spaceplasma:

Kirlian photography

Kirlian photography is a collection of photographic techniques used to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges. It is named after Semyon Kirlian, who, in 1939 accidentally discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a high-voltage source, an image is produced on the photographic plate.

Kirlian photography is a technique for creating contact print photographs using high voltage. The process entails placing sheet photographic film on top of a metal discharge plate. The object to be photographed is then placed directly on top of the film. High voltage is momentarily applied to the metal plate, thus creating an exposure. The corona discharge between the object and the high voltage plate is captured by the film. The developed film results in a Kirlian photograph of the object.

Color photographic film is calibrated to faithfully produce colors when exposed to normal light. Corona discharges can interact with minute variations in the different layers of dye used in the film, resulting in a wide variety of colors depending on the local intensity of the discharge. Film and digital imaging techniques also record light produced by photons emitted during corona discharge (see Mechanism of corona discharge).

Photographs of inanimate objects such as a coins, keys and leaves can be made more effectively by grounding the object to the earth, a cold water pipe or to the opposite (polarity) side of the high voltage source. Grounding the object creates a stronger corona discharge.

Kirlian photography does not require the use of a camera or a lens because it is a contact print process. It is possible to use a transparent electrode in place of the high voltage discharge plate, allowing one to capture the resulting corona discharge with a standard camera or a video camera.

astro-stoner:

shityo:

morefunthanbeingsad:

physicsphysics:

An interesting model of our solar system’s path as it travels through space in the Milky Way.

Certainly a departure from usual models that show the Sun as a static object, which it certainly isn’t

I had no idea this was happening. Where are we going?

To fuck some shit up

Around the center of the Milky Way, which is heading towards the Andromeda Galaxy.  And our whole Local Group is moving towards the Virgo Cluster.

But we’ll never actually reach the Virgo Cluster because space is expanding between us and them faster than we’re moving towards it.

Motherfucking science.

I’m pretty sure this is inaccurate, and that I’ve reblogged this before, but the animation is moving along the wrong axis. The solar system is moving longitudinally, not laterally, through space, as we travel around the center of the galaxy. The only way for this to be accurate is if this image accounted for that and depicted the motion of the entire galaxy along with it.

webbut:

thatscienceguy:

This is a simulation of a rotating 4 dimensional Cube, otherwise known as a Tesseract.

What you are seeing is it Rotating. It is not being distorted, reshaped, or anything like that. it is simply Rotating - It appears to be distorted because you are only seeing the ‘projection’ of it. similarly if you rotated a 3D cube infront of lamp the shadow you would see would appear to distort.

Everytime I see a Tesseract It makes me want to read Flatland

They made a movie out of it.

zucchinis:

wake up disney

Thank you, Marco J, for the much-needed reality check.

You neglected one variable, however: the rug is flying.
Your argument is invalid.

I had all of these. They bounced SUPER high. I took them to the pool and would bounce them off the ground, into the air, and into the pool. Then I’d dive after them to see that the sphere surrounding the Pokemon looked almost invisible under water. The ball the characters were contained in must have had a similar refractive index to the pool’s water.

science-junkie:

A storage power plant on the seabed

Norwegian research scientists will contribute to realising the concept of storing electricity at the bottom of the sea. The energy will be stored with the help of high water pressure.

The idea of an underwater pumped hydroelectric power plant may sound like Jules Verne fiction, but then it was hatched by a German engineer who has spent much of his professional life working in aerospace technology.

“Imagine opening a hatch in a submarine under water. The water will flow into the submarine with enormous force. It is precisely this energy potential we want to utilize,” explains Rainer Schramm, inventor and founder of the company Subhydro AS to Gemini.no. “Many people have launched the idea of storing energy by exploiting the pressure at the seabed, but we are the first in the world to apply a specific patent-pending technology to make this possible,” he adds.

Read more

This is totally awesome.

With this, we could really help the world’s rising energy demands.

brookhavenlab:

The Sound of the Big Bang

If a universe explodes into existence, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? The answer, according to physicist John Cramer, is a resounding yes.

“The early universe was like a hypersphere of space that was resonating with frequencies rollicking around in it,” said Cramer, a University of Washington physics professor who also conducts research at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). He used temperature fluctuation maps of the early universe to create a recording of the Big Bang as it might have sounded 14 billion years ago.

“There’s that saying from the Alien movie franchise: In space, nobody can hear you scream. The logic is that it’s a vacuum and sound waves can’t propagate, but in the early universe, someone could hear you scream. The medium was a lot more dense than even the atmosphere of today’s Earth,” Cramer said.

“The special thing about the early universe is that because it was so small, sound waves could propagate and come back around on themselves. As it opened up, as the universe expanded, the sound got Doppler-shifted to higher and higher frequencies,” he said.

The Big Bang was a bass singer to rival all others. The frequencies of the volatile birth of the universe were so low, they were out of range of human hearing. Just to get the recording to a frequency humans can hear, Cramer had to increase the frequency of the universe’s big debut by 100 septillion times.

So, yes, the Big Bang made a sound, but even if we were around to hear it, we couldn’t have done so without the help of modern technology.

astronemma:

Controversially, Physicist Argues Time Is Real

Is time real, or the ultimate illusion?

Most physicists would say the latter, but Lee Smolin challenges this orthodoxy in his new book, “Time Reborn”. In a conversation with Duke University neuroscientist Warren Meck, theoretical physicist Smolin, who’s based at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, argued for the controversial idea that time is real. “Time is paramount,” he said, “and the experience we all have of reality being in the present moment is not an illusion, but the deepest clue we have to the fundamental nature of reality.” 

Read more: [x]

I disagree with this guy, but I understand why he is inclined to think it is real.

Momentum and Portal - Sixty Symbols

Professor Moriarty requested that we re-visit one aspect of physics in the game Portal 2 - humour him!

Previous videos at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw6JIB… and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKAQ1P…

Visit our website at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/
We’re on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/sixtysymbols
And Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/periodicvideos
This project features scientists from The University of Nottingham
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/physics/i…

“Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out”
- GLaDOS, describing speed being retained through portals.

mothernaturenetwork:

New organic solar cells process sunlight as plants do

Organic solar cells would create renewable energy, rely less on fossil fuels, be recyclable, and be cheaper than current cells.

I knew it would come to this. Plants were doing what we were trying to do, but more efficiently. We can either learn from nature and try to improve it, or stick with what (barely) works. One day, solar cells with 99% conversion rates will allow us to really produce power everywhere the sun can reach.

Ladies and gentlemen, “The God Particle.”

Units: they’re important.