This cool video has been open in a browser tab for long enough that I can’t trace where the link came from. But it’s a really cool example not just of the mechanics of a steam engine, but also of glass blowing.

I knew a girl who was a glass blower once. It always sounded like a cool, unique hobby to have — like falconry.

Amy found this video this morning. It sort of reminded me of that scene in Jurassic Park (“They’re moving like birds. They DO move like birds!”) but because it’s real, it’s a little bit more magical. Although composted of individuals, the flock seems to move as a single living organism.

A two-and-a-half-year-old article in the Telegraph explains the reasons behind the flock’s swooping patterns:

It’s all about safety in numbers – none wants to be on the outside, none wants to be first to land …. Impenetrable as the flock’s movements might seem to the human eye, the underlying maths is comparatively straightforward. Each bird strives to fly as close to its neighbours as possible, instantly copying any changes in speed or direction. As a result, tiny deviations by one bird are magnified and distorted by those surrounding it, creating rippling, swirling patterns. In other words, this is a classic case of mathematical chaos

Because it freaking floats!

It’s surprisingly power-efficient, using just 3W to float and 15W when the LED array is fully lit, at least according to the specs at the store. Oh, and technically, I guess the lamp is only €980, but when you consider taxes, shipping and a North American adapter for the plug, you’re well up into four digits, even in terms of Euros.

[Edit 1: Boo-runs, the video can't be embedded -- check it out here, or at Wired, below.]

[[Edit 2: And now it can. Huzzah!]]

Oh my this is hilarious. And I’ll bet if you were a maker, you could make your own for a few hundred bucks. Anyone want to make me one?

More info at Wired: Interactive Periodic Table of Swearing Extends Your Rude Vocabulary | Underwire | Wired.com.

I do dig physics and like to read about how our understanding (“our” = humankind’s, not necessarily yours or mine) of the universe is ever-growing. There are constantly news stories about discoveries and theories and whatnot, but most of them, I am sorry to say, are over my head. Or, alternatively, they incorporate too much math for me to enjoy. I know math, I understand math, but I don’t necessarily want to read it for leisure.

But I digress.

Much like the incredible epicness of the LHC (which I’ve posted about before here and here) — a massive technological marvel in both scope and size — that will allow us to better understand the smallest pieces of our universe, another recent experiment has recently turned out some results but on a much grander scale.

Way back in 1963, an experiment was begun in order to determine Einstein knew what the hell he was talking about when he said that, according to general relativity, the mass of the Earth should distort the space-time fabric around it.  As science-fictiony as that sounds, almost 50 years ago NASA began funding a project called Gravity Probe B (GP-B).

Yesterday, some results were announced:

“The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts,” says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

Two questions immediately pop to mind:

1. How do they know?
2. So what?

To answer the second questions first:

The results of Gravity Probe B give physicists renewed confidence that the strange predictions of Einstein’s theory are indeed correct, and that these predictions may be applied elsewhere. The type of spacetime vortex that exists around Earth is duplicated and magnified elsewhere in the cosmos–around massive neutron stars, black holes, and active galactic nuclei.

The first question is more complex.  First of all, it involves an experiment that took “planning, promoting, building, operating, and analyzing data [...] for more than 47 years.”  It took the development of 13 new technologies.  It required the creation of a gyroscope consisting of four of the most perfect spheres created by humans.

These ping pong-sized balls of fused quartz and silicon are 1.5 inches across and never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. If the gyroscopes weren’t so spherical, their spin axes would wobble even without the effects of relativity.

In the end, it was shown that the Earth does affect space-time and that there does, indeed, seem to be Einstein’s hypothetical “space-time” construct.

Although I am absolutely not disputing the importance of this project, with the amount of time, energy, ingenuity and, although the article doesn’t mention it, presumably money spent, why can the scientific community not find a viable alternative to fossil fuels, a cure for cancer, or an end to reality TV?

An “orrery” is, according to Wikipedia, “a mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system in a heliocentric model. They are typically driven by a clockwork mechanism with a globe representing the Sun at the centre, and with a planet at the end of each of the arms.”

This one, of course, is Flash-based, not mechanical. And, like many orreries, it suffers from the fact that it is not to scale — either size or precise time. But it’s still cool. And it does have the benefit of being able to switch between Copernican and Tychonian models of the solar system!

Click here to see it in the full size of your browser.

(Source, via MeFi)

If any good can come out of the devastation in Japan, perhaps it will come from public education about nuclear power — education to show both its positive and negative sides, and to demystify it. One of the messages that scientists and commenters are hammering home is that radiation is natural. Even though too much too fast will kill you, that’s the same for radiation as it is for, say, water.

But you can definitely hear people arguing that “natural” radiation doesn’t kill — only this special, enhanced, totally-monkeyed-with “modern” radiation that we’ve been unnaturally producing in our nuclear plants.

Well, to that, I present a concise paragraph posted by MetaFilter’s bq:

The first nuclear reactor was in Africa, 2 billion years ago. Two billion years ago, there was enough uranium 235 in a naturally occurring deposit in Africa to fuel a nuclear fission reaction. In 16 separate locations, spontaneously occurring fission reactions went on for some hundreds of thousands of years, cycling multiple times per day. A picture of Fossil Reactor 15. The American Nuclear Society info site.

That’s right — a natural nuclear reactor.

Or evidence of a long-gone pre-human technological civilization.

(Photo, the Oklo reactor,  from NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, Credit & Copyright: Robert D. Loss, WAISRC)

(Click for full-size)

This chart, created by xkcd’s Randall Munroe (with help, sources here), does an excellent job of putting radiation dosage into context — especially with all the fear and uncertainty surrounding the current problems in Japan. The danger is Japan is real — it could get a lot worse, very quickly — but for the moment, the radiation from spending a day near the Fukushima reactor is somewhere around the amount you’d get from a mammogram.

Wow, this video really shows how many satellites orbit around the earth to provide us with telephone, television, GPS and other services. Of course, the satellite icons are probably 1000x larger than the satellites really are — but it’s still pretty crowded up there.

(via @dirtywett)

At least, this is what you missed if you live in a city, or spent the night indoors.

From the video description:

Time-lapse of a whole night at the ALMA Array Operations Site (AOS), located at 5000 meters altitude on the Chajnantor plateau, in the II Region of Chile. As the Moon sets at the beginning of the night, three of the first ALMA antennas start tests as part of the ongoing Commissioning and Science Verification process. Because they are pointing at the same target in the sky at any moment, their movements are perfectly synchronized.

As the sky appears to rotate clockwise around the south celestial pole (roughly on the upper left edge of the video), the Milky Way goes down slowly, until it is lying almost horizontal before sunrise. The center of our galaxy becomes visible during the second half of the night as a yellowish bulge crossed by dark lanes in the center of the image, just above the antennas.

The flashes on the ground are the car lights of the guards patrolling at the AOS. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is the largest astronomical project in existence and is a truly global partnership between the scientific communities of East Asia, Europe and North America with Chile. ESO is the European partner in ALMA.

Watch another video taken at the same time and location from a different viewpoint: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GZkHUWBOuY

credit: ESO / José Francisco Salgado – http://josefrancisco.org

source: http://www.eso.org/public/videos/alma4anttimelapse1/

Sometimes I worry that, because more and more people live away from the awe-inspiring natural world — like the night sky, but also any wilderness — we’re losing our sense of wonder. Could this be one of the reasons that “smart kids” now get into business, rather than science?

Hmmm, I’ve seen a lot of videos of people throwing hot water in the air on a very cold day (cue the instant vapour cloud) but I’d never seen this before. I think I’ll have to try it! But I’ll pick it up with gloves, so that my fingers don’t melt right through.

(via tdw)

That grainy yellow mass at the bottom shows a swath of the night sky, scanned at near-unfathomable resolution. Each pixel, according to this Guardian story, is about one-three-trillionth of the sky.

As you zoom in to the faint red square of at the top of the left-hand yellow mass, you’ll see a galaxy. Zoom in on that, and you can see the galaxy clearer. Zoom in on that, and you’ll see a mass of stars and other phenomena.

Then, using your imagination, repeat for the rest of the sky.

Astonishing.

It’s the product of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And thinking about that for a little while should help put all your life’s problems into some sort of perspective. At least it does for me.

The short answer is, “nobody knows,” at least according to this NPR video it is. But, as Boing Boing points out, what a wonderful piece of animation to explore this history of straight-line-walking experimentation.

A few years ago, as part of a fitness test, I was blindfolded and put into a racquetball court, where I was told to march in place, bringing my knees up as high as I could, for 10 or 15 minutes, while trying not to move forward, back, sideways or to rotate at all.

I felt a little shaky, but overall confident in my ability to stay immobile despite the marching in place. But when my blindfold was removed, I wasn’t anywhere near where I had started from, and I was facing in a completely different direction.

Not only was the disorientation pretty cool, but it was an interesting lesson in listening to my body.

There is more about it in the NPR story.

I like a cool slo-mo video as much as the next pseudo science geek — but this one was, dare I say it, almost too slow?

I guess it was cool to see the matchhead bubbling as the chemical reaction proceeds across it, with gouts of fire leaping up sinuously, but the problem with slowing things down this much is that the video lasts for too long.

Maybe I’m jaded by the internet, with an attention span forever wrecked, but two-and-a-half minutes of this was kind of excruciating.

(via Gizmodo)

Discovered in an ancient shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient clockwork computer from about 100 BCE.  It was of a complexity that was not seen again for almost 2000 years.  For whatever reason, the skill used to make the device was lost.  In fact, it wasn’t until a high-resolution X-ray study was done in 2006 that the real purpose of the device became clear:  it was a calculator used, among other things, to predict the movements of heavenly bodies and the timing of eclipses.

The level of knowledge about the movement of celestial bodies required for such a mechanism is boggling, but the degree of engineering needed to make the device is doubly so.  How this knowledge was gained and lost is the fodder for a great debate, and the main source of my interest in the topic.

Recently, an engineer recreated the Antikythera mechanism.  Out of Lego! 

Seeing exactly how the thing works makes me marvel at those ancient nerds all that much more.

(via PCWorld)