DISCOVER hit the airwaves yesterday. First, Editor-in-Chief Corey Powell appeared on Fox News to talk NASA and Mars—specifically the agency’s idea for “Tumbleweeds,” or inexpensive round explorers that could bound around the surface of the Red Planet, tossed by the wind. Given the uncertain state of NASA funding, Powell says, the future of exploration could look a lot like these intrepid little bots:
Secondly, if you stayed up late enough to catch the end of “The Colbert Report,” you saw Sean Carroll—who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance—talking time, the multiverse, and his new book From Eternity to Here. Besides surviving the cauldron that is talking to Colbert while still hitting some key scientific points, Carroll also accidentally thinks up a great title for an album:
Check out Carroll’s cover story for the March issue of DISCOVER, “The Real Rules for Time Travelers.”
Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: Report from Colbert, Carroll’s account of visiting the show
Cosmic Variance: From Eternity to Here Book Club
If you came across the number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is a one followed by 27 zeroes, won’t you say that’s a hella lot of numbers?
UC Davis student Austin Sendek seems to think so. He has initiated a Facebook campaign to designate a scientifically accepted prefix for this number, 10^27. The prefix he chose is “hella” because it is “a hell of a lot” of numbers. It is also his way of mixing homegrown California slang with science. Sendek thinks the new prefix would be the best way to acknowledge the Golden State’s hella hot contributions to science.
If Sendek’s proposal is accepted, then hella would come right after “yotta.”
Physics World reports:
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While we know what it looks like when a star explodes into a luminous supernova, here’s a chance to discover what one sounds like–sorta. Scientists have translates a supernova’s electromagnetic waves into waves of sound; and when there is sound, there is music. Enter the Grateful Dead.
The band’s famed percussionist Mickey Hart is working on a musical project to “sonify” the universe–taking sounds collected by scientists from supernovae and other astronomical phenomena and using them in his new album “Rhythms of the Universe.” To anyone who has ever heard one of the Grateful Dead’s extended “drums and space” jams, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
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If you have been itching to clamber across glass windows or cling to a ceiling like Spiderman, that wacky dream may today be one step less wacky than it was yesterday. Researchers Paul Steen and Michael Vogel of Cornell University think they can help you tap into your inner Spidey through a palm-sized adhesive device that could one day allow people scale walls.
The scientists didn’t work with any real-life arachnids while designing their tech, instead drawing inspiration from a beetle species in Florida that can stick and unstick from leaves at will. The leaf beetles can withstand pulling forces of 60 times its own body weight by using the surface tension of many tiny drops of water, which form “liquid bridges” between the beetle’s body and the leaf.
The scientists’ contraption looks like a little plate and could be worn either on the palm or as a boot sole. While the device isn’t strong enough to be tested on people yet, it did keep this Lego man dangling from a slick glass shelf.
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Never let a group of scientists have too much time on their hands. While a fusion reactor was down for improvements, scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory unleashed their inner child and built a model train track inside the reactor. A toy train then chugged around the track for three days, according to The New York Times:
It was not an exercise in silliness, but in calibration.
The modified model of a diesel train engine was carrying a small chunk of californium-252, a radioactive element that spews neutrons as it falls apart.
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Gotta love mathematicians: Even when they attack a practical problem familiar to just about everybody, the results can be wonderfully impractical.
New Scientist today documents the exhaustive, decades-spanning search of two mathematicians trying to solve the pizza problem: How to cut a pizza so that everyone gets a fair slice. Seems pretty simple with the standard method, cutting through the center four times to create eight equitable slices. But if you miss the center, or want to create a different number of slices, it opens up a world of possibilities for mathematicians to try to work out.
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Since the crush of press stories about Tiger Woods is more or less inescapable, you’ve probably heard about his little auto accident (and many of the less savory details). But if you take a close look at this photo released by the police, you’ll notice something besides the mess of debris—the book that the world’s great golfer has been reading. It’s Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbin.
While the accident and the tawdry personal accusations that resulted therefrom could damage Woods’ reputation permanently, it provided nothing short of a bonanza for author Gribbin, since Americans want to do whatever celebrities are doing. From The Independent:
“This is one of my older and lesser known books – a guide to new physics for non-scientists. I can only guess that Tiger has been interested in the various stories about the Large Hadron Collider, and wanted to learn more. Several of my books have been doing better than usual this year,” Dr Gribbin said yesterday.
The book was 2,268th position on the Amazon sales list, up from 396,224th the previous day.
Though Tiger was tight-lipped about the circumstances of the wreck, Gribbin has to be on to something here. Woods was probably so distracted thinking about the awesomeness of physics that he couldn’t concentrate on driving.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Jeepers Creeps, I Can Have Ted Williams’ Peepers?
DISCOVER: Why Even Tiger Has Off Days
DISCOVER: 25 Greatest Science Books of All Time
Image: Florida Highway Patrol
In truly French fashion, the Large Hadron Collider has shut down by… a baguette. Zut alors!
According to Popular Science:
[A] bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
The overheating shouldn’t postpone the LHC’s reactivation at the end of the month, but all the delays and mishaps are adding to our paranoid, sci-fi suspicion: Is the LHC being sabotaged from the future? See this Cosmic Variance post for an authoritative take on such a possibility.
Related Content:
Discoblog: LHC Collisions to Commence Next Week…Hopefully
Discoblog: You Say Large Hadron Collider, I Say Sizeable Particle Crasher
Discoblog: While LHC Scientists Were Drinking Champagne, Hackers Were Attacking
Cosmic Variance: Spooky Signals from the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC!
Image: CERN
To honor the start of a new school year, we bring to you the following Fermi problem: How long would a physics lecture have to be to actually kill you?
Or more precisely, from Physics Buzz:
Assuming you’re not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?
The mathletes at the Buzz make a few assumptions about the classroom, but in a 16-foot by 16-foot classroom with a 10-foot ceiling, packed with 34 bleary-eyed students and one Red Bull fueled professor the answer is…2 hours and 51 minutes!
Of course you’ll probably be brain dead long before that point.
Check their math here and then tell us why they’re right or wrong, or if you’ve ever survied such a physics marathon.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Can Golfing Make You Deaf?
Discoblog: Boys: If You Want To Get Girls, Don’t Study Science
DISCOVER: Fairway Physics
Image: flickr / Rober S. Donovan
Scientist hoping to prove the existence of dark matter are bringing their search deeper underground, thanks to a lab that at certain points will reach nearly 8,000 feet below South Dakota’s Black Hills.
The laboratory is being constructed beneath an old goldmine, which itself was once the site of renowned physics research. The fact that it’s sheltered from cosmic rays makes it a great potential locale for the mysterious dark matter particles, which may make up a quarter of the universe’s mass and do not “feel” the electromagnetic forces that affect ordinary matter. According to the AP:
The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
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