The Fire Rainbow: An Astonishing and Rare Marvel of Nature
To name it properly, a fire rainbow is a circumhorizontal arc. It is also known as a circumhorizon arc but whichever you chose, scientists (and aficionados) call it a CHA. It is given its name because it looks as if a rainbow has spontaneously combusted as it made its way across the sky.
Contrast with the circumzenithal arc (upside-down rainbow)
More atomic force microscope writing. (Like spelling out ‘IBM’)
‘Atomic pen’ writes with individual atoms
An Osaka University research team has demonstrated an “atomic pen” that can inscribe nano-sized text on metal by manipulating individual atoms on the surface.
According to the researchers, whose results appear in the October 17 edition of Science magazine, the atomic pen is built on a previous discovery that silicon atoms at the tip of an atomic force microscope probe will interchange with the tin atoms in the surface of a semiconductor sample when in close proximity.
Mysterious ‘dead water’ effect caught on film
Research has already shown that dead water occurs when an area of water consists of two or more layers of water with different salinity, and hence density – for example, when fresh water from a melting glacier forms a relatively thin layer on top of denser seawater. Waves that form in the hidden layer can slow the boat with no visible trace.
Now French scientists recreating that scenario in a lab tank have revealed new detail of the phenomenon and even captured the effect on video. The work will help scientists to better understand dead water and the behaviour of stratified sea patches.
Saturn’s tiny, icy moon Enceladus has recently been visited by NASA’s Cassini orbiter on several very close approaches – once coming within a mere 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the surface. Scientists are learning a great deal about this curious little moon. Only about 500 kilometers wide (310 miles), it is very active, emitting internal heat, churning its surface, and – through cryovolcanism – ejecting masses of microscopic ice particles into Saturnian orbit. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for over 4 years now, and has provided some amazing views of tiny Enceladus, some collected here. Another close flyby is scheduled for Halloween, October 31st. (26 photos total)
Compromising your keyboard by sniffing the EM radiation signature.
We found 4 different ways (including the Kuhn attack) to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of our 4 attacks.
Neal Stephenson did this in Cryptonomicon. Of course, fictional events are trumped by actual results.
Erwin may or may not have killed a cat. (His wife’s cat) But he didn’t humiliate it.
What’s cuter than a platonic solid? A cat dressed up as a platonic solid for Halloween!
A Light Take On The Gravity-Time Relationship
Brian Greene explains the link between gravity and time.
Greene has written a short (less than 40 cardboard pages) new picture book called Icarus at the Edge of Time. It tells the story of a young boy who slips off in a space ship and cruises over to a black hole, only to discover that he’s made a terrible mistake: He forgot one of Einstein’s fundamental observations, which is that time is not the same for everybody everywhere.
[…]
Einstein’s theories posit that as one gets closer to a center of gravity, time will “slow down.” So if you spend the rest of your life closer to the Earth’s center of gravity on 34th Street while I spend the rest of my life at the top of the Empire State Building, time for you will tick a teeny, teeny bit more slowly than time for me.
Einstein meant this not poetically, but literally. If you and I each had a watch, ticking off hundred-billionths of seconds, the watch on your wrist down below on the street would tick fewer times than the watch I was wearing up in the sky. It wouldn’t be a big difference — a few billionths of a second over 20 years — but it would be a real difference. If we decided after several decades to meet and compare watches, we’d see that they would literally differ, that time for the two of us had indeed ticked differently.
via Physics Buzz
Credulous media will apparently never run out.
Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source
It’s difficult to pay attention to these claims, because scientific history is littered with ambitious, revolutionary theories that turned out to be groundless. But Blacklight is an interesting case. Its “hydrino” theory isn’t put forth by a single crackpot; instead, the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists who would presumably rebel if the idea was totally false.
No, not really. Creationism, for example, has a few credentialed scientists among its ranks. Pons and Fleischmann really thought they had fusion. Scientists in any field will cover a spectrum — there will always be some on the fringe. A lot of outlandish “theories” have the backing of somebody with a degree. That’s not the right metric for measurement.
As I noted in May, it would be odd, if Blacklight were a complete sham, for Mills to place himself in an end game in which he would be definitively proven wrong within just a year or two. So there does seem to be something deeper here.
As with the above, this isn’t the right way to look at it. There are numerous free-energy advocates out there, convinced they are right, with a working model just around the corner (or so they claim), or gee, it was working yesterday, right before I was going to show it off. Remember Steorn?
Proof here is a working model, producing energy. I’m not holding my breath.
In the 80s music videos link from the other day I noticed the unsurprising absence of BLOTTO, a favorite Albany (NY)-based band from my high school/ college days (along with Fear of Strangers, aka The Units). So I went and looked for them on YouTube.
I must protest what I found.
This has to be the worse attempt at striking gold in the 80’s punk rock scene.
Punk? Dude, Blotto was not punk. They were a campy spoof-music band. Worst music video ever? Please.
I Wanna Be A Lifeguard
And I was there when they filmed the live footage. (I’m pretty sure I know one of the people visible in the crowd shot at 2:37, though she has kids now and is taking the fifth.)
Metalhead is after the jump. Sarge would always bite the head off of something during the song.
Continue reading
What We Research at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Researchers at PI build on the two great revolutionary advances of 20th century physics – the relativity and quantum theories:
Einstein discovered that space and time are not separate entities, but are different aspects of a single geometrical entity called spacetime, which dynamically twists and warps as it dances with matter and energy. This dance, called gravity, governs the behaviour of the universe on large scales, from the solar system and galaxies to the entire cosmos as a whole.
The fathers of quantum theory, on the other hand, such as Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, discovered strange new laws that were eventually seen to govern the behaviour of all matter and forces on very small scales – the atomic and subatomic worlds, with the exception of gravity, whose quantum nature continues to elude physicists.Both are profoundly powerful theories which not only explain, with extraordinary accuracy, many previously puzzling aspects of the universe, but have also successfully predicted a wealth of completely unexpected new phenomena, from black holes and gravitational waves to lasers and quantum teleportation.
Links to Quantum Gravity, Superstring Theory, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information, Cosmology and Particle Physics.