Understanding E=MC² Did you know?

  

Using Einstein's formula - if it were possible to entirely convert every grain in a lump of coal weighing just 2.2 pounds to energy - it could power a 100 watt light bulb for 29 Million years (25 billion kilowatt-hours). By conventional means it would only burn for 67 hours.
Entirely converting all energy in a paperclip would produce the energy equivalent to that contained in an atom bomb.
In an Einsteinian dream world, power generation could be billions of times more efficient than ordinary combustion -- and leave behind no ash or smoke!

  

NASA CURIOSITY TEAM.

  

CERN Breaks Record for Hottest Man-Made Temperature

Remember CERN? Sure you do! They were the folks with the Large Hadron Collider who discovered that Higgs boson thing back in July. Well, they’re at it again with all their science and their 17-mile-long particle accelerator, and they’ve even broken a world record. CERN’s physicists have created the highest human-made temperature in history with their ALICE heavy ion collider, beating the previous record of four trillion Kelvin. ALICE produced a quark-gluon plasma, a sort of subatomic milkshake if you replace the milk with quarks, the ice cream with gluons, the blender with a large ion collider, and the cherry on top with ground-breaking scientific discovery. This is starting to sound less and less like a milkshake.

Haha! Get it? Like scoop of ice cream? No? Anyone? I’m so sorry.

Most of us know about the European Organization for Nuclear Research and their success in finding a “Higgs-like” particle with their Large Hadron Collider, but fewer people know about their other experiments at the LHC. CERN physicists conducted a total of six experiments using six different particle detectors. Of the six, the ATLAS and CMS experiments led to the discovery of the Higgs-like particle as announced on July 4 of this year. But we don’t care about those silly experiments right now; we’ve got bigger fish to fry in a five-and-a-half-trillion degree beer-batter!

The large ion collider experiment, creatively-titled “A Large Ion Collider Experiment” or “ALICE,” was design to study heavy ion collisions. The LHC collided lead ions at extraordinarily high speeds in order to produce quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter which existed immediately following the Big Bang.

We all learned the states of matter in school: You have your solids, your liquids, and your gases. There you go, you’ve got the states of matter. So what’s all this nonsense about quark-gluon plasmas? CERN’s website explains it beautifully:

All ordinary matter in today’s Universe is made up of atoms. Each atom contains a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a cloud of electrons. Protons and neutrons are in turn made of quarks which are bound together by other particles called gluons. This incredibly strong bond means that isolated quarks have never been found.
Collisions in the LHC will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun. Physicists hope that under these conditions, the protons and neutrons will “melt”, freeing the quarks from their bonds with the gluons. This should create a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which probably existed just after the Big Bang when the Universe was still extremely hot.

The ALICE experiment is designed to study this hip, new state of matter as it expands and cools. The physicists at CERN hope to learn about the way quark-gluon plasmas formed the particles that make up every kind of matter in the universe. Future discoveries based on this research could help us better understand just how this big, crazy universe of ours came into being.
Some of the temperatures generated for the ALICE are estimated to be 38% hotter than those generated by another large ion collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York, which capped out at a world-record temperature of roughly four trillion Kelvin (that’s 7.2e12 degrees Fahrenheit). Experiments conducted using the RHIC led to the discovery that quark-gluon plasmas behave like perfect, frictionless liquids. The quark-gluon plasma produced by the RHIC in 2005 is still expanding and cooling into other forms of matter, so it’s unlikely that we will hear much about the quark-gluon plasma from the LHC anytime soon.

35-Year-Old Voyager 2 Probe Is NASA's Longest Mission Ever

The iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft celebrated its 35th birthday Monday (Aug. 20) in a milestone for NASA's longest-running mission ever.
Voyager 2 launched in 1977 just 16 days before its twin, Voyager 1. The probes were tasked chiefly with studying Saturn, Jupiter and the gas giants' moons, but have continued on through the solar system and are now about to cross into interstellar space. Voyager 1 is due to cross first, becoming the first manmade object to travel beyond our solar system, and Voyager 2 is not far behind.
"Even 35 years on, our rugged Voyager spacecraft are poised to make new discoveries as we eagerly await the signs that we've entered interstellar space," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement Monday. "Voyager results turned Jupiter and Saturn into full, tumultuous worlds, their moons from faint dots into distinctive places, and gave us our first glimpses of Uranus and Neptune up-close. We can't wait for Voyager to turn our models of the space beyond our sun into the first observations from interstellar space." [Voyager 2 Still Trekkin' at 35 (Video)]
On Aug. 13, Voyager 2 became NASA's longest-operating mission when it broke the previous record of 12,758 days of operation set by the Pioneer 6 probe, which launched on Dec. 16, 1965, and sent its last signal home on Dec. 8, 2000.
Voyager 2 is currently about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from the sun and traveling away in a southerly direction, NASA officials said. For the past five years it has been sending back information about the outer layer of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. No one really knows how long it will take to get to interstellar space, but NASA officials said the Voyager twins will have enough power to keep communicating with Earth until 2020, possibly 2025.
The Voyager 1 probe, meanwhile, is about 11 billion miles (18 billion km) from the sun and traveling north as it makes its way out of the solar system.
"We continue to listen to Voyager 1 and 2 nearly every day," Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA's statement. "The two spacecraft are in great shape for having flown through Jupiter’s dangerous radiation environment and having to endure the chill of being so far away from our sun."

In case the spacecraft encounter any life beyond our solar system, the Voyager probes each carry a golden record with a collection of sights and sounds from Earth, including 117 images and greetings in 54 languages, with a variety of natural and human-made sounds like storms, volcanoes, rocket launches, airplanes and animals. The collection was chosen by a committee chaired by the late Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan.

JUST IMAGIN

Did You Know ? Hanshin Expressway Goes Through a Building

It's not easy building a new highway in Japan, since it's one of the most crowded places in the world. For instance, often you'll find that the place where you want to build your roadway happens to be obstructed by a skyscraper. There's no place else to put it, and the owners of the building certainly don't feel like tearing it down. What do you do?

This is how the candle will glow in space i.e zero gravity.

Scientific curiosity

So wings work by forcing air to move faster over the upper surface than the lower surface, thus causing the air pressure above the wing to be reduced compared with the air pressure below it.
In order for this to happen air has to rush over the wing some how.
Could the pressure difference be accomplished another way, thus allowing VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing)?

I think it can, but I'm not exactly sure how :-)
Could vibration be used to reduce the air pressure above an object?
Possibly.
Sound or microwave?
No idea.
But this got me thinking.
The effect sought is a comparatively reduced air (atmospheric) pressure above the object (the craft) producing the effect.
Since the pressure is felt by the object in PSI (Pounds per Square Inch), the surface area subject to air pressure is at the heart of the equation.

So if an object was created that had a greater down-facing surface area than up-facing, would it simply lift?
No applied energy.

Does anyone know why this (at least in theory) can't work?

Intel robos

Meet your next Intel-powered Robot. Hello Q.bo! With its “brain” as either an Intel #Atom  or an Intel #Core i3/5/7 processor nestled inside its plastic head, Q.bo contains advanced #technology that will allow you to explore, dream, create and develop thousands of things. http://iq.intel.com/story/15087935/hello-q-bo

1st colour photo of mars sent by curiosity.

Great New Color  of the  Landing - "...NASA's curiosity rover has transmitted its first color photo and a low-resolution video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere, giving earthlings a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world."

This Day in History Aug 7, 1959: U.S. satellite photographs earth

From the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the U.S. unmanned spacecraft Explorer 6 is launched into an orbit around the earth. The spacecraft, commonly known as the "Paddlewheel" satellite, featured a photocell scanner that transmitted a crude picture of the earth's surface and cloud cover from a distance of 17,000 miles. The photo, received in Hawaii, took nearly 40 minutes to transmit.

Released by NASA in September, the first photograph ever taken of the earth by a U.S. satellite depicted a crescent shape of part of the planet in sunlight. It was Mexico, captured by Explorer 6 as it raced westward over the earth at speeds in excess of 20,000 miles an hour.

Science vs Religion. Science wins.

Not enough words to explain what I feel looking at this.

curiosity's landing position on mars

Image sent by curiosity after its landing.