Eclipse from Tokyo. Photo via @styleengine.
Nikola Tesla Wasn't God And Thomas Edison Wasn't The Devil »
The Oatmeal is a fantastic comic that I recommend that you make a habit of reading. However, even the greatest can go astray, and I’m pained to admit that The Oatmeal has done so regarding someone I regard very highly, and that’s Nikola Tesla. Alas, The Oatmeal has fallen prey to Tesla idolatry, confusing his genius for godhood and of course, setting up the now all-too-common ‘Edison as Tesla’s arch-villain’ narrative.
There are quite a few errors and misconceptions about both Tesla and Edison in this comic. But they’re errors that I’ve seen before and are often repeated, so it’s worth the time, I think, to address some of the big ones.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, has made public its best guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly lose contact and crash in the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin peeled off. »
The agency said it expected the HTV-2, which goes so fast it can make the commute from New York to Los Angeles in 12 minutes, to experience “impulsive shock waves” at such speeds, but shocks it experienced last August were “more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand
“
At times in the past attempts have been made to capitalize on bats’ special qualities. In the Second World War, the American military invested a great deal of time and money in an extraordinary plan to arm bats with tiny incendiary bombs and to release them in vast numbers — as many as million at a time — from planes over Japan. The idea was that the bats would roost in eaves and roof spaces, and that soon afterward tiny detonators on timers would go off and they would burst into flames, causing hundreds of thousands of fires.
Creating sufficiently tiny bombs and timers required a great deal of experiment and ingenuity, but finally in the spring of 1943 work had progressed sufficiently that a trail was set to take place at Muroc Lake, California. It would be putting it mildly to say that matters didn’t go quite to plan. Remarkably for an experiment, the bats were fully armed with live bomblets when released. This proved not to be a good idea. The bats failed to light on any of the designated targets, but did destroy all the hangars and most of the storage buildings at the Muroc Lake airport, as well as an army general’s car. The general’s report on the day’s events must have made interesting reading. In any case, the program was canceled soon afterward.
”This little anecdote about bats is from Bill Bryson’s “At Home: a short history of private life,” and appears in the chapter “The Study (page 294).”
There are many, many, way too many passages like this that have me saying, “what the fuck” out loud.
Also: Bat Bombs?!?!
Shark eating shark.
The photo comes from Daniela Ceccarelli, of Australia’s Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Ceccarelli was working with fellow researcher David Williamson on conducting a “fish census” off Great Keppel Island, part of the country’s Great Barrier Reef. That’s when Ceccarelli thought she spotted a brown-banded bamboo shark hanging out near the ocean’s floor.
“The first thing that caught my eye was the almost translucent white of the bamboo shark,” Ceccarelli told National Geographic in an email. Instead, as Ceccarelli moved in for a closer look she noticed a camouflaged wobbegong shark emerging from seclusion with the same bamboo shark partially wedged inside its jaws.
“It became clear that the head of the bamboo shark was hidden in its mouth,” she said. “The bamboo shark was motionless and definitely dead.”
As the New Scientist explains, Wobbegongs, aka carpet sharks, are silent predators, waiting at the bottom of the ocean floor for their pray to pass by. And as stunning as this photo may be, it’s not uncommon for Wobbegongs to devour such large meals. Like several kinds of snakes, the Wobbegong has a dislocating jaw and rearward-pointing teeth that help it consume disproportionately large prey.
British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years. »
Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide,Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled ‘C. Darwin Esq.”
“It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin’s signature on the slide,” the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a “quite important and overlooked” specimen.
He described the feeling of seeing that famous signature as “a heart in your mouth situation,” saying he wondering “Goodness, what have I discovered!
“With this research, we can actually figure out which symptoms it might help with, and what an optimal dosing strategy might look like. If we get a chance to do this, we’re not taking liberties. This is a carefully controlled, rigorous scientific study. We’re not sitting around trying to get these vets high.”
Dr. Sue Sisley, discussing a proposed controlled study of how marijuana can help alleviate post traumatic stress disorder for veterans.
Read the article in the Atlantic.
Cracking Open the Scientific Process »
The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.
For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.
The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”
Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.
With upgrade, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory chases dream of lighting fusion’s torch »
The lab is getting a head start on a $94 million project that will transform its plasma reactor into what officials say will be one of the most advanced in the world, bringing scientists one step closer to the goal of creating a clean fusion energy source.
The NSTX creates and controls super hot plasma with temperatures that surpass those found in the sun’s core. Over the next 30 months, it will shut down and undergo a major upgrade that will essentially double the power of the reactor by increasing plasma heat, electrical current and magnetic field strength.
Lab officials say the expansion of the nearly 13-year-old device will shape more advanced experiments to help unlock the remaining mysteries surrounding plasma fusion and give the United States the chance to remain competitive with countries, including China and South Korea, whose governments have invested heavily in fusion research.
Quantum Levitation Meets WipeOut Track
Remember that jaw-dropping video from a couple months back demonstrating quantum levitation? By using a supercooled superconducting disk placed over a magnetic field, the physicists were able to make the disk levitate, even holding an incline as it moved!
Well these folks from Japan have raised the quantum levitation bar. By turning that puck into a Wipeout racer, they’ve brought video game racing to life. Watch and be amazed. And then start your Christmas list 363 days in advance.
Wow.
(by JISTQuantum)
So does this mean Back to the Future hoverboards are going to be developed? We only have 3 years until we hit the 2015 timeline…
(via jtotheizzoe)
Stephen Hawking is hiring a "Technical Assistant." »
A respected scientist from the Cern particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see "the first glimpse" of the Higgs boson next week. »
This could be huge. Er, small. No, wait. 42.
Next Tuesday, two separate teams will each reveal the outcome of trawling through their latest data from LHC collisions. A spokesman for one of these teams told us that this year alone they’ve searched the remains of some 350 trillion collisions, with only ten or so producing candidates for a reliable sign of the Higgs.
Statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project showed that carbon emissions had increased 5.9 % between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.” »
Um?
What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever—they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century.
The "we are so insignificant" site of the day »
Today would have been Louis Daguerre’s 224th birthday, and Google, with their interesting sense of humor, uses the above Doodle, a picture of a family of letters positioned as if they were sitting for a Daguerreotype photograph, to highlight the inventor of the Daguerreotype. The Daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process, and the progenitor to the holiday ritual known as the family portrait.
According to Wikipedia, Daguerre was an artist and a physicist. Read more about Daguerre here (interestingly, his name is etched into the Eiffel Tower.)
