Interest of the day

Check out this really cool 3D visualization of the 100,000 stars near us. The project was an experiment for the Chrome browser. It works great on the Chrome browser but the scroll wheel input does not respond when using Firefox. Use the slider control on the right.

Brian Cox gave a wonderful lecture about the universe late last year. I did not know that the Hubble constant= 42 miles/second/3 million light years. He described it this way as a homage to Douglas Adams and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This tells us that the farther away a star or galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. So here's the really neat part 1/(Hubble constant)=13.73 million light years which is the age of the universe.

The Maker Faire NYC 2012 talks are now available as an archive on their site. They had a lot of good and interesting talks this year. It's nice to see so much university involvement and research in DIY projects.

This short video describes the life of star. It's nicely illustrated.

Serge Haroche and David Wineland have won the Nobel prize in physics for controlling and measuring the state of Schroedinger's cat . IOP Science has made 30 of their papers available to read for free now.

Researchers at the Fermi lab are trying to understand the strange behavior of neutrinos. The three neutrino types of flavors include electron, muon, and tau. The neutrinos appear to change from one flavor to another as they travel from place to place. The NuMI Off-Axis Neutrino Appearance experiment (NOvA) will study the properties of neutrinos and try to understand the oscillations between flavors (like between electron and muon) as they travel from the source to the detector. The description of the experiment also includes a short video which does a nice job of explaining the basics of neutrinos. I hope to learn how a particle can change flavor to a something with more mass and not emit light or violate conservation of mass laws.

Minute Physics has posted a tutorial on How to simulate the universe on your laptop.

RIP Neil Armstrong. You inspired us all to want to go into space. He died from complications from heart surgery. NBC News posted an account of his death and life. The BBC Documentary which was posted on YouTube early this year provides a nice biography of Neil Armstrong.

Professor Ken Pounds from the University of Leicester presents a History of X-ray Astronomy in this short video on the BBC News website.


Crab Nebula

SixtySymbols has posted a very good video demonstrating thermal expansion in a metal (copper wire} and the force between a moving charge (the current) and a magnet.