Cosmic Rays

In the 3rd episode of Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox (see below) there was the mention of cloud chambers. These chambers have allowed scientists to see the paths of ionising particles since 1912 (it is a chamber filled with supersaturated alcohol). These particles can also be affected by magnetic fields; the positive and negative particles curve in opposite ways to each other.

The particles that are seen in these cloud chambers do not come from the earth - they are travelling at a much too high speed with too much energy to come from such a close source.

Cosmic rays are most commonly protons. By travelling the paths of unaffected gamma rays (given off when protons collide with other protons) it can be seen that the high-speed protons originate from the two largest supernova remnants in the Milky Way. As these high speed protons collide with slower protons, it releases a neutral pion, instantaneously decaying into two gamma rays, having lower energy than normal gamma rays, therefore not showing up in the energy spectrum, making the discovery of the origin of the cosmic rays harder to trace. However, there are still questions regarding the MAIN causation of these rays.




Alice

Absolute Zero is no longer Absolute Zero

WHaT?! Something we learnt in GCSE  science isn't actually the whole truth?!???! Yeah, okay... welcome to my life

Scientists have rewritten the known laws of physics after hitting a temperature lower than absolute zero. Physicists at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany created a quantum gas using potassium atoms, fixing them in a standard lattice group using magnetic fields and lasers. When the magnetic fields were rapidly adjusted, the atoms shifted from a low energy state to their highest possible energy state. That rapid transition— along with the laser trapping field that kept the atoms in place — allowed the temperature of the gas to dip "a few billionths of a Kelvin below absolute zero."

The intriguing breakthrough could lead to the creation of "new forms of matter" in laboratories, but there are some side effects. Normally a cloud of atoms would be pulled downward by gravity, but some atoms in a group that’s below absolute zero could instead float upwards. Affected atoms in the modified gas also appear to mimic dark energy —hypothetically responsible for the expansion of the universe — by avoiding collapsing in on themselves.

Physics is so cool

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6115/52

I couldn't really find a suitable photograph for this post so please just enjoy this picture of a polar bear

Dayla

Euthanasia Coaster

Some people use Physics for good… and some use it to design a roller coaster that will kill you by the end of the ride. Behold, the Euthanasia Coaster!

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasant, elegant and ritualistic. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

Dayla

The Elements Song!

The elements song! One of our favourites... I really want to learn the words it would be such a cool party trick...

Alice and I might make a video of ourselves attempting to sing it and add it to this post soon... so stay tuned!
It's going to be pretty tragic.

Dayla (and Alice in spirit)

Are no two snowflakes alike?

Everyone’s heard the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike”,but is it true? and if so, how could we possibly know?

Complex snowflakes are made up of six symmetrical spokes, each extraordinarily detailed. If each tiny change in these details counts as new design of snowflake, these small variations result in a staggeringly huge amount of possible combinations.Clearly, checking every single snowflake that has ever fallen on Earth would be impossible. So we turn to mathematics...

To understand the maths  behind this (for those of you who haven't learnt about factorials), let’s think about a smaller number for a moment. Let’s say you have 10 books—how many possible ways can you arrange them on your bookshelf? You can decide on 10 different spots for the first book, then 9 for the second, 8 for the third, 7 for the fourth…and all the way down to just 1 for the tenth book. These numbers are then multiplied out to get the number of possible combinations, and although there are only ten numbers, multiplying them out gives you 3 628 800-i.e., over 3 million ways to organise just ten books. If you had 100 books, the combinations rocket up to a number a thousand times larger than the total number of atoms in the universe.

A complex snowflake easily has one hundred separate features, and because the maths behind the number of different designs of a snowflake is analogous to that othe bookcase example, the number of possible combinations for a snowflake is enormous, so the probability that there have ever been two identical snowflakes is so small that it is indistinguishable from zero.

So, now you know.

Dayla

The Scale of the Universe II

Hey guys!! If you enjoyed the video I posted a while ago about the universe in x10, check out this website!! http://htwins.net/scale2/

It's so amazing and goes EVEN smaller than the video and you can do it yourself!! My friend Emma wanted all of you to see it so please to check it out! It really doesn't take long and enjoy!

Alice

Wonders of Life

There is an easier way of getting interested in science, it isn't just all about the text books! Brian Cox is a physicist who has been on the radar for a few years, with his narrated series; Wonders of the Universe and lectures and podcasts.

Now he has branched out to the other sciences, Biology and Chemistry (mainly biology though!) with Wonders of Life. So far there have been 3 episodes, firstly focusing on how humans came to be related to other species, comparing our DNA with orang-utans and looking at how our jaw bone developed from small pieces to one large jaw bone, with the leftover bones forming the amplifiers for our ear drums.
He has also looked at how the earth as we know it formed, starting from a world filled with volcanic activity and how that difference in pH may have sparked the first signs of life.

Watching these programmes can really help to develop extra interests and information in the vast world of science, so we urge you to really give it a go!! Science really isn't all about what is on the school syllabus, and once you develop an inquisitive, scientific mind there is no stopping you!


http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qh3bb/Wonders_of_Life_What_Is_Life/

(find on bbciplayer)


Alice

Smell

So going along with the topic of food (thanks Dayla) I thought maybe doing a quick post on smell. Our sense of smell is usually associated with food, which is what I'm going to look at.

So what is smell? Everything that smells (freshly popped popcorn, a big fry up, perfume) gives off light, volatile molecules that waft through the air to your nose. Olfactory receptor cells are neurons that send impulses to the olfacory bulb through the axon (base part of the neuron). Each olfactory receptor cell only has one type of receptor, which can detect a small selection of molecules.

It is the vibration of the odors' atoms at the quantum level that is detected by humans. Chemoreceptors in our nose pass on electrical impulses to the brain, which can recognise specific odors, or interpret the electric patterns which we understand as smell.

When our sense of sight is taken away, our sense of smell becomes much more central to our lives. Try blindfolding yourself, taking in every sound and smell that you can and concentrate carefully. Try not to place yourself too close to the bin though - you might get a nasty surprise! 

Alice

Why does popcorn pop?

So today I was eating popcorn and I was trying to figure out why corn kernels pop into popcorn. I mean, their appearance and textures are completely different! I ended up googling it (did you know googling is actually a word?!?) and this is what I found:

When the kernel is heated (to about 200 degrees Celsius) the small amount of water (13-14%) stored inside the starchy endosperm turns into vapour causing it to expand about 40 or 50 times its original size. As the steam expands it puts pressure against the hard starch in the endosperm causing it to become inflated. Eventually, this causes the pericarp of the kernel to give way causing it to explode (pop) as it flips inside out allowing the steam to escape and expose the soft white fluffy starch known as popcorn.

So, now you know!

 Dayla

Paralysed woman moves robotic arm with her mind

We were shown this video in bio-med society today. Its amazing to see how the power of the mind can be harnessed and it's something that I'm sure would have been thought to be unachivable a couple decades ago. Imagine what the future could hold for this type of technology!

This is part of the reason why I want to go to a university like Brown so much, their research departments are incredible!

Dayla

Asteroid 2012 DA14

It was a year ago when Asteroid 2012 DA14 was spotted by Jamie Normen, who realised that the trace of light in the sky was an asteroid of an estimated mass of 130,000 metric tonnes, a diameter around 45 metres, returning again close in 2020.

This isn't going to be a re-run of the dinosaur annihilation so don't worry! Asteroid 2012 DA14 will not hit Earth (see diagram), but it will pass only just 25,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface - outside the atmosphere, closer than communications satellites but outside the Hubble space telescope.

On [February 15, 2013], the asteroid will travel rapidly from the southern evening sky into the northern morning sky with its closest Earth approach occurring about 19:26 UTC when it will achieve a magnitude of less than seven, which is somewhat fainter than naked eye visibility. About 4 minutes after its Earth close approach, there is a good chance it will pass into the Earth’s shadow for about 18 minutes or so before reappearing from the eclipse. When traveling rapidly into the northern morning sky, 2012 DA14 will quickly fade in brightness.

[NASA]

Alice

Alfred Russel Wallace

"It occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? and the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted lived. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enimies,the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then I at once saw, that the eve represent variability of all living things would furnish the material from which, by the mere weeding out of those less adapted to the actual conditions, the fittest alone would continue the race.There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest. The more I thought over it, the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species."

-Alfred Russel Wallace, (1823-1913) was an explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection, which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own ideas in The Origins of Species

Dayla

Agalychnis callidrya

Three-day-old embryos of red-eyed treefrog species Agalychnis callidryas. These embryos have external gills that protrude toward the surface of their eggs, where oxygen is most concentrated. This adaptation allows for high metabolic rates and accelerated development. 

Credit: Karen M. Warkentin, Boston University
Dayla

The Pale Blue Dot

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known.

The pale blue dot.


Carl Sagan

Alice


Alice

DNA replication

We found these really interesting gifs on Tumblr. They show the DNA replication process, something which we have recently learned about in biology. The pictures show single strand binding proteins and DNA polymerase.  At this instant there are billions of these molecular machines in constant activity within your body.

Video Credit: Drew Barry

Dayla

Power of Ten

This is one of our favourite videos! (I started crying the first time she saw it) Check it out!

Alice