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Science Archive: Science

November 6, 2009

Martian landscapes

Universal Site Graphics Blogs Bigpicture Mars 11 06 M04 43790925

Universal Site Graphics Blogs Bigpicture Mars 11 06 M11 02211420

Martian landscapes - The Big Picture @ Boston.com via Waxy.

Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)

November 5, 2009

"Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber"

Cern Lhc T2030Shigh
The God machine just can't catch a break...

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.

How ice spikes happen

Anybody else might shrug off these ice spikes as a meaningless hiccup in the preparation of a frosty beverage, but not Lenore and Windell at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories!

Snowcrystals.com has a fairly detailed explanation of how these things form, and it's documented elsewhere as well. (Roughly speaking, supercooled water is pushed up through a hole, somewhat like magma forming a volcano.) It's relatively easy to form these in your freezer if you start with distilled water, but occasionally-- as in our case --they do occur with regular tap water.

Double pendulum really swings!

Flickr member yamamo2 and his dad built this high performance double pendulum (aka chaos machine) and dang - can this thing get down or what? Instant physics party anytime! unless of course you happen to close and catch a stray pendulum to the noggin … physics party foul, indeed :(

November 3, 2009

All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 2.0

Axel.Mellinger Mwpan2 Aitoff 1200X600
Stunning...

Between October 2007 and August 2009, a new digital all-sky mosaic image was assembled from more than 3000 individual CCD frames. Using an SBIG STL-11000 camera, 70 fields (each covering 40° × 27°) were imaged from dark-sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. In order to increase the dynamic range beyond the 16 bits of the camera's analog-to-digital converter (of which approx. 12 bits provide data above the noise level), three different exposure times (240 s, 15 s and 0.5 s) were used. Five frames were taken for each exposure time and filter setting. The fields were photometrically calibrated using standard catalog stars and sky background data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The new panorama has an image scale of 36 arcsec/pixel (approx. 3× the resolution of the old, film-based mosaic), a limiting magnitude of approx. 14 mag and an 18 bit dynamic range. At full resolution and bit depth, it is a 648 MPixel, 7.7 GByte FITS cube. Unlike the old image, the new panorama was carefully calibrated to preserve the large-scale star and dust clouds.

Tic-Tac-Toe computer learns with beans

James Bridle built this version of Donald Michie's Tic-Tac-Toe solving computer, MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine). Not what one would think of as a typical 'computer', the instruction to choose the next move is performed by the user. To do this, they select a bead at random from the matchbox that represents the current game state. The type of bead then represents the move that the computer makes.

At first, the machine has an equal chance of making each possible move, but this is corrected by adding or removing beans at the end of each round. The way this works is that if the computer won the round, an extra bean of the same type played is added to each box involved in that round, to make it more likely that the computer will choose the same path on the next game. Likewise, beans are removed from the path if the computer loses, to decrease the chance that it chooses that path next time. This way, the computer slowly 'learns' to play the game correctly, merely by counting beans.

James uses this algorithm to demonstrate the awesomeness of scale. This strategy should work for learning any game, however it quickly becomes infeasible to make a set of matchbooks large enough to represent anything but the simplest game. For instance, he estimates that a computer to play the game Go would be at least the size of the Crab Nebula!

If you are curious, there is a (Windows only) simulator of MENICE here. [via boingboing]

November 2, 2009

$40K DARPA "find the balloons" social networking challenge

Starting on December 5, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first registered team to correctly report the location of ten eight-foot-diameter red weather balloons distributed randomly across the continental United States. From the challenge website:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Personally, I think 99 red balloons would've been better, for marketing purposes, than 10. I guess that would take way too long. [via Hack a Day]

November 1, 2009

Homemade medium format camera

Peter Johansson is building a professional-grade medium-format camera. Like, from scratch. He's about 80% done and has done a wonderful job documenting the build. [Thanks, Billy!]

October 31, 2009

Mark Frauenfelder on NPR's Science Friday

Mark, MAKE's Editor-in-Chief, was on NPR's Science Friday yesterday, talking about how to "Geek Your Halloween." You can hear the broadcast here.

Photo and pumpkin carving by Patrick Murray.

The long zoom of cells

Still trying to get a grip on the relative size of say, an X chromosome and a ribosome? Then you might want to check out Cell Size and Scale, a neat visualizer of the scale of things from a coffee bean to a carbon atom made by the University of Utah. Don't blink, or you might miss the bacteriophage! [via kottke]

Pumpkin abuse in the name of science

Over at the Periodic Table of Videos, their chemists put pumpkins through the ringer to demonstrate properties of various chemicals, states, and processes. Nice to see Halloween getting the whole "Peeps in the microwave" treatment. [Thanks, Shawn!]

Periodic Table of Videos

More:
See our own growing collection of chemistry experiments in the Make: Science Room

October 30, 2009

Bacterial typography

Dutch designer Jelte Van Abbema recently won the €10,000 Rado Prize for promising young designers. His awarded body of work includes Symbiosis, a project involving printing with bacterial cultures on paper and billboards. The letterforms change shape, saturation, and hue as the micro-organisms grow and die. The seriousness with which it's all taken seems a bit overblown to me, but it's still a neat idea. I also like the minimalist text-only styling of Van Abbema's personal webpage.

October 29, 2009

Flammable ice

This awesome little chemical machine is from Mr. Kent's chemistry page. Ice is laid in a Pyrex dish over a layer of calcium carbide. As the ice melts, the liquid water reacts with the carbide to produce acetylene gas, which of course is highly flammable. A match starts it off, and then it burns continuously on its own. My first thought was that the system could rapidly spiral out of control--more heat melts more water makes more gas makes even more heat. But it's limited by the amount of oxygen that can get down into the pan, I think. My second thought was that maybe a bit of sodium metal down there with the carbide could make the process self-igniting.... (For God's sake, no one try that.)

Lots of great new Science Room content

We've got lots of new content in the Make: Science Room, including a whole new Forensics series on the many methods of fingerprinting. Tired of those bitter family disputes over who ate the last ice cream sandwich? Take the wrapper to the lab and find out for sure!

We also have a lab on testing for lead paint and an introduction and series of labs on colloids and suspensions. What in blue-blazes is a colloid, you ask? Why it's a "two-phase heterogeneous mixture made up of a dispersed phase of tiny particles that are distributed evenly within a continuous phase." Think: homogenized milk. It has tiny particles of liquid butterfat (the dispersed part) suspended in water (the continuous part). That's a colloid.

And then there are sols, that's a "solid phase dispersed in a liquid continuous phase. Ordinarily, a sol is a liquid, but it can be converted to a semi-solid gel by adding a gelling agent. In some cases, the solid phase itself may also serve as the gelling agent."

An example of a gelled sol is the notorious Super Napalm B. And guess what? We show you how to make it -- just in time for Halloween. We're kidding. KIDDING! This is serious stuff, a cool experiment, but one with real dangers. This is seriously volatile burning material that's also a seriously sticky gel, a deadly combination (hence the notoriety).

Here's the door to the Science Room >>

In the Maker Shed

And don't forget all of the awesome science-related products now carried in the Maker Shed, including a Latent Finger Printing Kit and a Lead Paint Test Kit (seen above).

Gummy chromosomes and Cantor set eggs

From photographer Kevin Van Aelst. [via Boing Boing]

October 28, 2009

Fascination video series

Our Fascination video series features interviews with notable scientists and technologists, sponsored by Dow Chemical. All the videos are up now, and they're worth watching. How often do you get to hear these brilliant folks describe why they're fascinated with what they do? Here's the lineup:

Interesting cancer resistance in naked mole rats

There's a ridiculous amount of hype in science today, and in an area as sexy as cancer research it is perhaps even worse. In writing this post, I am mindful of the "sharks don't get cancer" trope that's been used irresponsibly to sell shark cartilage as snake oil, very often to people who are in a desperate situation. Consider that a disclaimer.

There is, reportedly, a very low incidence of cancerous tumors in naked mole rats. Statements like "there has never been a tumor found in a naked mole rat" may be misleading unless they also explain to us just who is looking for tumors in naked mole rats, how long they've been doing so, how hard they're looking, who's paying for it, and why. Still, I think this paragraph is interesting:

The findings, presented in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

Of course, there's all kinds of reasons why it might work for naked mole rats and not for people, but the idea that a mechanism as simple as cellular "claustrophobia" might go so far to eliminating tumors is pretty interesting. Here's the original abstract at PNAS.

Sending a heartbeat over ethernet

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Charles is using an Arduino ethernet shield to send the rhythm of his heartbeat over a network in the form of OSC messages. Each beat is detected via a simple sensor comprised of an IR LED and phototransistor -

The idea is that when your heart beats you have a quick rush of blood into tiny blood vessels close to your skin which makes it less transparent. This effect is easiest to observe on your finger tips or earlobe. So the IR emitter and phototransistor are placed next to each other (not much light goes through the side of the emitter!) and I put my finger on top. Light from the IR emitter illuminates my skin and is reflected into the phototransistor.

The phototransistor is connected to the Arduino in a similar way to a potentiometer. One lead is connected to +5V and the other to ground. The +5V lead is also connected to an analogue input on the Arduino. When the phototransistor receives more IR light it becomes more resistive and a lower voltage is detected by the analogue input.

His sensor was built using Meng Li's instructions & schematic. Looks like a great input option for those interested in experimenting with biofeedback.

Related:

Heartbeat midi controller

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Ethernet Shield

October 27, 2009

Super cements aka "geopolymers"

Think cement is just cement? Not so. These unlovely mugs are nonetheless very special. Prepared from special synthetic aluminosilicate materials called "geopolymers" (Wikipedia) by members of Dr. Waltraud M. Kriven's research group at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, these mugs were tested in a special "mug drop" event at the 2004 American Ceramic Society (ACeRS) conference, and supposedly "were impossible to break at even 50ft onto bare concrete" (although the photos clearly show an astroturf-covered floor). Danger Room's David Hambling recently posted a nice overview of geopolymer technology with an eye towards defense applications. These presentation slides by Dr. Kriven (.pdf) include some actual formulae.

October 26, 2009

How-To: Tesla "Spooky Spirit" radio

Instructables user mrfixits just posted this su-wheet luminiferous aetheric Tesla-punk tranceive-o-mogrifier doo-dad build. He explains it rather better than I:

The Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio is a crystal radio circuit in a jam-jar. It makes fun spooky sounds by responding to input from several types of electromagnetic sources. This non-powered radio plugs right into the computer sound-in jack, and makes use of audio software for real time sound effects.