no question that you can skip into the future.”
However, Farhi told LiveScience, “most physicists think you can go forward, but coming back is much more problematic.”
The roots of time travel stem from Einstein’s theory of relativity, which revealed how the passage of time is relative, depending on how fast you are traveling. The faster you go, the more time seems to slow down, so that a person traveling on a very fast starship, for example, would experience a journey in two weeks that seemed to take 20 years to people left behind on Earth.
In this way, a person who wanted to travel to a period in the future need only board a fast enough vehicle to kill some time.
“That was a huge thing when Einstein realized the flow of time was not a constant thing,” Farhi said.
However, this kind of manipulation only affects the rate at which time moves forward. No matter your speed, time will still progress toward the future, leaving scientists struggling to predict how one might travel to the past.
(via kenobi-wan-obi)
Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present.
A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.
— Nikola Tesla “The Electrical Review, 1893”
Close Encounters of the AEHF-2 Kind
Dramatic backlight illuminates a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch vehicle at Space Launch Complex-41 of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
10 Coolest Fictional Asteroids of All Time.
The asteroid-mining venture recently unveiled by James Cameron, Google executives and others sounds like it comes straight out of science fiction — but science fictional asteroids have done way more than just provide raw materials.
Here are asteroids from 10 imaginary realms that did everything from provide a supervillain lair to pave the way for alien invasion.
1) The asteroid field in Empire Strikes Back: The asteroid belt near Hoth is easily what the public thinks of when it comes to asteroid fields. Our asteroid belt is nothing like it, though - the giant rocks there are typically way too far apart to pose the kind of thrilling hazard the Millennium Falcon would have to weave through. Jury’s still out on giant space monster denizens, though.
2) “The Dynamics of an Asteroid”: Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty was more than just the Napoleon of Crime — he was, well, a professor. In the short story The Valley of Fearfrom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we find out Moriarty “is the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it.” In a number of stories written by others, Moriarty’s knowledge has nefarious ends — in “The Adventure of the Russian Grave,” he even tries to assassinate Holmes with the Tunguska event.
3) Asteroid M: Magneto is not only awesome because he’s played by Gandalf, but because he has an asteroid as his secret villain lair. Asteroid M unfortunately crashed to Earth, but its remains now serve as the mutant sanctuary Utopia near San Francisco, which just goes to show the lengths to which people will go in order to find real estate in the Bay Area.
4) The Little Prince: In this classic, the title character lives on an asteroid named B-612 and ventures from asteroid to asteroid making discoveries about the nature of humanity and the universe. An asteroid discovered in 1993 was named 46610 Bésixdouze, or B-612.
5) Armageddon: In this 1998 film, an asteroid the size of Texas hurtles toward Earth, and NASA sends up oil drillers with a nuke and an Aerosmith prom ballad to save the planet. Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof wrote up a fake sequel idea for Armageddon 2: Armageddoner where the center of the Earth is made of oil, which would keep the level of science in the franchise about right.
6) Footfall: Aliens resembling pygmy elephants bomb Earth with an asteroid in this science fiction classic by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
7) Gateway: In Gateway and subsequent novels from sci-fi author Frederik Pohl, an asteroid in our solar system is found to hold nearly a thousand spaceships left by enigmatic aliens humanity dubs the Heechee. The asteroid, named Gateway, becomes a port from which adventurers can venture on interstellar journeys resulting in riches or death.
8) Edison’s Conquest of Mars: In this 1898 magazine serial endorsed by Edison, which boasts the inventor as the hero of the tale, a fleet of spaceships from Earth counter-attacking Mars engages in battle at an asteroid Martians are mining for gold. The story apparently marks a number of firsts in science fiction - in addition asteroid mining, it includes the first space battle to ever appear in print, the first truly airtight spacesuits, the first known literary use of a disintegrator ray, and the introduction of the notion that the pyramids were constructed by extraterrestrials.
9) Gundam: In this anime series, civilization has spread itself across space, including mining asteroids that often become defensive strongholds.
10) The arcade game Asteroids: Seeing as how even the board game Battleship is coming soon to theaters near you, it’d be a good bet the same might happen with this video game classic. Indeed, a movie based on Asteroids has been under development for years.
Top image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Magnetic field viewing film, which can be bought relatively cheaply, lets you ‘see’ a magnetic field as it moves. Below, we’ll tell you about the simple way this film works, and show you a couple of demonstrations. See magnetic field lines!
This re-usable film can wrap around anything and shows you the shape and movement of a magnetic field. It’s fun to play with, and as something fun to play with it ranks only slightly below the stuff that inspired it; bubble wrap. Yep, the same technology that winds around your breakables when you move brings you this. The film is like a very fine bubble wrap, with each tiny bubble filled with liquid. This is not regular water. The liquid inside the bubbles has a high viscosity - meaning it has a high resistance to changes in shape. It takes force to move the liquid around inside the bubble.
Inside the liquid are tiny metal rods. A single pole of the magnet, when underneath the film, will pull the rods so they’re standing on end inside the film, and you’re looking at them head on. This makes the film appear dark. When pulled by both poles of the magnet, the rods will lie flat on the film, and you’ll see their sides. The film will appear bright. As long as the bubbles aren’t burst by crushing or scratching the film, they’ll keep moving as the magnet moves, letting you ‘see’ the shifting magnetic field of the moving magnet. And? It is very cool to watch.
