Remembering Sally Ride

The first American woman in space and third woman in space after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya is remembered by @fyfluiddynamics:

  

                                   

Source

Time-lapse video compiled from photos taken from the ISS

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Source

F-22 oxygen supply problem not a contamination issue

From Flightglobal:

The USAF has also gathered data that indicates that the problem has to do with the amount of oxygen that is reaching the pilot, Schwartz says. Based on tests conducted inside an altitude chamber and a centrifuge, the USAF has concluded that a combination of hardware defects with the pilot's life support gear contributed to the problem.
"Part of that is the upper pressure garment of the g-suit assembly," Schwartz says. "Part of that has to do with hose and valve and connection hardware in the cockpit."

 Source

The Messenger Lectures - Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman's lectures on physics at Cornell University in 1964. Microsoft Research's Project Tuva has added to these videos by including commentary, notes and extras. All seven videos are available here. 


Note: The site linked above requires Microsoft Silverlight to be installed for your browser.


Alternatively, you could watch the videos on YouTube (without all the Project Tuva additions though):

Photo - chalk as examined by Thomas Huxley in the 1860s

From NPR's 'Krulwich Wonders...' - A science blog by Robert Krulwich (excerpt follows):

"Chalk is composed of extremely small white globules. They look, up close, like snowballs made from brittle paper plates. Those plates, it turns out, are part of ancient skeletons that once belonged to roundish little critters that lived and floated in the sea, captured a little sunshine and carbon, then died and sank to the bottom. There still are trillions of them floating about in the oceans today, sucking up carbon dioxide, pocketing the carbon. Over the millennia, so many have died and plopped on top of each other, the weight of them and the water above has pressed them into a white blanket of rock, entirely composed of teeny skeletons. Scientists call these ancient plates "coccoliths." Technically, they are single-celled phytoplankton algae.

Chalk doesn't proclaim itself. It is usually out of view, buried in the ground below. Every so often, when a highway is being carved through a mountain, or when the sea and wind erode the side of a hill, that's when the green cover comes off, then you can see it. The White Cliffs of Dover are all chalk, piled hundreds of feet high."

Find more posts at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/


Read more..

Slick public service message on viruses

Warner Bros and Participant Media create a rather well produced public service message for Take Part's pandemic and disease prevention campaign:

Via

An astrophysicist's poetic act of revenge in 1984

From Maria Popova's fantastic 'Brain Pickings': 

A Vintage Scientific Paper Published as a 38-Stanza Poem:

...Reader Julia Deneva, a Cornell astronomer and fellow Bulgarian, alerts me to The Detection of Shocked Co/ Emission from G333.6-0.2 by New South Wales physicist J. W. V. Storey, a paper published as a 38-stanza poem, appeared in The Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia in 1984. It was as much an act of creativity as it was one of vengeance. Deneva writes:

"The unfortunate astronomer who got scheduled last at the annual meeting of said society decided to take revenge and gave his talk in verse — and later submitted it for publication."

The first few stanzas:

I wrote my abstract, sent it in,

With words that don’t offend.

Imagine my horror to find that I

Am scheduled at the end.

Let me say, to be last speaker,

There are very few things worse.

And so this talk, to get revenge,

Will be entirely in verse.

The subject I address today

Is that of star formation.

And what we’ve found out recently

About the situation.

Stars start out as clouds of gas and

Dust and bits of spinning stuff.

Collapsing gravitationally

Until they’re dense enough. 

They form themselves in little lumps,

(Or so says this bloke Jeans).

‘Dynamic Instabilities’

Whatever that term means. 

Source

Schweizer glider out-landing/crash

From the uploader (LarryHockensmith) -  

Complacency has no place in soaring. I was trained better than to have lingered on the lee-side of a ridge over rough terrain. The dramatic outlanding was due to my actions exclusively.

While tight turns over roofs, brushing treetops and dodging street signs are not desired flight maneuvers, they do make for interesting viewing. An almost perfect (for a power pilot and plane but not a sailplane) landing until an unnoticed mailbox catches the right wing of the sailplane about 8 inches from the tip.

The original is 16 minutes of Full High Definition Video and shows every second of the events leading to this out-landing/ crash. It has been closely reviewed and much learning has taken place. My instructor, safety officer, FAA and NTSB were all outstanding professionals in helping grow skills from this experience.

More videos on this are coming. See if you can spot how the differences between a power pilot's training and a glider pilot's training could have contributed to this outcome.

Dark Matter - Unaccounted for

From Quantum Diaries :

Neal Weiner, a theorist from New York University, started his lecture saying that contrary to the Higgs boson, for dark matter “we have no model, only guesses”. There is nothing within the Standard Model of particle physics to account for dark matter. This is one key reason we physicists are all convinced there is a bigger theory hiding behind the current known one.

So theorists and experimentalists are in the dark… As Neal stressed, there are many manifestations of dark matter. Different experiments observe strange signals where dark matter could be the explanation. But formulating an explanation is far from being trivial.

Full post can be found here. 

XKCD: Visual Field

Lego Rolls Royce 'Trent' Engine

On display at the Farnborough International Airshow 2012. Comes with functioning stages! Well functioning to the extent of 'turning' roundy round. 

From the Royal Aero Society's YouTube video:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTCSKRsOdT4&feature=youtu.be


Via: http://twitter.com/FlightTestFact

Source: http://twitpic.com/a62qqv

Source: http://twitter.com/EADSlive/status/222642839253815296/photo/1

Explained: Sigma - MIT News Office

Given the news we've just heard from CERN, this simple explanation from MIT (Feb 9, 2012) offers some insight into the magnitude of today's announcement. I'll collect many more links/resources to provide a more thorough picture of this discovery.

Explained: Sigma - MIT News Office