Interest of the day

Check out this cool Map of the Internet. Type in a web site address like google.com. The size of the circles shows the percentage of users that visit the site. The color indicate the country where the site is located.

L'Oreal is a nanotechnology patenting machine and has launched a new website for girls to show the cool thing you can do in science. The Girls in Science website provides information on women in sciences, careers in science, blcgs, and information about STEM fields. Some day soon the term Goldilocks might literally come true as some researcher have put gold nanoparticles into hair.

Colliding Particles is a series of 12 short films about scientist studying the Higgs Boson physics at CERN. The film follows a theoretical physics, an experimentalist and his grad student. They are looking for alternate ways of measuring the Higgs Field. Episode one introduces the team members. The cinematography is a little reminiscent of Errol Morris but not as good.

Time Magazine has posted an interesting story about the woman, Fabiola Gianotti, who was a literature, art, & history student and became the physicist director leading the team that discovered the Higgs Boson at CERN. Thus, Fabiola Gianotti is Time's runner up for person of the year.

Space Shuttle Endeavor has been prepared for shipping to LA. Photos of the orbiter have been taken and show the cockpit fully powered. Very cool. We should have been building a new generation of spacecraft every 20 years.

Mathematica has posted videos of their 2012 technical conference on YouTube. I've enjoyed the Arduino and Mathematica--Computation in the Maker World and Smart Meter-Driven Energy Analytics talks so far.

The NASA Wavelength website provides information for Earth and Space Science education that ranges from kindergarten level to graduate and professional level.

Professor Robert Lang describes how origami has changed with the application of mathematics to the rules of folding in his TED talk Folding way-new origami. He shows how to fold insects, dear, and other complex shapes. The techniques are being applied to space telescopes, and to stints. His group has created a program, TreeMaker, to help design most any origami concept into a fold pattern.

Peter Bohacek answers the question: How does work...work? in this short TED video. Work is the energy needed to applying a force over a distance such as lifting a mass in a gravitational field. Work and energy are both measured in Joules and power work/time and is measured in Joules/second or Watts.

In case you missed the NASA Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) 2012 Conference, you can watch an archive of some of the talks. Dr. Jay Falker gives a number of presentations on NIAC and on the process for submitting proposals. The remaining talks are given by the 2012 NICA proposal winners. There are a number very interesting concepts. I found the idea of 3D printing of spacecraft very interesting. I wish that Dr. Peck's keynote speech on Technology and the Future was available.