By Andrew Liszewski
While National Geographic can easily be considered the place to go if you’re looking for photos of life on Earth, if you’re interested in what’s happening away from our planet you’ll have to turn to NASA. And thanks to a partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive, accessing NASA’s image and video libraries just got a whole lot easier. The NASA Images website went live this past week, and features 21 NASA image collections merged into a massive and easily searchable online resource.
Over the next 5 years the partnership will see millions of photos and thousands of hours of video added to the site including imagery from the Apollo missions, the Hubble Space Telescope and experimental aircraft and spacecraft spanning NASA’s history. Unfortunately while the site appears to be getting hit pretty hard at the moment (in other words it’s almost unusably slow) it does appear to be well laid out and will most likely end up occupying a good chunk of my weekend.
[ NASA Images ] VIA [ PC Authority ]
By Andrew Liszewski
According to the BBC, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider is in the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, which is about -456°F or -271°C. In order for the collider’s thousands of magnets to maintain a high magnetic field with minimal power consumption they’re required to be superconducting, so liquid helium is currently being used to cool them down.
Roberto Saban, the LHC’s head of hardware commissioning, said that in order to obtain high magnetic fields without consuming too much power, the magnets were required to be “superconducting”.
This is the property, exhibited by some materials at very low temperatures, to channel electrical current with zero resistance and very little power loss.
Helium exhibits spectacular properties at 2.2 Kelvin - becoming “superfluid”. This allows it to conduct heat very rapidly, making it an extremely efficient refrigerant.
For comparison, while the LHC is being lowered to 1.9 Kelvin, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is a balmy 2.7 Kelvin, and my cold, cold heart comes in at around 3.2 Kelvin. That’s why I originally suggested that the Cern team should use years and years of sarcasm to bring the collider’s temperature down, but they felt the emotional toll on their staff would be too high. And if you want to keep track of how the LHC’s cool-down is coming along, you can check out their website from 1997 which features an updated graphic showing the temperature of various sections.
[ Cern lab goes 'colder than space' ] VIA [ Slashdot ]
By Andrew Liszewski
If you work in a laboratory setting and are tired of all the constant fighting about who gets to look in the microscope next, this video screen version will allow a handful of people to see the magnified images at the same time. Instead of a standard eyepiece, the microscope uses a built-in 2MP digital camera to capture stills or videos which are displayed on a 3 1/2 inch LCD with a resolution of just 320×240. Fortunately though the images and videos can also be downloaded to a PC using the microscope’s USB port or a removable SD card allowing you to see them at their full resolution.
The microscope features 3 switchable objective lenses (4X, 10X or 40X) that provide magnification from 40X to 400X, but you also have the option of switching on a digital zoom feature which boosts magnification up to 1600X. (But we all know that digital zoom is never that great.) The objects you’re viewing can also be illuminated from the top or bottom thanks to 2 separate 6-watt LED lights that can be adjusted with an exposure knob. There’s even a filter wheel with 6 selectable colors allowing you to block out certain wavelengths to make objects clearer.
With a price tag of $299.95 from Hammacher Schlemmer I’m pretty sure this model isn’t exactly the choice of professionals, but if you’ve got a budding scientist at home it would probably make for a great first microscope.
[ Video Screen Microscope ] VIA [ The Green Head ]
By Jonathan Kimak
Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, along with a team of students, has developed a microscope attachment for the digital cameras on cell phones. The CellScope as it is named, attaches over the camera lens of the phone and has a clip that can hold sample slides.
It’s good enough to be able to see individual blood cells up close and has been tested to diagnose malaria. Dan Fletcher’s hope is that the microscope can be a cheap(estimated cost $100) and fast method of providing diagnosis of diseases in remote areas of the world.
A doctor (or really anyone who took high school science) can make a sample slide of blood, insert it into the microscope, snap a picture of it and send it to anyone in the world, provided they can pull themselves away from texting their buddies about the latest gadgets.
Saving the world from diseases is a fine and noble cause, but they shouldn’t forget about the market of college guys who would buy this so they could determine what exactly is growing on top of the food in the back of their fridge.
[ The Economist ] VIA [ Popgadget ] AND [ Ubergizmo ]
By Andrew Liszewski
Ok, this is officially the coolest image I’ve ever seen. What you see on the right is a pulse of light that is 2.5 billionths of a millionth of a second long. The image was captured by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and the flash of laser light that made it possible lasted just 80 attoseconds. (An attosecond is one billionth of one billionth of a second.) The previous record for the shortest light pulse was 130 attoseconds set in 2007, and almost halving that number a year later is an impressive feat
But don’t expect your Nikon or Canon DSLR to pull off a cool shot like this. The team responsible for it used a laser firing extremely short pulses into a cloud of neon gas which ionized the neon atoms. This then releases electrons which the researchers were able to measure in order to produce this side-profile shot of the laser pulse.
The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.
The trigger pulses contained only one or two oscillations of a light wave so that they packed a compact energy punch when they reached the neon cloud. To do this, the researchers had to corral the trigger-pulse photons into a tightly packed bunch using a device called a chirped mirror. These multilayered mirrors make the photons at the front of a pulse travel further than the slower photons at the rear do. That gives the back markers time to catch up, in this case producing a tight pack of photons that hit the neon atoms at roughly the same time.
To find out how short the light flashes from the neon atoms were, Goulielmakis and colleagues directed them onto a second neon gas cloud. As each flash is intense enough to completely ionise a neon atom and release an electron, the researchers could use those electrons like a flashgun, to illuminate some of the original 2.5 femtosecond trigger pulses of laser light.
Since the microscopic world is still a big mystery to us, this method might eventually allow researches to visualize the movements of electrons around atoms, or even ’see’ nuclear particles like protons.
[ Fastest-ever flashgun captures image of light wave ] VIA [ Slashdot ]
By Andrew Liszewski
The days of having to decide between paper, plastic or cast iron bags at the grocery store are numbered thanks to the development of a new type of extremely tough nanopaper. The paper is made from nanosized (oh I get it!) cellulose fibers making it both stronger and lighter than traditional papers.
Conventional paper is made from cellulose, a crystalline polymer of glucose that’s the primary component of plant cell walls. At the nanoscale level, cellulose can be extremely strong, with individual fibers capable of withstanding more stress than glass fibers or steel wire. But paper processing generates relatively large cellulose microfibers riddled with defects that can break apart under stress. That leaves most commercial paper with a tensile strength that tops out at about 30 megapascals (MPa), says Lars Berglund, a lightweight structures engineering expert at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
To toughen paper up, Berglund and his colleagues kept the cellulose fibers small. They did this by breaking down wood pulp in water with a combination of enzymes and mechanically beating it further. The result: defect-free nanofibers about 1000 times smaller than typical cellulose fibers. As a final step, the researchers treated their nanofibers with carboxymethanol, which coated the fibers in carboxyl groups. These groups readily form hydrogen bonds that helped the fibers make tight contacts with one another, further strengthening the material. The final result–published in the current issue of Biomacromolecules–was a paper with a tensile strength of 214 MPa, far above the 130 MPa of cast iron and the previous record of 103 MPa for a high-strength paper.
Besides allowing you to pack a grocery bag full of canned food without the worry of it tearing, the nanopaper also has the potential to replace other expensive but strong and lightweight materials like carbon fiber or even carbon nanotubes. Maybe these researchers should hook up with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency who are trying to launch that paper airplane from space.
[ Say Goodbye to Wimpy Paper ] VIA [ Slashdot ]
By Andrew Liszewski
To anyone who thinks a toy that teaches science can’t be fun, behold the Magnetic Accelerator Kit! It’s easy to put together (no glue required) and once it’s assembled you simply roll one of the metal balls into one end of the accelerator, and another ball will come shooting out the other end at high speed. The basic principles are similar to what is being planned for future weapons and even space travel, so you can pretend you’re ordering one for your kid’s science fair project, when in reality you’ll be launching metal balls across your desk all day at work.
ThinkGeek’s got it for $29.99, and I’ve included their brief video of the accelerator in action after the jump. And if anyone feels like building one of these, but 10 times the size, we’d definitely be interested in seeing your own videos.
[ Magnetic Accelerator Kit ]
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By Andrew Liszewski
If you’re a professional astronomer working with a large installed telescope, you probably already have plenty of equipment to let you know when it’s the ideal conditions to stargaze. But for hobbyists who have to drag their telescopes into the backyard in order to peep the heavens, this watch should provide all the data they need.
The LCD display on the watchface features 96 separate sections arranged in a ray pattern. Each slice represents 15 minutes of time, which adds up to a full 24 hour day. Once you choose your specific location from a list of 583 pre-programmed cities, the sections are selectively shaded to depict the hours of sunlight and darkness throughout the day. A second circular LCD display around the edge shows the times of moonrise and moonset. There’s a single 24 hour hand that moves around a 12-hour bezel for telling the time, but the watch also features a standard digital time display on the top half.
You can find it at Hammacher Schlemmer for $495.95.
[ The Astronomer's Chronograph ]
By Andrew Liszewski
Any kid who’s ever made a paper airplane has dreamed of throwing it off a tall skyscraper to see how far it can actually fly. And at least one kid who grew up to become a professor at Tokyo University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has held onto that dream. But why stop at tall buildings or even mountains? Shinji Suzuki currently heads up a project that wants to launch paper airplanes from space, and see how they survive the trip back to Earth.
The first issue that comes to mind is that the real space shuttle requires bleeding-edge, heat-resistant tiles in order to survive the trip home. How would a paper airplane even have a chance? Well the origami paper they intend to use is made of sugar cane fibers sprayed with a special coating making them resistant to heat, wind and water. Shockingly, a 2.8 inch long prototype has survived speeds of Mach 7 and temperatures up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit in a hypersonic wind tunnel. So believe it or not, the plane could probably survive a trip through Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The actual paper airplane they intend to launch will be about 8 inches long, 4 inches wide and weighs about 1.05 ounces. Their last big hurdle before the ‘launch’ is to find a way to reliably track the airplane once it has been released. Otherwise the $300,000 in funding they get each year for the project will be wasted if they aren’t able to learn anything from the flight.
[ Japanese hope to launch paper plane from space ] VIA [ Popular Science ]
By Andrew Liszewski
Even if you’ve never heard of tritium before, odds are you’ve already experienced it. The radioactive material is used in compasses, gun sights, watches and other items you might need to use at night. While something like LEDs actually throw off far more light, the real advantage to tritium is that it doesn’t need a power source. In fact it will glow for years and years, even in complete darkness. The tiny piece used in this keychain will glow for about 10 years, and will ensure you’ll never lose your keys if you drop them in the woods in the middle of the night while the moon’s blocked out by clouds and you don’t happen to have a flashlight.
They’re available from DealExtreme for just $9.80 and come in either a white glow or green glow version. And while the material is radioactive, it’s safe to use in consumer products since the beta particles it emits are too weak to even penetrate human skin. (Though at one point we thought radium was safe to use too.)
[ Mini Tritium Glowring Keychain ] VIA [ Gear Diary ]
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