The official page of Drunk Science! An enthusiastic host performs simple experiments and then humorously explains the science behind the result, all while visibly drunk.
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Latest Posts by drunkscience4u - Page 3
The team behind Beauty of Science decided to explore the four seasons in this video combining macro footage of crystal growth, chemical reactions, and fluid dynamics. It’s always a fun game with videos like this to try and guess exactly what makes the mesmerizing patterns we see. Are those blue streaming waves in Spring caused by alcohol shifting the surface tension in a mixture? Are the dots of color welling up in Autumn a lighter fluid bursting up from underneath a denser one? As fun as the visuals are, though, what really made this video stand out for me was its excellent use of “The Blue Danube” to tie everything together. Check it out and don’t forget the audio! (Video credit: Beauty of Science; via Gizmodo)
um guys?
canada is currently considering banning imidacloprid, which is apparently “one of the most widely used bee-killing pesticides in the world”. this seems pretty huge, so if you’ve got two seconds, add your name to the list! as of posting this link, they need just over 8,000 more signatures by february 21!
Primitive plants are the latest forms of Earth life to show they can survive in the harshness of space, and for many months. Cold-loving algae from the Arctic Circle have joined the space-travelling club, alongside bacteria, lichens and even simple animals called tardigrades.
Preliminary studies of the algae after their return to Earth from the International Space Station lend some weight to the “panspermia” theory, that comets and meteorites could potentially deliver life to otherwise sterile planets. The results also provide insights into the potential for human colonies on distant planets to grow crops brought from Earth.
The algae were of the Sphaerocystis species, codenamed CCCryo 101-99, and were returned to Earth in June last year after spending 530 days on a panel outside the ISS. While space-borne, they withstood the vacuum, temperatures ranging from -20 °C at night to 47.2 °C during the day, plus perpetual ultraviolet radiation of a strength that would destroy most life on Earth if not filtered out by the atmosphere.
“I’m sure that plants of many kinds have been on the ISS before, but on the inside, not the outside,” says Thomas Leya of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology in Potsdam, Germany, who organised the algae experiment. “As far as I know, this is the first report of plants exposed on the surface of the space station.”
Continue Reading.
In spite of a decade of intense research, we still don’t have a commercially available vaccine for malaria.
While a candidate vaccine is being piloted next year, scientists have found a potentially more promising target in the bridge malaria makes with our red blood cells, which could lead to a more effective, cheaply made vaccine.
Continue Reading.
Largest Batch of Earth-size, Habitable Zone Planets
Our Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in an area called the habitable zone, where liquid water is most likely to exist on a rocky planet.
This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system.
Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.
This is the FIRST time three terrestrial planets have been found in the habitable zone of a star, and this is the FIRST time we have been able to measure both the masses and the radius for habitable zone Earth-sized planets.
All of these seven planets could have liquid water, key to life as we know it, under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.
At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets. To clarify, exoplanets are planets outside our solar system that orbit a sun-like star.
In this animation, you can see the planets orbiting the star, with the green area representing the famous habitable zone, defined as the range of distance to the star for which an Earth-like planet is the most likely to harbor abundant liquid water on its surface. Planets e, f and g fall in the habitable zone of the star.
Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated.
For comparison…if our sun was the size of a basketball, the TRAPPIST-1 star would be the size of a golf ball.
Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces.
The sun at the center of this system is classified as an ultra-cool dwarf and is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun.
The planets also are very close to each other. How close? Well, if a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.
The planets may also be tidally-locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong wind blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.
Because most TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky, and they are very close to one another, scientists view the Galilean moons of Jupiter – lo, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede – as good comparisons in our solar system. All of these moons are also tidally locked to Jupiter. The TRAPPIST-1 star is only slightly wider than Jupiter, yet much warmer.
How Did the Spitzer Space Telescope Detect this System?
Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing (aka transits) of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system.
Every time a planet passes by, or transits, a star, it blocks out some light. Spitzer measured the dips in light and based on how big the dip, you can determine the size of the planet. The timing of the transits tells you how long it takes for the planet to orbit the star.
The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets. Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using our upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone and other components of a planet’s atmosphere.
At 40 light-years away, humans won’t be visiting this system in person anytime soon…that said…this poster can help us imagine what it would be like:
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Seven planets, including three habitable ones, found around ultra-cool dwarf star
“Unlike the worlds in our Solar System, each one should be tidally locked to the parent star, meaning that the same side always sees “day” while the opposite side resides in eternal night. Yet life on Earth began in the oceans, and of these seven worlds, the fourth, fifth and sixth might all have conditions to support liquid oceans or lakes – if the atmosphere is favorable – bathed in eternal sunlight.”
What is it that makes our Solar System special? It’s Earth, of course. A rocky planet of the right mass and composition, the right distance from our Sun, the right atmosphere, the surface oceans, and all the life that’s ensued is what makes us special. Not just special, but unique, at least among the planets we’ve found so far. But there are other planetary systems out there with Earth-like worlds. Similar to Earth in mass, size, temperature and many other conditions, these might represent planets where life similar to what we find here arose. For the first time, we’ve found a planetary system with not just one Earth-like, potentially habitable world, but three!
Come meet the worlds around the ultra-cool star TRAPPIST-1, and learn what the prospects are for these worlds being truly Earth-like.
A Visualisation of the Recent Rapid Change in Temperature.
(GreenPeace)
Seer of Seers Sage of Sages Prognosticator of Prognosticators Weather Prophet Extraordinary
So reads the official title of Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous weather-predicting groundhog/woodchuck/marmot/whistle pig (yes, they are, in fact, all the same animal… surprises abound in the world of meteorological mammals).
Phil hails from the town of Punxsutawney, PA, where every year on February 2, a group of grown men sporting top hats and waxed mustaches pull him out of a box and ask him when winter will end. I can never keep straight whether seeing the shadow means spring will come early or if we’ll have a long winter, but this doesn’t really matter, since rodents are not good weather prediction tools.
Despite being about as reliable as a coin flip, Phil is joined in this annual tradition by more than a dozen North American groundhogs like Shubenecadie Sam, General Beauregard Lee, and Wisconson’s humbly-named Jimmy the Groundhog, seen here:
Surprise! Groundhogs can bite! And I would too, if you forcibly removed me from my warm, comfy house, held me aloft in the frigid air in front of thousands of gaping onlookers and flashing lights and asked me about a subject in which I have no expertise.
Rodents might not be real educated in the fields of meteorology and astronomy, but humans are! We’ve got Earth’s orbital mechanics and their corresponding effect on annual temperature cycles down to a literal science. We smart. Just look…
I dug into the science of seasons this week, and I discovered that our system of defining “winter” and “summer” and “spring” and “autumn”, at least the way that most of us non-meteorologists think of them, doesn’t really make sense when you compare it to the weather.
You might already know that we define “winter” or “summer” based on Earth’s position in relation to the sun, namely the solstices. This makes the seasons easy to keep track of, but for most of us these dates are unreliable, illogical, and remarkably disconnected from the actual weather. The little boxes on your calendar that say “First Day of Winter”, “First Day of Spring” and so on don’t line up very well with how cold or hot it is outside.
Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you try to apply a single calendar to an entire planet… could there be a better way?
You can learn the rest of the story by watching this week’s It’s Okay To Be Smart up at the top of this post. Enjoy!
December 17, 1965 – Stunning images of Earth captured by the astronauts of Gemini 7 as their craft raced around the planet.
(NASA/ASU)
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Flying to New Heights With the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission
A mission studying Earth’s magnetic field by flying four identical spacecraft is headed into new territory.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, has been studying the magnetic field on the side of Earth facing the sun, the day side – but now we’re focusing on something else. On February 9, MMS started the three-month-long process of shifting to a new orbit.
One key thing MMS studies is magnetic reconnection – a process that occurs when magnetic fields collide and re-align explosively into new positions. The new orbit will allow MMS to study reconnection on the night side of the Earth, farther from the sun.
Magnetic reconnection on the night side of Earth is thought to be responsible for causing the northern and southern lights.
To study the interesting regions of Earth’s magnetic field on the night side, the four MMS spacecraft are being boosted into an orbit that takes them farther from Earth than ever before. Once it reaches its final orbit, MMS will shatter its previous Guinness World Record for highest altitude fix of a GPS.
To save on fuel, the orbit is slowly adjusted over many weeks. The boost to take each spacecraft to its final orbit will happen during the first week of April.
On April 19, each spacecraft will be boosted again to raise its closest approach to Earth, called perigee. Without this step, the spacecraft would be way too close for comfort – and would actually reenter Earth’s atmosphere next winter!
The four MMS spacecraft usually fly really close together – only four miles between them – in a special pyramid formation called a tetrahedral, which allows us to examine the magnetic environment in three dimensions.
But during orbit adjustments, the pyramid shape is broken up to make sure the spacecraft have plenty of room to maneuver. Once MMS reaches its new orbit in May, the spacecraft will be realigned into their tetrahedral formation and ready to do more 3D magnetic science.
Learn more about MMS and find out what it’s like to fly a spacecraft.
Did you hear about the wooden statue that crashed a train
It was a bad conductor
The Strangest Eclipse Fact Of All: The Moon’s Shadow Isn’t A Circle
“These imperfections along the edge of the lunar limb don’t just reflect peaks and valleys on the Moon’s surface, but result in sharp edges and corners appearing on the Moon’s shadow as well. Thanks to incredibly accurate mapping of elevation of the entire lunar surface by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we know exactly what the profile of the Moon looks like. Combine that information with the Earth-Moon-Sun orbit, and we can derive what irregularities will be present during the August 21st, 2017 (or any) solar eclipse, when the Moon’s shadow passes across Earth’s surface.”
The Moon is spherical, and so its shadow should be a circle by simple geometry, right? Only, if we view it when it strikes Earth, it’s not even close to a circle. It’s stretched into an ellipse, and further complicated by irregular, sharp edges and corners. Why would it appear that way? As it turns out, three factors combine to get us there. The first is the fact that Earth is a sphere, not a disk, so any shadow falling on it gets stretched. The second is that the Moon’s sharp peaks, valleys and craters mean that its shadow gets irregularly distorted in a way that changes as its orbit continues. And the third is that Earth isn’t smooth, but exhibits significant changes in elevation and terrain.
Add them all up, and you’ve got the incredibly bizarre and ever-changing shape of the Moon’s shadow. Come see what the eclipse of August 21, 2017 will hold!
The First Galaxies: What We Know And What We Still Need To Learn
“As we look farther back in time, we find that younger galaxies formed stars at faster rates than galaxies do today. We can measure the star-formation rate, and find that at earlier and earlier times, it was more intense. But then we find it hits a peak when the Universe is about two billion years old. Go younger than that, and the rate goes down again.”
We’ve come incredibly far in our quest to learn how the Universe came to be the way it is today. We can see out in space for tens of billions of light years, to galaxies as they were when the Universe was only a few percent of its present age. We can see how galaxies evolve, merge and the stars inside change. And we can see to even before that, when no stars or galaxies existed at all. But how did we get from there to here? There are still plenty of gaps in the story. We’ve never seen the first stars or galaxies; we’ve never witnessed the start of cosmic reionization; we’ve never seen the star formation rate jump from zero to a real, finite number. Yet with James Webb and WFIRST on the horizon, these gaps in our knowledge may – if we’re lucky – all disappear.
Come get the story on what we know about the first galaxies, and what we hope and have left to still learn!
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A tesla coil gun made from a giant coil that uses re-purposed MRI capacitors with a water-cooled backpack. This looks like something out of Ghostbusters. (Source)