Scientists Create Pocket-Sized Black Hole
Researchers Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China created a device that partially simulates the effects (to a limited scale) of a black hole. It bends light differently from a the way that a black hole does, but it will readily absorb it:
The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses.[...]
The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic ‘resonators’ arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole’s ‘core’ until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. “The light into the core is totally absorbed,” Cui says.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA
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Saturn's Hexagon
There’s a strange hexagon shape at the north pole of the planet Saturn. It was spotted 20 years ago, and Cassini confirms it’s still there. Is it some alien fortress/outpost? Or something surprisingly cooler?
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Time To Hit the Panic Button: Universe Ending Faster Than Expected
The entropy of the universe may be 100 times worse than expected. Ron Cowen writes in Science News that recent research suggests that the universe will degrade faster physicists had previously thought:
An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates, the researchers reported online September 23 at arXiv.org.[...]
In the case of the universe, Egan says, “we’d like to know [when and] if the entropy will eventually reach a maximum value, marking the end of all dissipative processes, including life.” Physicists have dubbed that maximum entropy “heat death.”
I know nothing about physics, therefore I propose that people take alarmist, unjustified responses to this disastrous news.
Link via Gizmodo | Image: NASA
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Vortex Smoke Ring Collision
What happens when two smoke rings of equal size and different colors meet head on? It’s almost like art! Link -via Metafilter
You’ll find a discussion in this forum.
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Fun With Low Temperatures
Absolute Zero is Cool T-Shirt – just $9.95 over at Neatorama’s Online Store
There’s not many absolutes in science, so absolute zero – the coldest temperature theoretically possible where entropy is reduced to zero – truly stands out. Indeed, things get really, really weird quantum mechanically as we approach absolute zero. Let’s take a look at what fun we can have going down the thermometer all the way to 0 Kelvin.
Antarctica
Let’s begin with the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica. The temperatures there reach a minimum of about -80 °C (-112 °F) in the winter, with the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.2 °C (-128.6 °F).
In 2006, Anthony and Christine Powell of Frostbytes blog (fantastic photos there, by the way) recorded this video clip of what people in Antarctica consider a terrible weather (euphemistically called "Condition 1") at the McMurdo Station. So, next time you’re having some terrible winter weather where ever you are, just remember this video clip.
Liquid Oxygen
Purdue’s Senior System Engineer George Goble hated waiting for his BBQ to light. So, in 1995, he decided to find the fastest way to achieve barbecue ignition. He tried propane, acetylene torches, and even oxygen-fuel gas or racing fuel (the last one took 30 seconds). But that wasn’t fast enough – he wanted to set the world record of fastest ignition. (Source)
So Goble decided to get serious and reached for liquid oxygen (LOX, boiling point: 90.2 K or -183 °C). He doused 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) onto 60 pounds of charcoal and a smoldering cigarette*. Within 3 seconds about 40 pounds of the charcoal burned and the grill was vaporized.
For his creativity, George won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also attracted the attention of the West Lafayette, Indiana fire department who warned him never to repeat the stunt ever again.
*Actually it’s good that he had a lit cigarette in the pile. Pouring LOX onto unlit charcoal will cause it to explode at about the force of one stick of dynamite per charcoal. If you spill LOX on asphalt, it can detonate. Oh, did we mention that LOX is a rocket fuel? (The orange external tank of the Space Shuttle is filled with it.) Needless to say, don’t try this at home.
Liquid Nitrogen
Nitrogen becomes liquid at 77 K (-196 °C), which is pretty darn cold. Liquid Nitrogen or LN2 is actually a very useful substance: it’s used in the laboratory to freeze things, in hospitals as a medical treatment to freeze and remove warts and skin lesions, and even in restaurants to make alcoholic ice cream.
Wait – make alcoholic ice cream? Yes, it turns out though you can’t freeze alcohol in the freezer (not cold enough), you can do so with liquid nitrogen. Here’s Ferran Adria, Head Chef of elBulli Restaurant using liquid nitrogen to make alcohol sorbets and frozen pistachio puree truffles. Yum!
Liquid Hydrogen
Going down the temperature scale, we have liquid hydrogen at 20.28 K (-252.87°C). Liquid Hydrogen is good for one thing: fuel. It is a component of rocket fuel, and a perennial contender of zero-emission fuel (I’m looking at you, BMW H2R!)
Liquid hydrogen is used in one of the coolest (literally!) rocket engines ever created by NASA. Here’s the Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine ("CECE" for short), which generates a scalding 5,000 degree steam and a whopping 13,000 lb of thrust yet form icicles at the rim of its nozzle at the same time. It’s quite the fire and ice engine:
CECE is fueled by a mixture of -297 F liquid oxygen and -423 F liquid hydrogen. The engine components are super-cooled to similar low temperatures–and that’s where the icicles come from. As CECE burns its frigid fuels, hot steam and other gases are propelled out the nozzle. The steam is cooled by the cold nozzle, condensing and eventually freezing to form icicles around the rim. (Source)
Liquid Helium
Things get really, really strange with liquid helium. First of all, it’s the only element that remains liquid down to absolute zero (though you can solidify it with great pressure). It has two form of liquid phases – at 4.2K (-268.95 °C), helium-4 (an isotope of helium) becomes liquid. At 2.17 K, it turns into a superfluid.
And the fun begins: superfluid is weird – it has zero viscosity (a measure of friction for fluids), zero entropy, and infinite thermal conductivity. If a superfluid is placed in an open container, it will creep up the sides and flow over the top. If you rotate the container from stationary, the superfluid inside will never move.
And weirder still: if you place a capillary tube in a pool of superfluid, then shine light on it, you’ll get a frictionless fountain that will flow forever (no friction*, remember?)
*Actually, in bulk fluid, superfluid does have some viscosity whereas in capillary it has no viscosity. Scientists think the explanation of this paradox is that superfluid is composed of two components – the normal component, and the superfluid component. I told you it’s strange.
The Coldest Objects in Space
Quick: what’s the coldest object in space? A frozen comet or a chilly gas cloud? Nope, the coldest object in space is actually a manmade object – the Planck Telescope – launched by the European Space Agency.
As part of experiments to measure the cosmic microwave background (the afterglow of the Big Bang to you and me), the Planck Telescope is cooling its instruments to -273.05 °C or 0.1 °C above absolute zero.
But what about the coldest natural object in space? That title belongs to the Boomerang Nebula (aka the Bow Tie Nebula). The protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth has been spewing ultracold gas for 1,500 years. This cooled down the nebula to a mere 1 K above absolute zero (Source).
Boomerang Nebula, credit: European Space Agency/NASA
The Coldest Substance on Earth
In 2003, Nobel Laureate Wolfang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the coolest man-made substance on Earth: they cooled a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms down to 450 picoKelvin (0.00000000045 K).
In 2009, Tauno Knuuttila and colleagues at the Helsinki University of Technology’s Low Temperature Lab used magnetic refrigeration (yes, using magnets to cool things down – ain’t physics interesting?) to cool rhodium to 100 pK (technically, it’s the temperature for nuclear spin, not its overall thermal energy).
Now that’s cold!
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Sixty Symbols
Are you familiar with these sixty symbols from physics and astronomy? The University of Nottingham is following up on the success of their Periodic Table of Videos (previously at Neatorama) by posting this guide with a video explaining each symbol. You can access the videos by clicking a symbol at the site. The question marks indicate symbols and videos that aren’t yet ready to launch. Link -via Metafilter
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VideoSift Clips of the Week
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When Squirrel Attacks |
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Auto-Tune the News Here's a clip from Sarah Fullen Gregory (excellent singer, actually) and The Gregory Brothers making the nightly news much, much more interesting. Link | If you like that, here's the second one in the Auto-Tune series | The Gay Marriage Debate, Auto-Tuned | more from YouTube schmoyoho |
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Smoochie Girl Behold the smoochie girl - and yes, she made the exact same smoochie face in every photo: Link |
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The Weirdest Japanese Commercial Ever Not going to describe it: you have to see it for yourself. |
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Magnet Falling Down a Copper Tube |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
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The Rattleback (Wobblestone) Phenomenon
[YouTube - Link]
A rattleback or wobblestone is an object with a smooth bottom that can be spun like a top. Unlike conventional tops, however, the rattleback has an asymmetry which gives it a preferred direction of spin. If spun in the opposite direction, it will begin to wobble, and then change the direction of its spin.
It would seem that if a spinning object changes the direction of its spin, it is defying the law of conservation of angular momentum, but apparently it is the rocking/wobbling motion that is converted into counter-rotational motion, not the initial rotation.
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The Biology, Chemistry and Physics of Coffee
After many years in grad school, Pauline Fujita of Litmus has had at least as much coffee as science, yet like most of us, she knew very little of the brewed beverage. So, Pauline decided to delve a little into the science of coffee.
Take, for instance, the science behind the aroma of coffee:
Most of the aroma we associate with coffee is created during the roasting process. Longer roasting times mean coffee that is more bitter and less acidic and darker in color (Fortin 1999). Green, or un-roasted coffee contains about 300 volatile organic compounds (Bonnländer et al. 2005 pp. 198) whereas over 1000 such compounds have been found in roasted coffee. The green bell pepper-like “aroma” of green coffee can be attributed primarily to the compound isobutylmethoxypyrazine. In contrast, the aroma of roasted coffee is thought to result from a combination of about 25 volatile organic compounds, the “aroma compounds”, found at a total concentration of only 1g/kg of coffee and ranging in individual concentration from the lower part per million range down to as little as parts per trillion.
So where do all these extra compounds come from? During the roasting process many different chemical reactions occur, the most important of which can be classified as one of two types of reactions. The first, Maillard or “browning” reactions, produce aroma compounds as well as colored compounds (melanoidins), and the second, caramelization reactions, involve the chemical reduction of sugar compounds, the same tasty process that, you guessed it, makes caramel.
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The Rubens' Tube: Physics + Fire = Awesome!
[YouTube - Link]
Physics can be fun if you don’t have to take a test. The scientific principles behind the Rubens’ Tube (showing standing waves) involved in this demonstration are explained at Wikipedia, but are more dramatically illustrated in the video.
– via dilidoo
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