The Enlightening Science Thread

Watch a bowling ball and feather fall at same speed in world’s largest vacuum

Now, for the BBC science program Human Universe, celebrity physicist Brian Cox takes on one of the most famous thought experiments of all: the bowling ball and the feather. According to theory, an object’s acceleration due to gravity at any one point without interference from air should be equal no matter what the object’s mass, density, or shape. We all obviously understand that a bowling ball will fall faster than a feather in the real world, but the physical principle asks us the imagine a world without air — and Brian Cox and the BBC happen to know where such a world can be found. Traveling all the way to America to use NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio, the Human Universe crew filmed a precise run of the bowling ball-feather experiment inside the largest vacuum chamber in the world.

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A Guy

Thanks for posting that Bill, It's not often one sees one of Einstein's thought experiment's proven so dramatically. I enjoyed Brian's commentary near the end describing how the ball and feather aren't actually falling, they are being released from a point in space, and the Earth and its surroundings are moving to meet them. The elevator, the rocket, and gravity: the equivalence principle ? Einstein Online

Gravity is a difficult principle to understand; It is not something that pulls on us to make us feel heavier, it is the forward motion of the Earth's mass in its orbital rotation that pushes us into Earth's mass that makes us feel heavier.

On a humanitarian note:

Project Subtitle:
MOM is an inexpensive, electronically controlled, inflatable incubator constructed to decrease the number of premature child deaths within refugee camps.

The Inspiration:
Every year an estimated 150000 child births occur within refugee camps. Of these child births, 27500 will die due to lack of sufficient incubation.

A recent BBC panorama program based upon Syrian refugees only increased my interest in this problem. They explained how the number premature births and subsequent deaths due to the stresses of war are ever increasing even calling this group 'the lost generation.'

With all the evidence, it presented an opportunity to redesign an incubator specifically for refugees that could also be used within a 3rd world setting.

......This is what I felt was most impressive.....(Anak)

'Does every child born not have the right to a chance of survival?'......

......Instead of the normal £30000 ($47,540 USD) for a standard incubator, my design can be manufactured, tested and delivered to the camp all for £250 ($396.10 USD).

Source: MOM | James Dyson Award

Scientists find young star with small planets orbiting

How did we come to encircle the sun? Why do we orbit as we do, and why are other planets circling the big orange globe with us? Those are questions we may understand to some degree, but a new finding may shed light on how it all really began. A young star has been discovered with some very small planets beginning to form around it, with their orbit already being decided. It may not be the birth of our universe, but it’s very similar.

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A Guy

Nano-scale sculptures re-create the human body in the eye of a needle

Nanoart may be tiny, but the field just keeps on getting bigger and better all the time. Sculptor Jonty Hurwitz has created a series of miniscule sculptures that are not only invisible to the naked eye -- they're also highly detailed, created from 3D scans of people.

The tiny objects range from less than half the width of the human hair, to around roughly the same width, and were created from scans of a human model and a 3D model of Antonio Canova's famous 1793 Cupid and Psyche sculpture.

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3ders.org - Jonty Hurwitz 3D printed nano sculptures at the same scale as a human sperm | 3D Printer News & 3D Printing News

A Guy

Good find A Guy.
I also found this.

Art in the Eye of a Needle - Video

Those who can't see the " Leonid Meteor Shower " you can watch it online in a few minutes here: http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/t...-november-2014

Our rain's over but have to wait 'till cloud deck opens up, running 50% sky cover till 3am then 25%.

Image and another slooh b-cast lead here: Watch Now: Leonid Meteor Shower to Flash Across the Night Sky Monday

1,300-year-old book of Egyptian magic deciphered

Researchers have decoded an ancient Egyptian book of spells they are calling an “Egyptian Handbook of Ritual Power.” It contains incantations for everything from attaining success in a business venture, to love spells, to curing disease. The 20 page illustrated codex is thought to date from the 7th or 8th century, some 1,300 years ago, which seems to have been a pivotal time for the history of mysticism in that area of the world.

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A Guy

We’ve just figured out how Earth’s force-field works

A planet-scale force field sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but scientists using NASA probes have discovered that Earth is in fact protected by just such a phenomenon, with speedy electrons from a vast and naturally-occurring twin torus of radiation kept away from us. The Van Allen belts were first measured in 1958, each a gathering of charged particles kept in place by the planet's own magnetic field, and varying in size and strength according to the output of the sun. However, it's only now that their interaction with Earth's plasmasphere and how it acts as a forcefield has been understood.

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A Guy

World's fastest 2D camera can capture 100 billion frames per second

A new camera developed by researchers at Washington University in St Louis may be just the thing to enable new discoveries about light. They're claiming it's the world's fastest 2D receive-only camera, able to capture images at a rate of up to 100 billion frames per second using a technique its creators call Compressed Ultrafast Photography.

Current receive-only cameras image at a speed of around 10 million frames per second, limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed.

"For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly," said study leader Lihong Wang, PhD, Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

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A Guy