The creation of life and primordial soup. Write something about this, like a Atheism - how I answer their questions - or something.

sharing an interesting link on twitter #icandothat? Its about pixels, and stuff.

Remember those rugged gadgets we smashed to bits in super slow-mo? Well that spectacular footage was shot at around 1,500 frames per-second. A new camera system being built for the European XFEL (X-ray Free-Electron Laser) facility will record stunning clips of viruses and cells at an almost unimaginable 4.5 million fps. The camera is, in part, powered by a high speed flash created by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, that blasts its microscopic subjects with ultra-bright X-rays. The flashes themselves last as little as two femtoseconds, or 2x10^-15 seconds for you math nerds out there. When the whole apparatus is fired up in 2015 it could provide amazingly detailed, 3D images of individual molecules and answer some questions about the behavior of viruses and cells.4.5 million fps microscope camera powered by ultra-fast X-ray flash originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Gizmag  |  STFC  | Email this | Comments

Science takes a long time, so just be patient.  If your problems haven’t been solved yet, it’s only because you didn’t wait long enough for science to do its thing.

  I'm not familiar with this particular chemistry item, but I do have strong and pleasant memories of the Watch Mr. Wizard television series in the 1950s, which helped establish and maintain my personal interest in the hard sciences.At some future time I'll post a biography of Don Herbert and a video of one of his television programs, but I just found this today and decided to post it for Steve up in Minnesota.

This video is absolutely stunning, not only because of the excellence of the Lego construct, but because of beauty of the presentation. Wanna learn more about the Antikythera Mechanism? You've come to the right place. MAKE Volume 17 discusses the ancient device in "The Kosmos in a Box" on page 30 while Volume 24 covers a previous Lego Antikythera on page 27.

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue!

Buy your copy in the Maker Shed, Subscribe to MAKE, or Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber).

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.


Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » |





Read more articles in Science |


Digg this!

From the Abstract City archive: One man's unhappy encounters with the laws of physics.

Comments

funny photo

thefrogman:


Bill Nye’s Sci-sense was tingling. 

(samuraifrog / agriking)

There is a famous (and mostly apocryphal) set of stories about universities – sometimes it’s Tufts, sometimes Irvine, sometimes somewhere in … Denmark – that allegedly left grassy areas without sidewalks. The idea, according to the stories, is that students and faculty would create trails by their “desire lines”, and then campus planners could then turn those “cow paths” into sidewalks. It turns out it mostly didn’t happen, but the idea is the thing: paths in grass tell stories.
I was thinking about those cow paths while watching Wimbledon this year. While Rafael Nadal was unsurprisingly triumphant, I kept being pulled back to the cow paths on Center Court. Here is a screen grab of that court during the Nadal/Berdych final.

Notice the wear areas. After two weeks of play, the Center Court grass is dead along both baselines, stretching horizontally from sideline to sideline at either end of the court. (It’s also dead under the ball-boys and line judges, but that’s not important for this argument.) It is clear that the area seeing the most wear – the most player traffic during points – was that baseline dead-zone.
Now have a look at a screen grab from the classic 1980 Wimbledon final between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg.

The wear patterns? They’re very different. There is wear along both baselines – left/right at the near and far ends – but the predominant wear is along what’s called the “t”-line which leads from mid-court to the center of the net. You can see how players have repeatedly rushed to the net, and then moved from side-to-side in an area just in front of the “t”.
Look once again at the picture of Center Court from this year’s final. See anything like what you saw during Borg/McEnroe? No, not at all. As most tennis fans know well, the game of tennis, even on grass, has been transformed by technology in recent years, with a “power baseline” game becoming dominant. Players like Rafael Nadal wallop the ball from the baseline, hitting unreturnable shots (“winners”) from parts of the court where players like Connors, Ashe, Borg and McEnroe would never have imagined it possible.
Turning back to court usage patterns, what this makes clear is the unidimensionality of court use. The dead areas in 1980 weren’t as dead as those in 2010 – it’s the difference between mostly dead and all dead, to borrow a phrase from Miracle Max.  Players baseline usage is so overwhelming that the courts became dried and crusty, according to player complaints. No area of the courts was as dead in 1980 as was the baseline in 2010. Modern technology has created a tennis monoculture, one that is best seen in paths of dead grass.