Movie Trivia: Raiders of the Lost Ark
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.
Carnivorous Clock eats bugs, begins doomsday countdown
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.
Tim Allen has apparently rewired somebody’s toaster
… but we just can’t kill the beast. Until the fourth try. Fortunately the failed attempts are kinda neat, too.
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.
Those which involve duct tape, and those which do not.
Someone needs to start an experimentalist version of this (if it does not already exist) — lab kludges
Why a Greyhound or a Racehorse Doesn’t “Pop a Wheelie”
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
Over at incoherently scattered ponderings, there’s a post on safety at academic labs, which links to an article at Slate about an explosion at a lab which killed a worker, and discusses the difference in safety standards for students vs workers, and academia vs industry.
Why the difference between industry and academe? For one thing, the occupational safety and health laws that protect workers in hazardous jobs apply only to employees, not to undergraduates, graduate students, or research fellows who receive stipends from outside funders. (As a technician, Sheri Sangji was getting wages and a W-2. If she’d been paying tuition instead, Cal/OSHA could not even have investigated her death.)
I had not realized that students aren’t covered, but the disparity between the described situations is not surprising. I’ve spent time in academia (grad school) and worked in national labs (the NanoFabrication facility at Cornell, TRIUMF in Canada), and my current government job is a confluence of being industry/government and a quasi-national-lab (though not formally recognized as such). And I have to concur: lab safety in a university setting is not formally the priority is is in those other places. Academic safety leans far too much on the involvement of the PI, and leaves way too much to chance. A key difference of academia is that students are … students — they are still learning, and one cannot assume that they have the requisite experience to know much about the finer points of safety.
It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado
I had no idea water rights apply/applied to rainfall.
Dot Physics: The physics of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk
Neither a spherical Michael Jackson nor a point Michael Jackson is assumed.