A few years back, when I was working on using NASA satellite data to create educational materials for kids, we had this idea of using the steady beats from pulsars in a song. Pulsars are the rapidly-spinning über-dense fantastically-magnetic collapsed cores of exploded stars. As they spin, they emit beams of matter and energy that sweep out into space much like a lighthouse beam, and we see a blip of light when that beam passes over us.

Some pulsars spin hundreds of times per second, some take several seconds to spin once. If you take that pulse of light and translate it into sound, you get a very steady thumping beat with very precise timing. So making it into a song is a natural thought.

But we certainly didn’t take it as far as the German band Reimhaus did, making a music video out of it! They used several pulsars for their song "Echoes, Silence, Pulses & Waves". So here’s the cosmic beat:

Pretty clever. Lots of other people have turned cosmic phenomena into sounds and music, including the Perseid meteor shower, the Phoenix Mars Lander descent, the Earth’s aurorae, and even the aurorae from Saturn!

Image credit: NASA. Tip o’ the magnetar to Elkin Fricke for sending me the link to the video.

[NOTE: A lot of folks are posting geek holiday gift ideas, which is great! I have a few things I want to mention, so I'll be posting a few of mine as well this week. I have a bunch I'll put in one post later, but what follows here needed some pictures, so it goes in a post by itself. Enjoy!]

The other day I got an email from my friend, the appropriately-named Bob Goodman. He told me that another friend of his, Sarah Stocker, had co-founded this company called My Robot Nation — where you can design your own little toy robot model, and then the company will create it using a 3D printer! Would I be interested in checking it out?

Duh. Emails and introductions were exchanged, and Sarah — full disclosure here — sent me a coupon code so I could make my own little toy minion. I called down my 15-year-old proto-geek daughter, and the two of us sat in front of my computer, logged in to My Robot Nation, and started playing with the robot design web interface.

It was fun! It was also pretty easy to get the hang of it. You can choose among many different styles of heads, bodies, and lower portions (legs, treads, and so on) as well as decorations (flames!), eyes, other accouterments (a jetpack!), and then finally colors. It took us about a half hour all told — punctuated with us saying things like "Cool!" and "Oh, that’s awesome" — and when we were satisfied, we submitted it.

A few days later, in the mail arrived… Chip!

Isn’t he adorable? (more…)

I have a billion things to do this weekend, but since today is conspiring to just be silly, I’ll just leave this here for you. Click it, and don’t forget to hover over the red button at the bottom.

P.S. That’s not my real tattoo, though Zach got the location correct.

You see, this is why I didn’t do very well in my graduate quantum mechanics class.

I couldn’t think outside the box.

Alternate captions:

"My quantum trap finally succeeded for capturing a mewon."

When the Sun belches out an eructation of subatomic particles, they can travel across the solar system and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. This can make our field ring like a bell, shaking the particles trapped within, and generating electromagnetic noise and signals across the radio spectrum. The CARISMA radio array can detect these emissions and learn about how the Sun’s and Earth’s fields interact.

That’s the science. But there’s art here, too: the Lighthouse agency commissioned artists to create digital artwork based on science, and one group, Semiconductor, used the CARISMA data to do so. Based on the data, they translated the radio waves (which are like the light we see, but less energetic) and converted them to sound. This has been done many times before, but what’s cool is that they then created an animation based on the converted sounds, an astonishing and odd and mesmerizing animation. Watch:

How wild is that? It reminds me of the movie "Forbidden Planet". The vibrating patterns are wonderful, and while I’m not sure how much scientific insight can be gained from them, the aesthetics are riveting. And I can hope the underlying purpose of this will be seen: to show that science is beauty, science is art, and that if this gets someone who might not otherwise be interested to poke a little further into it, then mission accomplished.

I am very pleased to announce the grand opening of Science Getaways, where you can take a vacation with your brain!

Science Getaways is a new travel company, started by my wife Marcella and me, for science enthusiasts who want to do more than just take a vacation: they want to feed their brain, too. Over the years I’ve been to a lot of cool places, but I’ve always found my experience is enhanced a lot by learning about the science of the region: the geology, the biology, the connection to other sciences. Heck, when we visited the Galapagos Islands a few years back the whole thing was nothing but science — and it was the vacation of a lifetime (as you can read here, and here, and here). Trips like this are becoming popular enough to get written up by the New York Times.

So we decided we wanted to do this too. Voila! Science Getaways, where we do all the work for you: find cool places to take a vacation, then bring along fun, outgoing scientists eager to show you the natural wonders of the region^*.

Our first getaway is Science Ranch 2012, September 16 – 20, 2012, at the C Lazy U Ranch in Granby, Colorado. This is an authentic western ranch where you can ride horseback, fish, hike, mountain bike, and eat gourmet food (trust me on this; we sampled the food there and it was fantastic). We visited a lot of Colorado ranches, but C Lazy U was clearly the place that fits our needs best.

And we made it better: we added SCIENCE to it! We’ve invited Holly Brunkal, a geologist, and Dave Armstrong, a biologist and ecologist, to come along (we have their bios online). Both scientists are experts in the Colorado version of their fields, and have experience with tours. They’ll be taking us on hikes in the valley where the ranch is located, so you can peruse the local rocks and biota, and they’ll give talks beforehand to familiarize you with everything.

I’ll be the third scientist; I’ll give a couple of short talks and run a stargazing session every evening it’s clear — the skies in that part of Colorado are dark dark dark. When we stayed overnight at a ranch a couple of months ago, we went outside at around 10:00 p.m. and Marcella was stunned at how many stars she could see. It was magnificent.

If you read my blog — and I see you there, admit it! — then I suspect you love science and nature as much as I do. Science Getaways is a new way for me to bring the fun and wonder of the Universe to folks, and have a really great time while doing it. I hope to see you in September at C Lazy U!

^* Just to be clear, this is something I’ll be doing as well as writing this blog and everything else. I’m having way too much fun writing to stop now!

In retrospect, the story similarities seem obvious.

Via Neatorama on G+