In 1961, John F. Kennedy asked a lot of the U.S. space program when he declared: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” NASA hit that ambitious target with a few months to spare. On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their famous first steps on the desolate lunar surface. The original video is grainy, hard to see. But the photos taken during the mission are anything but. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (back in 2009), the folks at SpaceRip stitched together a collection of high resolution photos from the Apollo 11 mission, then set the slideshow to Chopin’s Trois nouvelles études, 2nd in A flat major. You can find this clip housed in our collection of Great Science Videos.
Alexander Tsiaras has made a career of using advances in visualization technology to offer vivid tours of the human body. His books have taken readers inside the human heart, the kidneys and vascular system, and also human reproduction. Back in 2002, Tsiaras published From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, a book that offers a “visual diary of fetal development.” Now, nearly a decade later, he brings that visual diary to video at a conference affiliated with TED. The visuals are impressive. There’s no denying that. But what might leave you cold (or not) is his willingness to talk about human development in terms of “mystery, magic, and divinity” rather than trying to grapple with any scientific analysis. Is this a nod to “Intelligent Design”? Or an unfortunate byproduct of the short talk format? Who knows.…
We have seen several time-lapse views of Earth from the International Space Station, but this may well be the best. Recorded from August to October, 2011, this HD footage has been smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc, and then coupled with music by Jan Jelinek. It gives you a pretty splendid view of the aurora borealis from orbit (how often have you seen that?), and if you’re wondering just what produces those northern lights, you can watch a nice explanation here (scroll down to the second video). This video is housed in our collection of Great Science Videos.
Electronic musician John Boswell has just released the 12th installment in his “Symphony of Science” series. Onward to the Edge celebrates the adventure of space exploration and features the auto-tuned voices of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, particle physicist Brian Cox and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. It’s a mashup of material from four sources: Tyson’s My Favorite Universe video course, Cox’s BBC series Wonders of the Solar System, a TED talk by Porco and scenes from National Geographic’s A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets.
The “Symphony of Science” grew out of Boswell’s 2009 video, A Glorious Dawn, which stitches together scenes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s Universe and has been viewed over six million times on YouTube. You can download a free digital album of all 12 songs from the series, along with a bonus track, here. H/T BoingBoing
NASA has released a series of new satellite data visualizations that “show tens of millions of fires detected worldwide from space” between July 2002 and July 2011. The visualizations were produced by the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instruments onboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. And they help scientists understand how fires affect our environment on local, regional and global scales — one of the many unexpected things that come out of NASA space missions. h/t holykaw
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Cobbling together some LEGOs and a smartphone running a custom Android app, Mike Dobson and David Gilday built CubeStormer II, a lean, mean Rubik’s Cube-solving machine. Cracking a Rubik’s Cube in 5.35 seconds, Cubestormer II made mincemeat out of Ruby, the previous robot record holder — 10.18 seconds. And it even edged out the existing world record, 5.66 seconds, set by Feliks Zemdegs earlier this year. Watch him go below.
To see Cubestormer II in action, you can visit ARM TechCon 2011, to be held in Santa Clara, California on October 26 and 27. H/T Science Dump.
You may have seen levitation tricks performed by magicians, but rest assured that they can’t beat this: quantum levitation. The video above was captured at the 2011 ASTC conference, a gathering of scientists in Baltimore, Maryland, with the purpose of demonstrating “how science centers and museums are putting new ideas to practical use to serve their communities.” The School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel-Aviv University has put together this physics experiment showcasing quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field.
While the video fails to explain the science of what is happening here, the complementary website is helpful. The white round disk (essentially a sapphire wafer coated with a thin layer of yttrium barium copper oxide) is cooled to below negative 185 degrees C. At that temperature (dubbed the critical temperature), the material becomes superconductive, meaning that it has zero electrical resistance. From the website:
Superconductivity and magnetic field do not like each other. When possible, the superconductor will expel all the magnetic field from inside. This is the Meissner effect. In our case, since the superconductor is extremely thin, the magnetic field DOES penetrate. However, it does that in discrete quantities (this is quantum physics after all! ) called flux tubes.
Inside each magnetic flux tube superconductivity is locally destroyed. The superconductor will try to keep the magnetic tubes pinned in weak areas (e.g. grain boundaries). Any spatial movement of the superconductor will cause the flux tubes to move. In order to prevent that, the superconductor remains “trapped” in midair.
And in case you’re wondering: are there practical applications for quantum levitation? The answer, of course, is yes!
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Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
The Open University strikes again. In June, they released The History of English, a series of witty animated videos that covered 1600 years of linguistic history in ten minutes. Now, they’re back with 60-Second Adventures in Thought, another animated sequence that highlights six famous thought experiments. It all starts with Zeno’s ancient Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. (Watch above.) Then we head straight to the 20th century, to five famous thought experiments in physics, math and computer science.
The Grandfather Paradox (time travel)
Chinese Room (artificial intelligence)
Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (the concept of infinity)
The Twin Paradox (special relativity)
Schrödinger’s Cat (quantum mechanics)
You can watch the full series on YouTube and iTunes.
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