What do you get when you take a bottle of liquid hydrogen and place it in a garbage can with warm water at the bottom and then place 1500 ping pong balls on top of it? This:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldgp3Ton7R4]The setup takes a little time so if you just want to watch the explosion, go to the half way mark.
An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun. Even the largest exoplanets are invisible to our mightiest telescopes. So how do we find them? Watch and find out:
[youtube http://youtu.be/CcUhVCMAhAI]I’ve known about the solar transit trick for finding exoplanets for some time, but the ability to identify atmospheres had always left me a little perplexed. After watching the video, I was like,well, duh. That doesn’t make it any less amazing, though. Think about it, we have the ability to not only find exoplanets but get a fairly good idea as to what the composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere and physical makeup are. And all of it by simply measuring the change in light patterns as the exoplanet traverses its star.
It turns out that exoplanets are much more abundant than ever thought. It was thought that the norm would be a star without a planetary system, but we’ve discovered the exact opposite. We’ve found gas giants orbiting their star closer than Mercury orbits our Sun. We’ve found planets that are almost all water with a solid ice core and a vast ocean and a steam atmosphere. We’ve even found a few exoplanets that are tantalizing Earth-like. In fact, around 20% of stars are now thought to contain Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks zone of its star where it may support life. That doesn’t mean they’re all habitable, but it’s an enticing promise that there could be a habitable planet circling a star fairly close by.
Of course, there’s a big fat asterisk on the Goldilocks planets. A lot of this data is extrapolation from what we’ve found so far. Exoplanets that orbit quickly close to their star are much easier to detect than exoplanets the size of Earth as far away from their star as the Goldilocks zone. From what I understand, we’ve only found a few actual exoplanets from direct (or I guess indirect) observation. Regardless, we’re still in the infancy of exoplanetary exploration and detection methods are bound to get better if we can devote more time and resources to this exciting field.
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Well, at least compared to Tim Blais. You need to watch this video. It’s an a capella explanation of string theory set to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.
[youtube http://youtu.be/2rjbtsX7twc]I mean WOW! I cannot even begin to imagine how much time, effort, and creativity went into making this. Too bad people like him are wasting their time trying to figure out the fundamental reality of the universe and not ruling the planet.
Back when I was in college taking quantum physics I remember having a barely tenable grasp of what was being taught to me. Much of the math beyond collapsible wave functions was lost on me. Never once did the professor bother to mention that even the people that did this stuff for a living didn’t get it either. It wasn’t until years later that I realized this to be true. Quantum physics makes no sense but it exists. It is experimentally provable but we don’t really know why it is. I like that Tim actually admits this at the end of the video. Science is awesome.
We see these origin of life stories every once in a while that will claim that life originated on Mars. In this case, it’a a chemist claiming that a certain mineral necessary to create life could only be found in the necessary concentrations on Mars. So, yeah, we’re all Martians now. Or something like that.
Panspermia, the idea that Earth was fertilized with life by rocks from other planets, isn’t a new concept, but the idea that a specific mineral is necessary to create life is something I’ve never heard of. If true, wouldn’t it be more likely that a large chunk of that mineral made it to Earth and allowed the transition from inorganic to organic material to happen on Earth? Isn’t that a far more likely event than a rock from Mars filled with microbes is able to make it through the vaccuum of space and land on Earth without killing the microbes?
Despite the fact that I find the whole “we are Martians” very hard to believe, I love science like this. It’s important to make these comparisons. It may not lead to where you thought you were going, but it may lead somewhere even better than you originally hoped or it could be a dead end. Science is full of dead ends. But once branches of discovery open, they tend to blossom into dazzling new avenues of understanding which push our knowledge of life, the universe, and everything farther and farther.
That was my reaction to this news. Mind blown. I’ve always thought of the Moon as a lifeless ball of potentially valuable minerals. Time to reprogram some neurons.
Bearing the incredibly cool name magmatic water, which is just a fancy name for water that bubbled up from the depths of the Moon, scientists have discovered water on the surface of the moon! If it’s detectable on the surface, there’s no telling how much water is still in the depths. Imagine what a large water discovery would mean to colonization. One of the biggest roadblocks to colonizing any foreign satellite is the prohibitively expensive costs of transporting water to the colony. Even transporting water as close as the Moon would be a huge cost undertaking. Maybe now it won’t be.
Please let there be large amounts of water on the Moon! Oh please, oh please, oh please! I want my underground Moon lair and I want it now!
We all know that oil is used to create plastic. Well now there is an invention to turn plastic back into oil. Watch:
What a goldmine for developing countries! They will get free oil that can be used for heating or cooking all while saving them money and reducing their garbage footprint. I guess this would also come in handy for those industrialized areas that still use heating oil, but small scale stuff like this seems pretty pointless for urban areas. I’m sure there’s a larger scale equivalent that major cities could use to collect the plastic and save on their own electric bills or sell off to someone who is willing to convert the plastic.
The video is, unfortunately, a little vague on details. For instance, what is the byproduct? It can’t all be oil. Regardless, this has the makings of a revolutionary product that may become commonplace as resources get scarcer and scarcer.
Elon Musk is at it again, inventing futuristic modes of transportation. The billionaire PayPal creator is most famous for SpaceX, which promises to revolutionize space travel, and Tesla, which promises to revolutionize the electric car. This time it’s the Hyperloop, a relatively cheap train-like system to shuttle people at hyper-speeds between cities. The basic idea is that you create a sealed tube and you push a vehicle inside it using the air pressure in the tube or make it a vacuum tube and magnetically push the vehicle through the tube.
It really is a great idea, but it seems to me to be hopelessly impractical. Elon Musk actually seems to think so to, which is good to hear, but he seems to be coming from a politically impractical standpoint where I’m more of a, yeah, well this is great for rich people, but not really a practical public transportation method. Of course, that’s what Elon Musk does, create better modes of transportation for rich people, and more power to him, but this is his first foray into public transportation.
I haven’t read the details of the specs, but it worries me that there’s no mention in anything I’ve read about what kind of volume of people the Hyperloop would be able to move in a day. The cars themselves appear to be much smaller than a normal train so each individual trip would be much smaller than a train’s capacity. And how many cars can travel in the tube at any given time? At the speeds they’re talking across the distances they’re talking, I can’t see it being more than six in either direction at optimal conditions. At 600 mph, since the cars are only supposed to hold 28 people, we’re talking about a 6 billion dollar system that can shuttle less than 200 people per hour.
Since Elon Musk is undoubtedly smarter than me and he says the system should be able to handle 7.4 million passengers per year, I’m assuming there’s something that I’m missing. Maybe each car holds 28 people but multiple cars can be strung together. Of course, he also says that this system is incapable of crashing and will need no external power source and will not need to purchase more than 1 billion dollars in land rights so he may be assuming much more than I am.
The world needs billionaire futurists like Elon Musk. Looking to the future is important and efforts to make our ideas reality should always be at the forefront of our minds. But where are the billionaire presentists? Where are the Andrey Carnegies who believed that their riches should be spent now for the common good? The incredibly solvable problems of today requires more Bill Gateses than Elon Musks.
Ever wonder what happens when a mosquito bites you? Well wonder no further! The thing that you think of as the mosquito’s needle is actually a sheath and these tiny filaments are hidden inside and they are what go searching for a blood vessel. It reminds me somewhat of an anteater sticking his tongue down an ant hole. Something I didn’t know, mosquitoes actually fail to draw blood more often than they succeed. In the last video, you can actually see a mosquito hitting a blood vessel and sucking blood out. He sucks so hard you can see the blood vessel contracting! There is also some talk about how malarial mosquitoes behave differently than non-malarial mosquitoes. They’re not sure why but they think it may have to do with the parasite actually controlling the mosquito’s actions. Wild stuff!
Science is always pretty cool, but sometimes it’s WAY cool. Remember the Chelyabinsk meteor that went streaking through the sky and exploded with the force of half a million tons of TNT earlier this year? It was caught on video from many different angles thanks to the prevalence of Russian dash cams. All those videos allowed scientists to triangulate it’s trajectory back into space and find out which larger chunk of rock hurled this warning shot across our bow. The likely culprit? The notorious 2011 EO40! Dun dun DUUUUUNNNNN!
Yeah, I’ve never heard of it either. It’s just one of many large chunks of space rock screaming through space and happens to cross Earth’s orbit. But how cool is it that we were able to use the tools of science to track the origins of a fireball that exploded in our atmosphere and sprinkled to the ground?
Phil Plait’s article that I linked to above also pointed out something that is obvious once it’s pointed out, but I had never really thought about it before. Many asteroids travel in packs, following very similar orbits to each other. Scientists believe that the pack mentality of asteroids is the result of them all being part of a larger asteroid that had broken up. This makes sense because many asteroids aren’t really all that solid. They’re just giant balls of rock and dust loosely glommed together by their own gravity. Strike them hard enough with another streaking rock and a new asteroid family is born! Awww, how cute, he has your chemical composition!
Scientists have stated that the Sun’s magnetic poles are only months away from reversing polarity. The apocalypse is nigh. This is going to be like every Star Trek episode where Geordi or Dax or whoever attempts to reverse the polarity of some gewgaw and science runs amok only supersized. I fully expect the entire solar system to be transported into another universe as a result of this occasion.
We are, of course, ignoring the fact that the Sun does this every 11 years or so and I have already lived through 3 of these polarity switches. That’s boring, though. It’s much better to imagine massive upheavals and global chaos as a result of events that are long enough apart that our memories fade from the last event. I’m pretty sure I just rehashed the formula for every trend known to man.
Really, though, all this means is the magnetic sphere that surrounds the solar system out well past Pluto gets all wibbly-wobbly forming lower period, higher frequency waves during the event. This wibbly-wobblyness is actually good news for Earth and astronauts as it tends to protect us better from the high energy particles from outside the solar system that cause bad things to happen to astronauts and electronics. It also can cause space weather to act up which means a greater likelihood of aurorae and other coronal mass ejection related phenomena. This is bad for astronauts and electronics. So I’m just going to call this whole event a wash. Unless I’m missing something…