SU2: Open-source CFD Software from Stanford's Aerospace Dept.

From the Stanford University website:

At a recent demonstration, the Stanford team debuted "Stanford University Unstructured" (SU2), an open-source application that models the effects of fluids moving over aerodynamic surfaces such as fuselages, hulls, propellers, rotors, wings, rockets and re-entry vehicles.

Dubbed SU2 for short, the application incorporates everything engineers need to perform a complete design loop for optimizing the shapes of aerospace systems.  While commercial programs offering similar capabilities are available, they can be prohibitively expensive. SU2, on the other hand,  can be downloaded for free from the lab's website.

Source: http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-aero-engineers-debut-open-source-fluid-dynamics-design-application

Update: Version 1.1 of SU2 is available as of 06/29/12

Download via: http://su2.stanford.edu/news/news_release1p1.html

Many thanks to @FlightTestFact for the link!

Human birth as viewed through an MRI machine

From Medical Daily:

"The 30-second movie captures the active second stage of labor as the mother makes expulsive efforts to push out the fetus.  Researchers had to stop recording in the late second stage as the fetal head extended and from the mother to ensure that the ears of the newborn were still covered by maternal soft tissue so that it was not exposed to MRI noise."

Source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20120626/10461/childbirth-mri-video-inside-delivering--magnetic-resonance-imaging.htm

Von Karman Vortices with a Pair of Rainbows

From New Scientist:

" The layer of stratocumulus clouds normally reflects a portion of solar energy into space and in this image the clouds are diffracting the sunlight back to the satellite splitting the light into its constituent colours.

...Von Karman vortices are linear series of alternating spiral eddies formed by a fluid moving round an obstacle, in this case it is the clouds moving around the island.  "

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/06/swirls-and-glories.html

"Nikola Tesla in Sound & Light"

via @orezavi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/orezavi/status/216138782179721216

Irrationality & Intelligence -- Two of a kind?

From Jonah Lehrer's blog, Frontal Cortex (The New Yorker): 

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

Although Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, his work was dismissed for years. Kahneman recounts how one eminent American philosopher, after hearing about his research, quickly turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz1yVfbNgld