Written and sung by The Phenomenauts, this is a near-punk anthem to a world class astrophysicist, Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. Someone had to inherit the mantle from Carl Sagan, and it turned out to be Neil. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.
Curiosity, more formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory, will be attempting to land on Mars on Sunday, August 5th, at 10:31 PM PDT. They are using that time zone because the JPL Labs running the rover are based in California. I think the landing is going to be pretty exciting (referred to as the Seven Minutes of Terror by the NASA scientists behind the mission), and if you like you will be able to watch live coverage as it happens. To give you an idea of the landing process, watch either of these videos.
A few good photos and videos of cities as seen from space, photographed from the ISS. I particularly like the commentary from NASA Astronaut Don Pettit on the second video, which gives you some pointers on how to recognize specific places from orbit. He also took an awful lot of these images, and even starts off by explaining a bit about how they solved the blurring problem created by trying to take time lapse images while hurtling through the sky. This is also the man who invented the zero G coffee cup; thanks to Openculture for the heads up on this one.
A Tesla Coil is a transformer that is able to generating extremely large voltages, which allows it to throw huge but extremely short-live sparks. So what looks like one long spark is actually a bunch of sparks each second. As any musician with a scientific background will tell you, a given tone is a given frequency of vibration, producing each unique note. So by adjusting the sparks per second from the coil, different notes can be played. And that is exactly what they did in this video; enjoy!
The coil was invented by Nikola Tesla, who also invented AC power, the electric motor, the alternator, the generator, the audio speaker, radio (they took the patent away from Marconi when it turned out it was based on 17 of Tesla’s patents), the florescent light four years before Edison used brute force slave labor to invent the light bulb, and ever so much more which he patented. He also invented some stuff the patent office couldn’t figure out how to process, like broadcast energy and the related wireless charging of batteries (a company finally figured out how to make a profit on that one a decade or so ago for all our portable electronics), Ball Lightning, Radar (it was WWII before anyone decided building that could be useful), and oh, yeah, that earthquake machine he almost sank Long Island with. Tesla has been one of my personal heroes since I was a kid, and if you don’t know about him it is time you learned.
One of the modern holy grails in physics is the Higgs Boson, AKA The God Particle, and several weeks ago Cern announced they believed they had finally proven it exists. As in all such advances, some will only go so far as to admit that a Higgs-like particle has been identified, but even if it is not the elusive Higgs itself a major step along the road to understanding how the universe works has been taken. As complex as both the question and the means of answering it are, there is a simple explanation put forward by Assistant Professor Daniel Whiteson of the University of California that anyone can understand. And just to make it easier to follow, this excellent animation was assembled; thanks to Open Culture for the heads up on this one.
The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
A Cat Anime done with stop motion wooden dolls from Nekomacitta did a pretty good job of explaining to Japanese children the dangers of a nuclear power plant issue such as the one Fukushima and the surrounding countryside just suffered last year. It is a fairly balanced presentation which cites both the good and bad points of such a power generating system, apparently not driving one to a preordained conclusion but rather letting the audience weigh the options and come to their own conclusions. I say apparently because I have not had the opportunity to watch the entire 20 minute animation so far, but just the outtake presented here. Thanks to The Asahi Shimbon for the heads up on this one.