Category: Science

How much water IS there on Earth?

This is really cool…the image here shows how much water there is on Earth, if you were to gather it all up in a ball and compare it to the size of the whole planet.  It really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

(via io9)

Now, take this a step further, and think about the water on this planet compared to others in our solar system.  Our little blue marble in space seems to be the gem, the most water-rich planet orbiting this star.  Well, it turns out that’s not exactly true, if you count moons at least.  Check out the picture below, showing the water on Earth, compared to the estimated water on the moon Europa!  In terms of volume, Europa is estimated to have two to three times the volume of water that Earth does.  Incredible!

(via io9)

Bad news for dinosaur fans

If you watched Jurassic Park and thought, “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if we actually COULD recreate dinosaurs like that” (and let’s be honest, who DIDN’T think that), then I have bad news for you.  Nature reports that researchers have found the bonds between nucleotides in DNA break down over time.  Pretty quickly, too…the half-life of DNA is about 521 years (after 521 years, half of the bonds have been broken; another 521 years and half the remaining bonds have been broken, and so on).

The bright spot here is that scientists reached this conclusion by analyzing a very specific set of bones…so there’s perhaps a chance that bones preserved in some different environment may yield usable DNA.  It’s not looking too likely though.

If you hope to have a pet dinosaur someday, it looks like your best bet may be to follow the works of Jack Horner, who wants to engineer modern-day dinosaurs (aka ‘birds’) to gradually undo millions of years of evolution:

1500 ping pong balls + liquid nitrogen

If you want to get kids interested in science, just show them this awesome physics demo.  Liquid nitrogen is placed in an enclosed container, buried under 1500 ping pong balls, and allowed to heat up.  Care to guess what happens?  Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

 

More money spent bailing out banks than on science

In the UK, professor Brian Cox claims that the UK has spent more money saving banks in a year, than it has spent on science for the past two thousand years (“since Jesus”).  It’s a bizarre claim, but when you look at the size of the bank bailouts, it certainly seems plausible. (source:BBC)

Billions and billions of stars…

Sure, we know there are billions and billions of stars in the universe, but our species is not good at comprehending large numbers.  What does ‘billions and billions’ actually look like?  Astronomers compiled a giant image of a small slice of the night sky, and if you go to this website, you can click and zoom in on different areas of that.  That’s where it really gets amazing…what at first appears like a light haze resolves itself into an incredible number of stars.  It’s an amazing universe we live in.

 

(via Discover Magazine)

Plummeting cost of rapid prototyping

The cost of rapid prototyping has been plummeting lately with open source products like the RepRap and MakerBot, but now it’s hitting a new low…$500 for an extrusion style rapid prototyping machine from Solidoodle.  What you save in money, you sacrifice in layer resolution…this Solidoodle, for example, uses 1.75mm extruded material so the parts have a definite stairstep look to them.  Still, it’s awfully impressive and even that limitation can be acceptable for a lot of uses (especially if you sand or fill the parts to smooth out the layers after building).  While material selection and build resolution are nowhere near as good as more expensive processes like SLS and SLA, this is a market that just didn’t exist a few years ago, and is quickly growing.  For those who don’t want to learn how to make their own 3D files, there are even websites like Thingverse where people can download files ready to print.

Frog sitting on a bench

See, this is what’s so amazing about the information society we’ve built up.  This is a video of a frog sitting on a bench in a human-like pose.  It’s 43 ridiculous seconds that over three million people have viewed so far.  The global reach of technology is astounding…the challenge is how to harness that to make the world a better place (frog videos are not accomplishing that…).

Super glass

Glass is one of those things that gets better the less you see it, and researchers at MIT have found a way to make it pretty awesome.  By creating a precise surface pattern of nanoscale cones on it, they’ve produced a material that is extremely clear, while also being anti-reflective, anti-glare, and superhydrophobic (water beads up on its surface, so it’s like an anti-fog coating).  About the only thing it doesn’t talk about is impact strength, but if you apply this surface treatment to something like Corning’s Gorilla Glass, you have a formula that’s sure to be a hit in any portable electronics application.

Time lapse video of Earth, seen from space

This is hardly new, but it’s worth sharing time and time again.  It’s a time lapse video taken of the most amazing planet our species has ever laid eyes upon, as seen from the International Space Station.  Nice to watch time and time again as a reminder of how awesome this planet is.

 

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