In honor of what will hopefully be the last round of winter storms for most of the country, I present to you The Lorax as projected onto snowflakes. Back in mid-February Brian Maffitt turned his digital projector onto the snowstorm outside his window. The results are really quite wonderful -- and, I'm betting, much more colorful than your standard Instagram feed post-snowstorm.
Your weekly round-up of geek:
- How many dominoes will topple a cathedral tower? Fewer than you think.
- Cocktail party hearing; study hints at how we manage to focus on one conversation in a room full of them.
- Just two liters of water from the English Channel contain at least half of the world's ocean microbe species.
- NASA captures first images of the bottom of a subglacial lake in Antarctica. [VIDEO]
- Crystal found in Viking shipwreck may have been used for navigation by the Sun in the 16th century.
- "Imagine that...instead of having a tongue, you have this large spiral of teeth" WTF, evolution?
- ESA's Herschel space telescope captures the highest resolution infrared image of the Andromeda galaxy to date, illuminating where dust lanes where stars are actively being born.
- STUNNING photos of methane bubbles beneath the frozen surface of Canada's Abraham Lake.
- Don't take your maple syrup for granted. It takes some complicated math to explain the flow of sap.
- 11,000 year-old deep-sea sponge holds record of deep ocean temperature variations over its entire life.
May the geek be with you. @Summer_Ash
Leave a Comment:
An interesting point about those methane bubbles is that they have the potential to create a positive feedback effect in the case of global warming. Warming and melting of the permafrost and similar lakes like Canada's Abraham Lake can release those trapped methane bubbles into the atmosphere, and Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide, almost 34 times stronger of a greenhouse gas, which can lead to a runaway warming effect. They make for a very pretty sight though!
Oh Yea???
I live fifty feet from this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LHXLCTpsWk&feature=player_embedded
The Joy of Blowing circles: University of Chicago announced this week that they have been successful in creation of Vortex knots. (youtube) (article U Chicago)
These are useful for understanding the variety of systems of political circular thinking as well as hard physics problems in plasma and fluid dynamics.
BTW- TRMS geek reporting has been interested in applications of 3D printing. The precision of the hydrofoils seen in the video would have been extremely difficult to machine without such printers.
The dominoes story is cool. But really - can you picture what that *last* domino would look like??? ... not to mention the practical problems of producing it and placing it in an upright position!
Why not fire a few large dominoes into the side with a canon? OK, maybe I'm thinking outside the unstated rules of this exercise. File this along with the Archimedes quote about being able to move the earth given the proper lever and a place to stand.
Summer,
Very good geek as usual. Thank you.
Geek is a great edition to the show. Thanks.
If snow looked like that out my window it could snow once a week all year round!
Viral geekness: Supersymmetry theorist James Gates, awarded the Presidential medal of Science this week reported that he was inspired by comic book uber geek Reed Richards. Gates gives an excellent glimpse into, he world of math geeks:
Of course, supersymmetrical particles may turn out to be a mathematical fiction, but it is conceivable the LHC may demonstrate once again how literature leads us to the truth.
How I'm addicted to geek. I was watching Into the Universe with Steven Hawking this evening, and they were talking about what it would take to find another earth-like planet. The closest possibility that we know of is about 20 light years away. Even if we go faster than anything we've ever made, it would take about 350,000 years to get there.
I was thinking it would be far more feasible to try to terraform Venus. Venus is a good candidate. It's about the same size as Earth. If you pumped enough CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it into the atmosphere of Mars, you could stabilize the temps of both planets more. You'd probably have to melt the core of the planet to give it a magnetosphere. You could collect water from asteroids and comets. You could maybe use Mercury as a stabilizing moon for the planet.
All this would be incredibly difficult, but I bet it would be easier than traveling for 350,000 years just to get somewhere.
20 light years does have benefits. Not the least of which is, according to Hawking that it would get some of us out of range.
.
Survival of the species and all that.
.
Regarding terraforming Venus, the big problem is that Venus's spin is very slow, making days 243 earth days long. For this and other reasons, Mars is more frequently depicted in science fiction as the first candidate for terraforming. I think in Star Trek: Enterprise, what they were doing to increasing water/ oxygen supply was to crash massive water heavy asteroids onto the surface. The time scales, challenges and possible engineering solutions along with citations to journal articles on the subject may be found at the Wikipedia article on terraforming mars.
The snow is beautiful. Thanks.
I wouldn't mind shoveling THAT snow!