Super Sol

The Sun emits 400 million million million million watts, that’s a million times the entire power consumption of the US every year, in a second.

Superior Southern Skies

The three brightest stars in the sky, Sirus, Canopus and Alpha Centuri are all in the southern hemishere. The next three brightest Arcturus, Vega and Capella are all in the Northern. Go Australia !

Something for the Weekend

You may have heard of a group called OK-GO (if you haven't your missing out on some of the coolest music video's around, as these guy's specialize in making videos that require extreme precision) Well this time they have outdone themselves and created (with the help of engineering types from MIT) a Rube Goldberg machine that well, is just amazing. A tour de force of engineering.It took two months to build and covered two floors of an abandoned warehouse in Echo Park LA.

Without further ado I bring you OK-GO This too will pass. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=qybUFnY7Y8w

PS.Don't forget to check out the how they did it videos and if you haven't seen it already their breakout video Here it goes again (the one with the treadmills)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=dTAAsCNK7RA&feature=rela t ed

Finally a Dynamic Periodic Table to play with http://www.ptable.com/

Figuring out fire

Fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen molecules and some kind of fuel. This reaction releases the heat and light that we call fire. You might wonder how a chemical reaction like this turns into the colorful flame you see dancing on a candle. What are flames made of?

You can think of a flame as being like a kind of tent. Heat melts the candle’s waxy fuel, and turns it into a gas. This fuel gas floats away from the wick to fill the inside of the flame’s tent. Outside the tent are oxygen molecules from the air. Where these two gasses meet–at the surface of the tent–is where the fiery chemical reaction takes place. This is called the “combustion reaction zone” of the flame, and it glows a delicate blue color. Sometimes, however, the fuel molecules don’t burn up right away. They clump together to form particles called soot, which then swirl around inside the body of the flame without actually burning. As they swirl, heat from the reaction zone can make this soot begin to glow a bright orange or yellow color. The reaction zone at the surface of the flame’s tent provides the blue color of the flame. The yellow color comes from hot soot, churning around inside. Eventually this soot will probably enter the reaction zone and burn blue like the rest of the fuel. If the reaction zone is incomplete however, or not very efficient, the soot can escape the flame without burning at all. Outside the flame, the soot cools quickly to black and drifts away. What do we call this unburnt sooty fuel? You guessed it. Smoke.

Pioneering paper

Ts'ai Lin, a **** ( noun a castrated man, esp. one formerly employed by Oriental rulers as a harem guard or palace official) in the court of the Emperor Ho Ti, is credited with the creation of a paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree which was combined with bamboo fibres, hemp and flax around 105AD.

Rapidly Red

Your body is creating and killing 15 million blood cells per second.

Turning the red light green

What’s the best thing about having a rocket-powered car? If you go fast enough, the red lights look green!

That's an old physics joke on the nature of light, here is more information on colour and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Light is electromagnetic energy, and it comes in waves. What we see as different colours is actually just different frequencies of these waves. The lower frequencies appear to us as colours down at the low end of the spectrum, such as red, orange, yellow. The higher frequencies appear to us as colours at the high end of the spectrum, such as green, blue, and violet.

Now, one neat thing about colours is that you can effectively change their frequencies by moving toward or away from their source. Think of it this way. Imagine that a line of evenly-spaced joggers is running toward you. If you stand still, they will run past you with a certain frequency, such as one jogger per minute. If you run towards them, you can increase that frequency; say to two joggers per minute or more.

It’s the same with light waves. A certain low frequency coming from a stoplight is perceived as red. If you raced towards the light very fast, you could increase the frequency you perceive until the color appeared to be green.

Now, it has to be admitted that to really do this you’d need to go twenty-thousand miles-per-second, much faster than any car, or even rocket, can at present move.

Also, you should never run a red light, but that’s taking the fun out of the joke.

Why Ice isn't slippery

Try telling someone who has just fallen on a patch of ice, that ice is not slippery and they’ll think you’re crazy.

But, in fact, ice itself isn’t slippery because it is a solid.

One quality of solids is that when two solids are together there is friction between them that will keep them from slipping.

So how can your shoe slip on ice? The answer lies in two peculiar properties of ice.

The first is that as water freezes, its molecules move farther apart. The molecules of most substances move closer together as they freeze, making them shrink at lower temperatures.

But water molecules move farther apart at temperatures below 39 degrees Fahrenheit, making water expand as it freezes. That is why frozen water pipes burst, and a tray of ice cubes will freeze over its top if you fill it too full.

The second peculiar property of ice is directly linked to its first peculiarity. When subjected to pressure, ice melts.

Remember that the molecules in ice are farther apart than the molecules in water; therefore ice molecules are vulnerable to pressure which pushes them closer together, causing the ice to change into water.

So when you step on a patch of ice, you exert pressure on the ice, which causes its molecules to move closer together. That makes them revert to their more dense state, which is water.

If you slip on a patch of ice, you are actually slipping on a thin layer of water that the pressure from your weight has created. And, unlike solid ice, water, as a liquid, is quite slippery.

Something for the Weekend

First things first, Earth. NASA has just released the most detailed whole planet pictures to date showing our small, mostly blue, ball in stunning detail. Can you pick out your location?

http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the
-most-accurate-highest-resolut
ion-earth-view-to-date?utm_sou
rce=feedburner&utm_medium=
feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+gi
zmodo/full+(Gizmodo)

(Just click to enlarge)

To go hand in hand with the new pictures is this animation showing plate tectonics and how our planet has evolved over the last 600 million years and our predicted future (this is from the Northern University of Arizona’s Geology dept)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=uGcDed4xVD4

Finally as a follow up to two weeks ago’s focus on STS130 here is a nice photographic record of the mission from the guys themselves.

http://www.sacbee.com/static/w
eblogs/photos/2010/02/space-sh
uttle-endeavours-missi.html

Internet security and Prime numbers

Ever wonder how websites like Amazon.com keep your personal information, like credit card or check numbers, safe from the internet bad guys? Well, here’s the how.

At the Amazon website you enter in your private info, press “send”, and your internet browser quickly encodes your data and sends it off to Amazon. To make sure no one but Amazon can view your info, each code has a lock that can only be opened with the correct key, which Amazon has.

This is where prime numbers come into play. Prime numbers are those divisible only by themselves and 1, like the numbers two, three, five, seven, eleven etc. Of course these are very small prime numbers, but there are infinitely many of them and they can get big; the biggest found so far is thirteen million digits long!

The lock on the code protecting your private info is a very big number which is the unique product of two prime numbers, and the key to this lock are exactly these two primes. As a small example, take the number fifteen.

If this were our “lock” number, then the two primes three and five would be our “key”; since both are prime and three times five is fifteen. Unlike the small example however for a larger “lock” number it is nearly impossible to find the two “key” primes if you don’t already know them.

The best computers in the world might take years to find the “key” primes of a “lock” number only three-hundred digits long. Thankfully websites like Amazon typically use “lock” numbers at least this big, thus making it nearly impossible for a bad guy to sneak a peak at your private info online.