Stuff I find interesting

At each moment, light (as well as electromagnetism and gravitational force) is coming towards you from every direction, in a sphere around you.  The light has left its location at different times, from the Moon; 2 seconds ago, the Sun; 8 minutes ago, Vega; 25 years ago, Andromeda; 2 million years ago and so on.  You could imagine a set of concentric spheres, each one containing a part of the universe you are experiencing.  The greater the radius of the sphere, the farther back in time you experience that part.  In the diagram this is represented as the “past light cone”; each ‘sphere’ becomes a circular slice of that cone.  The present moment of each location in spacetime is the focused intersection or standing wave pattern of all waves and forces originating within the past light cone of that location.  Likewise, all electromagnetic and gravitational waves and forces traveling into the future of the present are ‘dispersed’ relative to the observer by the inverse square law; intensity is proportional to 1/(distance²).  For example, all the light the bounced off of a pterosaur 200 million years ago and passed through Earths atmosphere is still out there, traveling, 200 million light years away.  It is incredibly diffuse, you would need to construct a telescope billions of light years across to create an image, but the information still exists. 

For forces that travel at light speed, we only experience and effect the surface of the light cones.  Matter, which travels at less than light speed through space, influences us and is effected by us within the volume of the light cones.  All matter and forces travel at light speed, but in different dimensions.  Light is restricted to space dimensions, and does not experience time.  Matter travels at light speed primarily through time, and can also travel through space relative to other objects.  To maintain light speed, matter will move less through time, giving rise to relativistic effects such as time dilation.  Here I will cite "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, an excellent book that shaped my thinking on this subject.

guy let a Quake 3 server run for four years to see how good the learning AI would get

Thriving since 1960, my garden in a bottle: Seedling sealed in its own ecosystem and watered just once in 53 years.

“To look at this flourishing mass of plant life you’d think David Latimer was a green-fingered genius. Truth be told, however, his bottle garden – now almost in its 53rd year – hasn’t taken up much of his time. In fact, on the last occasion he watered it Ted Heath was Prime Minister and Richard Nixon was in the White House.

For the last 40 years it has been completely sealed from the outside world. But the indoor variety of spiderworts (or Tradescantia, to give the plant species its scientific Latin name) within has thrived, filling its globular bottle home with healthy foliage.

Yesterday Mr Latimer, 80, said: ‘It’s 6ft from a window so gets a bit of sunlight. It grows towards the light so it gets turned round every so often so it grows evenly. ‘Otherwise, it’s the definition of low-maintenance. I’ve never pruned it, it just seems to have grown to the limits of the bottle.’ 

The bottle garden has created its own miniature ecosystem. Despite being cut off from the outside world, because it is still absorbing light it can photosynthesize  the process by which plants convert sunlight into the energy they need to grow.”

So how does it work exactly?

“Bottle gardens work because their sealed space creates an entirely self-sufficient ecosystem in which plants can survive by using photosynthesis to recycle nutrients.

The only external input needed to keep the plant going is light, since this provides it with the energy it needs to create its own food and continue to grow.

Light shining on the leaves of the plant is absorbed by proteins containing chlorophylls (a green pigment).

Some of that light energy is stored in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a molecule that stores energy. The rest is used to remove electrons from the water being absorbed from the soil through the plant’s roots.

These electrons then become ‘free’ - and are used in chemical reactions that convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, releasing oxygen.

This photosynthesis process is the opposite of the cellular respiration that occurs in other organisms, including humans, where carbohydrates containing energy react with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, water, and release chemical energy.

But the eco-system also uses cellular respiration to break down decaying material shed by the plant. In this part of the process, bacteria inside the soil of the bottle garden absorbs the plant’s waste oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide which the growing plant can reuse.

And, of course, at night, when there is no sunlight to drive photosynthesis, the plant will also use cellular respiration to keep itself alive by breaking down the stored nutrients.

Because the bottle garden is a closed environment, that means its water cycle is also a self-contained process.

The water in the bottle gets taken up by plants’ roots, is released into the air during transpiration, condenses down into the potting mixture, where the cycle begins again.”

Acoustic Levitation

Using sound waves to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing pharmaceutical drugs and drying them in mid-air. Why do this? This is useful because most of the drugs on the market are either amorphous or crystalline and the crystalline form doesn’t get absorbed by the body. So levitating the solution allows the drug to be made into an amorphous state (by evaporation) because if it were to touch any surface it would simply crystallize. They call this “containerless processing”.

The frequencies used are just above the audible range at about 22 kilohertz and when the two speakers are aligned they create two sets of sound waves, perfectly interfering with each other creating a phenomenon known as a standing wave. This allows the objects to levitate in areas within the waves known as nodes as the acoustic pressure is enough to cancel the force of gravity.

A lab has created negative temperatures? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!

Record Temperature Set: Colder than Absolute Zero: “The inverted Boltzmann distribution is the hallmark of negative absolute temperature, and this is what we have achieved,” said researcher Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the University of Munich in Germany. “Yet the gas is not colder than zero kelvin, but hotter. It is even hotter than at any positive temperature — the temperature scale simply does not end at infinity, but jumps to negative values instead.”

Magic Plan App: Making Floor Plans on Your Phone

Body suit may soon enable the paralyzed to walk: An international research team announces it has taken a key step toward achieving its goal of a “prosthetic exoskeleton” that a quadriplegic could command by brain power. They demonstrated that they could bypass the body’s complex network of nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains of monkeys. Doing so with humans is their next objective.

How Futurama Gets Science Right (Sort Of)

Bender, the hard-drinking, kleptomaniac, aspiring folk singer robot, sure hates to work about as much as he loves himself. In the episode “Benderama,” Bender avoid doing “two things” — folding two sweaters — by simply doing one thing: making two smaller copies of himself using a new invention by the Professor. To make the smaller clones, however, Bender has to ingest an equal amount of matter from which to build the mini-Benders. Complications ensue when the mini-Benders make their own copies in an infinite series that threaten all of Earth’s resources. This scenario is actually based on a doomsday scenario dubbed “gray goo” first proposed by author and nanotechnology expert K. Eric Drexler. In his book “Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology,” Drexler examines a scenario in which automated nanotechnology created self-replicating machines that would eventually use up all of Earth’s resources.

FORD EVOS IS CLOUD-CONNECTED

Ford’s newest concept car is one of the first from a major manufacturer that will store data on and retrieve it from the Cloud. 

The Internet-connected vehicle could provide access to the Web to scan weather and traffic reports in real-time in order to suggest routes, warn of accidents ahead or even alter the suspension and handling to fit the road conditions. A rainy, wet road might require more responsive steering.