The smooth and youthful skin of a baby neutron star
In this week’s Nature, researchers present the first ever observational evidence of the atmosphere of a very young neutron star, which implies that, even for neutron stars, youth is smooth skinned and old age is crusty.
I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included. So I had to buy them again.
Steven Wright
Cocktail Party Physics: batteries not included
Some historians believe primitive batteries were used in Iraq and Egypt as early as 200 B.C. for electroplating and precious metal gilding. Around the 1790s, through numerous observations and experiments, Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of anatomy, caused muscular contraction in a frog by touching its nerves with electrostatically charged metal. Later, he was able to cause muscular contraction by touching the nerve with different metals without a source of electrostatic charge. He concluded that animal tissue contained an innate vital force, which he termed “animal electricity.”
Spain reaches new wind record: 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand
That’s a peak value.
On average throughout the year, wind energy meets 12% of Spain’s electricity demand. The largest producer of wind power in Spain is Iberdrola, with 27 percent of capacity, followed by Acciona on 16 percent and Endesa with 10 percent. Spain’s wind farms are on track to meet a government target of 20,000 MW in capacity by 2010.
Spain’s so lucky, having those large wind deposits. If only we had wind here in the US (that’s not counting the coastal wind, dangerous to harvest off of Nantucket, because of the danger it might spill)
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Baguette breaks collider
The Nature blog asks the hard-hitting (presumably from high-energy particle interactions) questions about the latest CERN incident.
Has anyone considered the possibility that the baguette came from the future to sabotage the LHC? Is there any indication that this is a futuristic baguette?
The possibility has been examined by theoretical physicists – considered unlikely as they feel baguettes will not play a part in future cultures.
Letters of Note: Prepare For Contact
1924 telegram from then Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Edward W. Eberle, instructing all Naval stations to monitor the airwaves for any unusual transmissions due to anticipated contact from Martians. August 22nd of that year was witness to the closest Mars opposition since 1804
Rhett’s got a post up on parallax, and how you can use this effect to measure distance: Parallax, what is it good for? He’s got some pictures showing the effect of viewing from different vantage points.
The other thing you can do with such photos is to make stereograms, and I’ve taken the liberty of doing so with Rhett’s image, though I didn’t try and take out the dotted lines.
Cross your eyes and you can make the image take on depth. In case you want more, here’s the optics layout stereogram I posted a while back.
“What do we really describe in physics?” he [Zeilinger] asked. “Do we describe reality? Is it out there?”
Classical physicists would have said yes, resoundingly. Studying physics reveals nature’s workings, providing an explicit map of reality’s subtleties. Those subtleties would be there whether we figured out how to question and extract them.
But in the early part of this century, quantum mechanics put that happy belief on the chopping block. Quantum mechanics, for all its ability to describe the atomic and subatomic world, blurs the distinction between the observer and the observed. As a result, it calls into question the essence of scientific curiosity and inquiry.
Built on Facts: Book-throwing and physics.
More like book-spinning. Why a book will or won’t wobble like crazy when you toss it.