Acoustic Levitation

At the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have been experimenting with sound waves and pharmaceutical solutions, levitating soluble drops between two speakers facing each other. While their research has produced some visually fascinating results, it has also led to the discovery of a far more effective method for creating amorphous drugs, which happen to be the more desirable of two forms that pharmaceutical drugs can take.Watch Video Here. 

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Source: mymodernmet.com

“Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought. Insight is the total absence of the whole movement of thought as time and remembrance. So there is direct perception. It is as though I have been going North for the last ten thousand years, and my brain is accustomed to going North, and somebody comes along and says, that will lead you nowhere, go East. When I turn round and go East the brain cells have changed. Because I have an insight that the North leads nowhere. I will put it differently. The whole movement of thought, which is limited, is acting throughout the world now. It is the most important action, we are driven by thought. But thought will not solve any of our problems, except the technological ones. If I see that, I have stopped going North. I think that with the ending of a certain direction, the ending of a movement that has been going on for thousands of years, there is at that moment an insight that brings about a change, a mutation, in the brain cell.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) Sujata Krishna offered this passage from Questioning Krishnamurti after listening to our show with Rex Jung. During the interview, he described how the brain, with training, can actually change shape, beef up like a muscle that’s been trained: “I think there are some strategies to cultivating creativity. It takes a lot of time to change the structure of your brain and there are several studies out there now. You know, the famous juggling study where they have novices who don’t know how to juggle. They image them, then they juggle for three months, they image them again and they see that literally a portion of their brain, a small chunk, but a portion of their brain is beefed up like a muscle in service of that concerted thing that they’re doing with their brain and that is the thing. The important thing is they’re doing a very new thing in a concerted way. And their brain says, hey, if we’re going to be doing this thing in the environment over and over and over, I’m going to build tissue to do that so that we can do it easier and more efficiently. So if you’re going to be creative, pick one thing, get a lot of experience in that one thing, and do it over and over and over.” Think about that. We can actually change the shape of our brains. Time to get to work. Putting that idea to work, methinks this magnified image of stained neurons is a fitting pairing. Image by Mr. McGill / Flickr ~Trent Gilliss, senior editor (via beingblog:)
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“Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought. Insight is the total absence of the whole movement of thought as time and remembrance. So there is direct perception. It is as though I have been going North for the last ten thousand years, and my brain is accustomed to going North, and somebody comes along and says, that will lead you nowhere, go East. When I turn round and go East the brain cells have changed. Because I have an insight that the North leads nowhere.

I will put it differently. The whole movement of thought, which is limited, is acting throughout the world now. It is the most important action, we are driven by thought. But thought will not solve any of our problems, except the technological ones. If I see that, I have stopped going North. I think that with the ending of a certain direction, the ending of a movement that has been going on for thousands of years, there is at that moment an insight that brings about a change, a mutation, in the brain cell.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Sujata Krishna offered this passage from Questioning Krishnamurti after listening to our show with Rex Jung. During the interview, he described how the brain, with training, can actually change shape, beef up like a muscle that’s been trained:

“I think there are some strategies to cultivating creativity. It takes a lot of time to change the structure of your brain and there are several studies out there now. You know, the famous juggling study where they have novices who don’t know how to juggle. They image them, then they juggle for three months, they image them again and they see that literally a portion of their brain, a small chunk, but a portion of their brain is beefed up like a muscle in service of that concerted thing that they’re doing with their brain and that is the thing.

The important thing is they’re doing a very new thing in a concerted way. And their brain says, hey, if we’re going to be doing this thing in the environment over and over and over, I’m going to build tissue to do that so that we can do it easier and more efficiently. So if you’re going to be creative, pick one thing, get a lot of experience in that one thing, and do it over and over and over.”

Think about that. We can actually change the shape of our brains. Time to get to work. Putting that idea to work, methinks this magnified image of stained neurons is a fitting pairing.

Image by Mr. McGill / Flickr

~Trent Gilliss, senior editor

(via beingblog:)

30,000 year old flower revived. Scientists have resurrected a flower from plant tissues found frozen in Siberian permafrost, thought to be 30,000-32,000 years old. The new Silene stenophylla is healthy and fertile, and producing viable seeds. The experiment has excited many because it proves that material trapped in the permafrost is recoverable and usable - scientists have been working to recover other species of plant and animal life from the same area, such as the woolly mammoth.
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30,000 year old flower revived.

Scientists have resurrected a flower from plant tissues found frozen in Siberian permafrost, thought to be 30,000-32,000 years old. The new Silene stenophylla is healthy and fertile, and producing viable seeds.

The experiment has excited many because it proves that material trapped in the permafrost is recoverable and usable - scientists have been working to recover other species of plant and animal life from the same area, such as the woolly mammoth.

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Source: USA Today

Dearest Mama,

I must tell you what my opinion of my own mind and powers is exactly—the result of a most accurate study of myself with a view to my future plans during many months. I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me preeminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.

[…]

Firstly: owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has—or at least very few, if any. This faculty may be designated in me as a singular tact, or some might say an intuitive perception of hidden things—that is of things hidden from eyes, ears, and the ordinary senses…This alone would advantage me little, in the discovery line, but there is, secondly, my immense reasoning faculties. Thirdly: my concentrative faculty, by which I mean the power not only of throwing my whole energy and existence into whatever I choose, but also bringing to bear on any one subject or idea a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources. I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.

Now these three powers (I cannot resist the wickedness of calling them my discovering or scientific trinity) are a vast apparatus put into my power by Providence; and it rests with me by a proper course during the next twenty years to make the engine what I please. But haste, or a restless ambition, would quite ruin the whole.

Reconstructionist Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, is very, very confident in her intellectual abilities in this 1841 letter to her mother. She was twenty-six at the time.

 

(via explore-blog)

“Just a Theory”: 7 Misused Science Words Feel like you need to make serious distinctions within the language of science? Maybe brush up on a few key concepts of the subject? Perhaps you feel an article is using word tactics to get people to believe in something false. Scientific American (originally on LiveScience) has a great article highlighting 7 misused science words that are sure to put things into perspective for the public: 1. Hypothesis The general public so widely misuses the words hypothesis, theory and law that scientists should stop using these terms, writes physicist Rhett Allain of Southeastern Louisiana University, in a blog post on Wired Science. “I don’t think at this point it’s worth saving those words,” Allain told LiveScience. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for something that can actually be tested. But “if you just ask anyone what a hypothesis is, they just immediately say ‘educated guess,’” aid. 2. Just a theory? Climate-change deniers and creationists have deployed the word “theory” to cast doubt on climate change and evolution. “It’s as though it weren’t true because it’s just a theory,” Allain said. That’s despite the fact that an overwhelming amount of evidence supports both human-caused climate change and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Part of the problem is that the word “theory” means something very different in lay language than it does in science: A scientific theory is an explanation of some aspect of the natural world that has been substantiated through repeated experiments or testing. But to the average Jane or Joe, a theory is just an idea that lives in someone’s head, rather than an explanation rooted in experiment and testing. 3. Model However, theory isn’t the only science phrase that causes trouble. Even Allain’s preferred term to replace hypothesis, theory and law — “model” — has its troubles. The word not only refers to toy cars and runway walkers, but also means different things in different scientific fields. A climate model is very different from a mathematical model, for instance. “Scientists in different fields use these terms differently from each other,” John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email to LiveScience. “I don’t think that ‘model’ improves matters. It has an appearance of solidity in physics right now mainly because of the Standard Model. By contrast, in genetics and evolution, ‘models’ are used very differently.” (The Standard Model is the dominant theory governing particle physics.) 4. Skeptic When people don’t accept human-caused climate change, the media often describes those individuals as “climate skeptics.” But that may give them too much credit, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in an email. “Simply denying mainstream science based on flimsy, invalid and too-often agenda-driven critiques of science is not skepticism at all. It is contrarianism … or denial,” Mann told LiveScience. Instead, true skeptics are open to scientific evidence and are willing to evenly assess it. “All scientists should be skeptics. True skepticism is, as [Carl] Sagan described it, the ‘self-correcting machinery’ of science,” Mann said. 5. Nature vs. nurture The phrase “nature versus nurture” also gives scientists a headache, because it radically simplifies a very complicated process, said Dan Kruger, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. “This is something that modern evolutionists cringe at,” Kruger told LiveScience. Genes may influence human beings, but so, too, do epigenetic changes. These modifications alter which genes get turned on, and are both heritable and easily influenced by the environment. The environment that shapes human behavior can be anything from the chemicals a fetus is exposed to in the womb to the block a person grew up on to the type of food they ate as a child, Kruger said. All these factors interact in a messy, unpredictable way. 6. Significant Another word that sets scientists’ teeth on edge is “significant.” “That’s a huge weasel word. Does it mean statistically significant, or does it mean important?” said Michael O’Brien, the dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri. In statistics, something is significant if a difference is unlikely to be due to random chance. But that may not translate into a meaningful difference, in, say, headache symptoms or IQ. 7. Natural “Natural” is another bugaboo for scientists. The term has become synonymous with being virtuous, healthy or good. But not everything artificial is unhealthy, and not everything that’s natural is good for you. “Uranium is natural, and if you inject enough of it, you’re going to die,” Kruger said. Natural’s sibling “organic” also has a problematic meaning, he said. While organic simply means “carbon-based” to scientists, the term is now used to describe pesticide-free peaches and high-end cotton sheets, as well. Check out the full article written by Tia Ghose and LiveScience (via scinerds:)
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“Just a Theory”: 7 Misused Science Words

Feel like you need to make serious distinctions within the language of science? Maybe brush up on a few key concepts of the subject? Perhaps you feel an article is using word tactics to get people to believe in something false. Scientific American (originally on LiveScience) has a great article highlighting 7 misused science words that are sure to put things into perspective for the public:

1. Hypothesis

The general public so widely misuses the words hypothesis, theory and law that scientists should stop using these terms, writes physicist Rhett Allain of Southeastern Louisiana University, in a blog post on Wired Science.

“I don’t think at this point it’s worth saving those words,” Allain told LiveScience.

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for something that can actually be tested. But “if you just ask anyone what a hypothesis is, they just immediately say ‘educated guess,’” aid.

2. Just a theory?

Climate-change deniers and creationists have deployed the word “theory” to cast doubt on climate change and evolution.

“It’s as though it weren’t true because it’s just a theory,” Allain said.

That’s despite the fact that an overwhelming amount of evidence supports both human-caused climate change and Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Part of the problem is that the word “theory” means something very different in lay language than it does in science: A scientific theory is an explanation of some aspect of the natural world that has been substantiated through repeated experiments or testing. But to the average Jane or Joe, a theory is just an idea that lives in someone’s head, rather than an explanation rooted in experiment and testing.

3. Model

However, theory isn’t the only science phrase that causes trouble. Even Allain’s preferred term to replace hypothesis, theory and law — “model” — has its troubles. The word not only refers to toy cars and runway walkers, but also means different things in different scientific fields. A climate model is very different from a mathematical model, for instance.

“Scientists in different fields use these terms differently from each other,” John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email to LiveScience. “I don’t think that ‘model’ improves matters. It has an appearance of solidity in physics right now mainly because of the Standard Model. By contrast, in genetics and evolution, ‘models’ are used very differently.” (The Standard Model is the dominant theory governing particle physics.)

4. Skeptic

When people don’t accept human-caused climate change, the media often describes those individuals as “climate skeptics.” But that may give them too much credit, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in an email.

“Simply denying mainstream science based on flimsy, invalid and too-often agenda-driven critiques of science is not skepticism at all. It is contrarianism … or denial,” Mann told LiveScience.

Instead, true skeptics are open to scientific evidence and are willing to evenly assess it.

“All scientists should be skeptics. True skepticism is, as [Carl] Sagan described it, the ‘self-correcting machinery’ of science,” Mann said.

5. Nature vs. nurture

The phrase “nature versus nurture” also gives scientists a headache, because it radically simplifies a very complicated process, said Dan Kruger, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan.

“This is something that modern evolutionists cringe at,” Kruger told LiveScience.

Genes may influence human beings, but so, too, do epigenetic changes. These modifications alter which genes get turned on, and are both heritable and easily influenced by the environment. The environment that shapes human behavior can be anything from the chemicals a fetus is exposed to in the womb to the block a person grew up on to the type of food they ate as a child, Kruger said. All these factors interact in a messy, unpredictable way.

6. Significant

Another word that sets scientists’ teeth on edge is “significant.”

“That’s a huge weasel word. Does it mean statistically significant, or does it mean important?” said Michael O’Brien, the dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri.

In statistics, something is significant if a difference is unlikely to be due to random chance. But that may not translate into a meaningful difference, in, say, headache symptoms or IQ.

7. Natural

“Natural” is another bugaboo for scientists. The term has become synonymous with being virtuous, healthy or good. But not everything artificial is unhealthy, and not everything that’s natural is good for you.

“Uranium is natural, and if you inject enough of it, you’re going to die,” Kruger said.

Natural’s sibling “organic” also has a problematic meaning, he said. While organic simply means “carbon-based” to scientists, the term is now used to describe pesticide-free peaches and high-end cotton sheets, as well.

Check out the full article written by Tia Ghose and LiveScience

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Source: scinerds

Scientists Figure Out What You See While You’re Dreaming In today’s science-so-weird-it-absolutely-must-be-science-fiction contest, we have a clear winner: a new study in which a team of scientists use an MRI machine, a computer model and thousands of images from the internet to figure out what people see as they dream. Unbelievable as it sounds, researchers from Kyoto, Japan, say that they’ve built something of a dream-reading machine, which learned enough about the neurological patterns of three research participants to predict their sleeptime visualizations with 60 percent accuracy. The study, published today in Science, is believed to be the first case in which objective data has been culled about the contents of a dream. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo: Mark Sebastian Ed note: A slew of new devices are helping people influence what’s going on in their heads while they sleep. (via smithsonianmag:)
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Scientists Figure Out What You See While You’re Dreaming

In today’s science-so-weird-it-absolutely-must-be-science-fiction contest, we have a clear winner: a new study in which a team of scientists use an MRI machine, a computer model and thousands of images from the internet to figure out what people see as they dream.

Unbelievable as it sounds, researchers from Kyoto, Japan, say that they’ve built something of a dream-reading machine, which learned enough about the neurological patterns of three research participants to predict their sleeptime visualizations with 60 percent accuracy. The study, published today in Science, is believed to be the first case in which objective data has been culled about the contents of a dream. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: Mark Sebastian

Ed note: A slew of new devices are helping people influence what’s going on in their heads while they sleep.

Relatively Simple: Explaining the Theory of General Relativity

Published in 1916, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is one of the towering accomplishments of 20th-century physics, completely changing our picture of the universe. While formulating his theory of special relativity, Einstein found that space and time are one and the same thing—they’re woven together into a single fabric called space-time. Everything that happens in the universe affects space-time, and space-time affects everything in the universe. Matter is embedded within this fabric, and so it warps, bends and distorts the space-time. Imagine setting a basketball on a trampoline—its mass will make a dent in the springy sheet. If you then rolled a marble around the basketball, the dent would cause the marble to spiral inwards towards the larger ball, much the same way as the gravity of the sun pulls at the Earth—like the basketball, the sun curves and warps the space around it. Newton postulates that smaller masses travel towards larger ones because of a force of attraction between them, but Einstein theorises that actually, massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravitational influence. It’s a cool thought—that matter makes space-time stretch and warp, forming mountains and valleys that create ‘paths’ for objects to move through. The planets travelling around the sun are simply following the curvature of space-time. As theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler said, “Matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move.” Although we can’t actually see or measure space-time, it’s been confirmed by observing phenomena like gravitation lensing, which is the way light bends around massive objects such as black holes because of the warped space-time around them. Newton wasn’t wrong—matter is the source of gravity, and his equations still hold up most of the time—Einstein just delved further into how and why gravity exists.

(Image Credit: Wonders of the Universe) 

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A Meadow of Frost Flowers

Just before dawn broke one morning over the Arctic Ocean, the temperature dropped and University of Washington graduate student Jeff Bowman spotted something otherworldly from his ship—little icy flowers, blooming up from the frozen sea. They were like snowflakes, delicately protruding up from the thin ice “like a meadow spreading off in all directions,” Bowman recalls. “Every available surface was covered with them.” These are called frost flowers, though they’re not really flowers—they’re natural ice sculptures that form when the air is colder and dryer than the thin layer of ice covering the sea. The air teases up moisture from imperfections in the ice, which becomes supersaturated and condenses back into ice, creating frosty, feathery spikes that blossom like flowers. The flowers are about three times saltier than the ocean below, yet each one houses around a million bacteria. This is rare for such incredibly salty, brutally cold conditions, but it’s strangely beautiful—each delicate frost flower is essentially a temporary ecosystem, until the sun rises and melts them away again.

(Image Credit: Jeff Bowman)

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Galileo GALILEI Autograph notes on the satellites of Jupiter, 14–25 January 1611Purchased by J. P. Morgan, Jr. in 1928; MA 1064 “On this scrap of paper (an unfolded envelope), Galileo recorded the positions of four satellites of Jupiter over a period of several nights. He had observed the moons with the aid of his newly constructed telescope and published his findings in his revolutionary book The Starry Messenger (1610). He then worked to define more precisely the periods of the orbits of the Jovian moons, setting up his telescope night after night and making notes such as these. In a radical departure from his university training, Galileo insisted that scientific theory be grounded in observation and physical evidence rather than reliance on ancient authority.”  (via chromaticities: / thenearsightedmonkey:)
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Galileo GALILEI

Autograph notes on the satellites of Jupiter, 14–25 January 1611
Purchased by J. P. Morgan, Jr. in 1928; MA 1064 

“On this scrap of paper (an unfolded envelope), Galileo recorded the positions of four satellites of Jupiter over a period of several nights. He had observed the moons with the aid of his newly constructed telescope and published his findings in his revolutionary book The Starry Messenger (1610). He then worked to define more precisely the periods of the orbits of the Jovian moons, setting up his telescope night after night and making notes such as these. In a radical departure from his university training, Galileo insisted that scientific theory be grounded in observation and physical evidence rather than reliance on ancient authority.” 

(via chromaticities: / thenearsightedmonkey:)

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Badass Scientist of the Week: Rosalind Franklin Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a biophysicist and X-Ray crystallographer who made important and controversial contributions to our current understanding of DNA. She graduated from Cambridge in 1941, then went to study carbon and graphite microstructures for the British Coal Utilization Research Association before returning to Cambridge to earn her doctorate in 1945. Franklin then worked in Paris for a period, where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques, then she returned in 1951 to work as a research associate at King’s College, London. It was here she began to solve the mystery of DNA’s structure. Scientists knew that DNA was a genetic material, capable of storing the information needed to create a living being, but its structure and inner workings were still largely a mystery. Franklin worked with Maurice Wilkins, who at first thought she was his assistant—he was quickly set straight, but the university environment was not a friendly one for Franklin, with male-only dining halls and pubs. Still, Franklin persisted with her work, applying X-Ray diffraction techniques to create crystallographic portraits of DNA, which J. D. Bernal called “the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” Franklin discovered that DNA has two forms, and invented an ingenious method to separate them. She discovered that the helical structure of DNA has two strands, that the backbone of DNA lies on the outside, and noted details about its shape and size. But before she could discover how the bases paired inside the helix—the secret to heredity—James Watson and Francis Crick figured it out first. But not entirely on their own. Maurice Wilkins, who had a tense relationship with Franklin, showed Watson one of Franklin’s crystallographic portraits. Watson at once saw the solution to their question, and he and Crick published their findings—Franklin didn’t realise the slight, assuming they had fairly beaten her to the discovery. She later moved to J. D. Bernal’s lab to work on the tobacco mosaic virus and polio, but became ill with ovarian cancer in 1956, and died two years later. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work on the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick made it clear that Franklin’s work played an essential role in their discovery, but since the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, Franklin—despite her tenacity, ingenuity and badassery—was not even acknowledged. (via sciencesoup:)
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Badass Scientist of the Week: Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a biophysicist and X-Ray crystallographer who made important and controversial contributions to our current understanding of DNA. She graduated from Cambridge in 1941, then went to study carbon and graphite microstructures for the British Coal Utilization Research Association before returning to Cambridge to earn her doctorate in 1945. Franklin then worked in Paris for a period, where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques, then she returned in 1951 to work as a research associate at King’s College, London. It was here she began to solve the mystery of DNA’s structure. Scientists knew that DNA was a genetic material, capable of storing the information needed to create a living being, but its structure and inner workings were still largely a mystery. Franklin worked with Maurice Wilkins, who at first thought she was his assistant—he was quickly set straight, but the university environment was not a friendly one for Franklin, with male-only dining halls and pubs. Still, Franklin persisted with her work, applying X-Ray diffraction techniques to create crystallographic portraits of DNA, which J. D. Bernal called “the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” Franklin discovered that DNA has two forms, and invented an ingenious method to separate them. She discovered that the helical structure of DNA has two strands, that the backbone of DNA lies on the outside, and noted details about its shape and size. But before she could discover how the bases paired inside the helix—the secret to heredity—James Watson and Francis Crick figured it out first. But not entirely on their own. Maurice Wilkins, who had a tense relationship with Franklin, showed Watson one of Franklin’s crystallographic portraits. Watson at once saw the solution to their question, and he and Crick published their findings—Franklin didn’t realise the slight, assuming they had fairly beaten her to the discovery. She later moved to J. D. Bernal’s lab to work on the tobacco mosaic virus and polio, but became ill with ovarian cancer in 1956, and died two years later. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work on the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick made it clear that Franklin’s work played an essential role in their discovery, but since the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, Franklin—despite her tenacity, ingenuity and badassery—was not even acknowledged.

(via sciencesoup:)

Interplanetary Superhighway For thousands of years, navigators have used the stars to find their way, but in recent years, GPS has all but eliminated the challenge of navigating the Earth’s surface. Today’s navigational problems are in space—and JPL research scientist Martin Lo has conceived an interesting and mathematically viable idea for navigating amongst the planets: an ‘Interplanetary Superhighway.’ Most missions take advantage of the way gravity speeds up a spacecraft as it swings by a planet or moon, but Lo’s idea takes advantage of something else—Lagrange points, which are the points between celestial objects where their gravitational pull is cancelled out. These points leave paths of ‘gravity voids’ through which spacecraft can travel without having to fight the pull of gravity, so just a tiny expenditure of energy would propel the craft, slashing the amount of fuel it needs to move. The Earth-Moon system has five Lagrange points, which connect to similar ones between other planets and moons, creating subtle pathways that link the solar system—imagine a network of virtual tubes, snaking through space like a freeway but constantly shifting as the planets orbit the sun. Even though travelling along these would be slower than more direct routes, and they do not guarantee easy access to every part of the solar system, this potential Interplanetary Superhighway requires minimal energy and therefore minimal fuel—a huge advantage for future unmanned deep-space missions. (via sciencesoup:)
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Interplanetary Superhighway

For thousands of years, navigators have used the stars to find their way, but in recent years, GPS has all but eliminated the challenge of navigating the Earth’s surface. Today’s navigational problems are in space—and JPL research scientist Martin Lo has conceived an interesting and mathematically viable idea for navigating amongst the planets: an ‘Interplanetary Superhighway.’ Most missions take advantage of the way gravity speeds up a spacecraft as it swings by a planet or moon, but Lo’s idea takes advantage of something else—Lagrange points, which are the points between celestial objects where their gravitational pull is cancelled out. These points leave paths of ‘gravity voids’ through which spacecraft can travel without having to fight the pull of gravity, so just a tiny expenditure of energy would propel the craft, slashing the amount of fuel it needs to move. The Earth-Moon system has five Lagrange points, which connect to similar ones between other planets and moons, creating subtle pathways that link the solar system—imagine a network of virtual tubes, snaking through space like a freeway but constantly shifting as the planets orbit the sun. Even though travelling along these would be slower than more direct routes, and they do not guarantee easy access to every part of the solar system, this potential Interplanetary Superhighway requires minimal energy and therefore minimal fuel—a huge advantage for future unmanned deep-space missions.

(via sciencesoup:)

St. Elmo’s fire

‘Everything is in flames—the sky with lightning—the water with luminous particles, and even the very masts are pointed with a blue flame…’ wrote Charles Darwin while aboard the Beagle. He was describing of a fascinating natural phenomenon that sailors have seen for thousands of years—a sudden glow atop a ship’s mast near the end of a thunderstorm, which many sailors believed to be a sign of salvation from St. Elmo. ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ is a weather phenomenon that behaves a bit like lightning because it’s plasma—i.e. ionised air that emits a glow—and it’s similarly created in thunderstorms, when the air is electrically charged and there’s a significant charge imbalance in the air. However, lightning is a movement of electricity between clouds and ground, while St. Elmo’s Fire is a spark between the air and a charged object, such as the mast of a ship, a church steeple, or an aeroplane wing. These charged, pointed objects discharge electrical energy when the voltage in the air gets high enough, and the imbalance between the discharge and the air causes atoms of gas molecules (the nitrogen and oxygen of our atmosphere) to tear apart. Negatively-charged electrons move away from positively-charged protons, creating ionised air that emits light. Since the discharge usually lasts several minutes, it creates a constant blue glow—different gases glow different colours when they become plasmas, and nitrogen and oxygen glow blue. Interestingly, St. Elmo’s Fire behaves somewhat like a plasma globe: a pilot once reported that the phenomenon occurred on the windshield of her plane while flying through a storm cloud, and when she touched the windshield, blue plasma streaked out to meet the tips of her fingers.

(Image Credit: 1, 2, 3)

(via sciencesoup:)