Orbital mechanics, also called flight mechanics, is the study of the motions of artificial satellites and space vehicles moving under the influence of forces such as gravity, atmospheric drag, thrust, etc. Orbital mechanics is a modern offshoot of celestial mechanics which is the study of the motions of natural celestial bodies such as the moon and planets. The root of orbital mechanics can be traced back to the 17th century when mathematician Isaac Newton (1642-1727) put forward his laws of motion and formulated his law of universal gravitation. The engineering applications of orbital mechanics include ascent trajectories, reentry and landing, rendezvous computations, and lunar and interplanetary trajectories.

Gigapan: Ant - Eutetramorium mocquerysi

This Gigapan is part of the NanoGigaPan project. Which is working to take high resolution images of very small things.

More at the Nano Gigapan blog

Also ant-related Mr. Ellis, Ant mega-colony takes over world

[I]t now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords, and want to disavow any connection with the Nano Gigapan pictures. I’m just the messenger.

The movie was filmed in Tunisia because it was a lot cheaper to shoot there than Egypt, and since the script never called for shots of the Sphinx or the pyramids, so they were able to get away with it. In fact, one of the scenes was shot in the exact same canyon where R2-D2 was stolen by Jawas in Star Wars.

This prototype time-piece from UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau traps insects on flypaper stretched across its roller system before depositing them into a vat of bacteria. The ensuing chemical reaction, or “digestion,” is transformed into power that keeps the rollers rollin’ and the LCD clock ablaze.

So when the machines become sentient, they will already be carnivorous. All we can do now to compound the problem is to make sure they have a taste for human flesh.

Besides being host to stunning lightning displays, thunderclouds also emit gamma rays, although researchers aren’t completely sure why. Last fall, detectors installed on a mountaintop in Japan captured the first simultaneous observations of this radiation along with the high-speed electrons thought to be their source. The results, detailed in the 26 June Physical Review Letters, support the prevailing model of thundercloud accelerators generating “runaway” electrons, which may sometimes initiate lightning.

My instinct to grab a pointy object to burst the bubble was misplaced, of course. The soap film isn’t a rigid object, so it was content to accommodate the intrusions, for a while.

There, I fixed it

Someone needs to start an experimentalist version of this (if it does not already exist) — lab kludges

The ability to gain speed quickly is crucial for survival, but there’s a limit as to how rapidly an animal can accelerate. Researchers wondered whether the “wheelie” problem experienced by cars during a drag race could be a factor in four-legged animals’ ability to speed up. They came up with a simple mathematical model… to see how fast a quadruped could accelerate without tipping over backward. The model predicts that the longer the back is in relation to the legs, the less likely a dog is to flip over and the faster it can accelerate. Then the researchers tested the model by going down to the local track, London’s Walthamstow Stadium, and video-recording individual greyhounds as they burst out of the gate in time trials. The acceleration approached–but never exceeded–the limit predicted by the model