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.
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.
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.
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.)
We’ve taken some totallysweetpicturesofothergalaxies, but it’s kinda hard to get a decent image of our own Milky Way… There’s just no good place to stand and point the camera. This 12cm glass cube contains a pint sized model of our home galaxy. It’s not just an abstract rendering; there are 80,000 individual points, representing the relative positions of 80,000 real stars, based on data from Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory.
According to Monty Python’s Galaxy Song, our galaxy contains a hundred billion stars, which is a far cry from the mere eighty thousand represented here. On the upside, this model will set you back 1 yen (just under a penny) per star, so if it was more accurate, you’d be paying upwards of a billion dollars instead of the $800 or so it actually costs. Oh, and before you start complaining that the galaxy is off center, this model is geocentric: Earth is in the middle. Yep, we’re kinda off in the middle of nowhere. Humbling, huh?
If you’re worried about taking your kids outside at night to stargaze because of the risk of asteroids, falling satellites and other space debris, you can now enjoy a considerably less awesome experience indoors. The Discovery Ultimate Star Planetarium will project 88 constellations and 12 celestial objects including the 8 planets, that outcast Pluto and its moon, Charon.
A backlit navigational screen allows you to search a database of over 600 star facts and myths, while an interactive talking computer will take you through a variety of astronomy tours and settings. It uses a couple of “super bright bulbs” to project over 600 dots stars and even has a one-hour timer so your kids can fall asleep under the constellations.
You can find it at the Discovery Channel online store for $79.95.
Somewhat unusually, there are a couple things going on up in the sky this Wednesday night, at least for those of us who don’t live in Asia or Australia (sorry chaps). The first thing to look forward to is a total lunar eclipse, which should be visible in its entirety from the central and eastern US and Canada as well as western Europe. Eastern Europe and most of Africa will be able to see the eclipse beginning as the moon sets, and the western US will catch it in progress as of moonrise. The moon will be completely within the shadow of the Earth as of 10pm EST, and won’t start to come out again until 10:50pm. During that time it’ll turn a lovely reddish-orange, thanks to the sunrises and sunsets refracting light past the limbs of the Earth. If you live in North America, your next chance to see something like this will be December 21, 2010, so get your butt out there and take a look.
The other big thing that’s going on Wednesday night (in the middle of the eclipse, in fact) is that the United States is going to try to shoot down a dysfunctional spy satellite over Hawaii with a sea launched interceptor missile. If you live in Hawaii, fear not, the debris cloud is headed for central Canada, and as far as I know, nobody actually lives in Canada. Not that they’d have any toxic hydrazine propellant to worry about. Oh wait, there’s 1000 pounds of it on board. That, in fact, is the US government’s rationale for shooting the thing down: they don’t want it to crash into a populated area. Sounds reasonable, but it’s actually total bunk, according to Danger Room. In fact, it’s far more likely to be a response to the Chinese anti-satellite missile test of a year ago, despite the heavy criticism of that test from the United States. More on why the US Government thinks we need to shoot this thing down, and why none of their reasons make much sense, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
You don’t think about it much, but generally, when stuff falls over, it doesn’t get back up. Off the top of my head, I can think of two exceptions to the rule: Weebles, and turtles. Of course, Weebles (and most other self-righting objects) cheat by having a weight in the bottom. The Gomboc, “invented” last December by Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, is the first convex, homogeneous object with only one stable orientation, which means that it’ll always turn itself “up” no matter which way you set it down, without any help:
Turtles, though, seem to have had this figured out a while ago… Quite a few of them have shells shaped nearly identically to the Gomboc. As for practical uses for those of us who aren’t turtles, I honestly don’t know what this is good for. How about a cake mold, to make self-righting pineapple upside-down cake? Yeah, okay, got nothin’. It’s definitely cool, though.
If you want to order one, they’re available in a limited edition starting at about 1000 euros. Or you could just go find a turtle somewhere.
I’m somewhat of a scale buff. That is, I find it fascinating to think about how big, and how small, things are. The problem (and part of the appeal) is that it’s a really hard topic to wrap your brain around. For example, an atom of hydrogen is about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, which is a hundred thousand thousand times larger than an electron. How do you picture that?
This webpage has taken an electron, and scaled it to the size of one pixel. The rest of a hydrogen atom, including one proton and the space between the proton and the electron, is then displayed at that scale. On a 72 DPI monitor, this webpage works out to be about 11 miles long, and that’s just the radius (the middle of the atom to the edge), as opposed to the full diameter. This webpage takes the same approach to show the scale of the solar system; it’s only half a mile long.
I say largest practical webpage because a quick Google search has revealed that the biggest webpage is actually this one; it contains some 8,100,000,000,000,000 (gasp) ,000,000,000,000,000 pixels. That’s 9 quadrillion pixels wide by 9 quadrillion pixels tall:
At 77 pixels to the inch, this page takes up 3.4e18 square miles and is 1.844 billion miles on a side– an area roughly equivalent to a section of the plane of our Solar System with the sun at the center and the orbit of Saturn on the outside edge (a square 22 AU on a side). That’s about 17 billion times the surface area of the Earth.
Now, I’m not sure what the point of that is, but I’m impressed anyway. After the jump, you can watch an old classic on this same topic: Powers of Ten. Read the rest of this entry »
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By Andrew Liszewski
The other big thing that’s going on Wednesday night (in the middle of the eclipse, in fact) is that the United States is going to try to shoot down a dysfunctional spy satellite over Hawaii with a sea launched interceptor missile. If you live in Hawaii, fear not, the debris cloud is headed for central Canada, and as far as I know, nobody actually lives in Canada. Not that they’d have any toxic 
