Archive for the 'Sciences' category

Normally, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is interesting only the physicists for its uses in scientific research and the physicians for the fabulous pictures it gives of the insides of the human body.

An MRI scanner will allow to display fine cuts of the body of the patient laid into the machine, but what is to be seen when the human guinea pig is replaced with fruits or vegetables? We discover the new face of these friends of our everyday food. And when the pictures are animated, this gives something like:

Impressed? Go and check the others on http://insideinsides.blogspot.com/.

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These are language courses which have been developed by the US government and are set in the public domain. So, you can use them as much as you want.

A long list of languages:

Source: fsi-language-courses.org.

2,053 nuclear explosions took place around the world during the 20th century, starting with the detonations at Alamogordo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the more recent tests in India and Pakistan in 1998.

Building a tall structure able to resist the worst earthquakes, asks for some flexibility in the architecture. For this, it may be useful to do some tests simulating the furious conditions of a real earthquake.

You certainly know the basic principles of the operation of a 4-stroke engine with its different phases:

• piston going down to suck gas and air in
• piston going up to compress the mixture
• piston going down pushed by the explosion
• piston going up to push burnt gas out of the cylinder

Let’s admire the actual operation filmed at ultra-high speed from inside the cylinder:

If you were not sure that genetics was a science, you needed a controlled experiment. Here is the result of such an experiment:

Here, we don’t even speak about Summer or Winter; This is not about global warming either. The Rasmussen College presents us a great poster sweeping the widest possible range of temperatures to allow us to travel through universe’s thermal diversity.

I hope they will sell the poster somewhere.

If you’re not a scientist and you don’t understand these, there is no shame to feel. Some scientists are just wondering what this is all about…

Source: Brian Malow on Fora.tv.

A nice Flash animation that you can play with to get a grasp of the dimensional diversity of our universe. Fly from portion of a yocto-meter to many yotta-meters.

Vinyl records are a thing of the past, mostly. But it’s still very nice to see how they look when you zoom in with an Electron Microscope.

Reckon has a gallery of images that show the finely engraved grooves of a vinyl record.

It also shows this video of how a vinyl record was made.

The fashion of drawing fractals is a memory of the past (it was probably linked to the first appearance of computers able to collate the computing power for the needed calculations and the display capacity for complex images). But the pleasure is all mine to find this HD video which sends us into a Mandelbrot set, this fractal structure (which seems to never change whatever the observation scale – a little like the ever finely cut coast of Brittany).

So, here are 10 minutes of total fractal travel:

The zoom is so intense that the original fractal is larger than the known universe, but the last image gives details smaller than the smaller of nuclear physics particle.

Astonishing mathematics via Boing Boing.

The TED Talk conferences are often a great moment of technologie accessible to the largest numbers and an opportunity for the démonstration of what could be our future if the great thinkers of our time work on it.

The following conference (from Pranav Mistry) wants to give us a rought idea of perspectives opened by a rather recent technologie named SixthSense willing to put computers in our world rather than forcing us to flow in the computers mould.

It gets real speed and starts getting exhilarating after 6 or 7 minutes. Be patient, it’s worth it.

Thanks Xtian.

An enormous aquarium in Japan (Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium).

Think about it: Some divers dream of meeting a Whale Sharks. Here, you can meet four of them!

Beards, they are amazing, full of surprises, flowering with novelty. Do you want some evidence?

You can join the competition for the beard holding the largest number of wooden toothpicks:

2222 toothpicks in a single beard!

If you feel a pinch, don’t accuse the beard!

In order to stay on the competition field, there was this beard contest in Alaska in May 2009. The new champion: David Traver.
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Sharks are amazing killing machines, very efficient predators of the seas. But they are not only that. They also have some behaviors that could be described as interesting, astonishing, amazing, curious or mind-boggling (depending on your state of mind and what you think about the interaction between sharks and divers).

May I parallel this video with a previous post where I was showing the photo of a Japanese diver putting identification marks on a giant jellyfish?

There are not only creepy aliens in space (where no one can hear you scream). There are also monster-shaped galaxies.

A Spectre in the Eastern Veil

Thanks to NASA.

Magnetic levitation is considered by some as the future of train technology. Several real trains have actually been created (the German industry has been a pioneer and is in a strong competition with Japan for the development of such MagLev trains or Magnetic Levitation trains). But did you really see how it works? It’s easy. Check this demonstration with maglev toy trains.

The tracks are made of traditional magnets and the train contain a big super-conducting magnet (cooled down by liquid nitrogen to maintain its super-conducting characteristics). Everything is relying heavily on magnetic fields. So, not surprisingly, these fields can be observed in the real train. The following video — shot on the Rokko Liner in Kobe, Japan — shows metal paper clips dancing on the stray magnetic fields of such a Maglev train, going through the floor of one of the passenger cars.

Don’t drop your credit card (or an age-old floppy disk) on the floor for fear of seeing it quickly erased.