Interest of the day

Professor Walter H.G. Lewin is quite famous for his lectures on physics at MIT. Professor Lewin is heavily involved in studying x-ray sources. He brings astrophysics into his lecture when ever possible. The three lecture series is open source and includes:

• Physics I: Classical Mechanics
• Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism
• Physics III: Vibrations and Waves

In lecture one, he shows the class the film Power of 10 with Philip Morrison, but it does not show up in the video due to copyright issues, but is available on the web (follow the link). An updated interactive version is also available.

Don't miss the NOVA special Hunting The Elements Wednesday at 9 PM (2 hrs).

Researchers at the The Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) produce 3D visualizations of the universe. These images and videos show the formation of the universe, or stars based on present theories.

Mandelbulber is a 3D Mandelbrot fractal builder tool. The images in the gallery are stunning.

Wind cold, foreboding, yet so powerful. The Hint.fm website has posted a Wind Map that is updated once an hour from the National Digital Forecast Database.

The folks at Sixty Symbols have posted a video showing the Inside the Large Hadron Collider (CMS). The LHC Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is huge and very impressive. You can see the excitement and awe of this world class experiment in Professor Ed Copeland description of the system.

I've been reading the Shape of Inner space by Shing-Tung Yau. It's about the geometry of spacetime and super fascinating. It is also integral to String Theory. I was looking up a reference and found this 2D (quasi-3D) visualization of a 6-D Calabi-Yau manifold on the Wolfram website. It's very cool and the gif appears to be animated.

The NSF reports the US R&D Expenditures for 2008 and 2009. US companies spent $291 billion on research and development in 2008, but this decreased in $282 billion in 2009. For more details follow the link above.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Hosted the 2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Faster Than the Speed of Light on March 20, 2012. The debate was sold out with 700 people in the overflow room. The debate was streamed live too and is now available on archive. It was billed as a debate but was more of a discussion about particle physics and the current research be performed to today at CERN. The focus was mainly on neutrinos and the the faster than light neutrinos measured by the OPERA experiment. It was a good discussion, but needed a bit more introduction to the character of the particles being discussed.

This short video describes the March 8-10, 2012 solar storm that hit the Earth. The Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) imparted 26 GWh of energy to the atmosphere. 95% of this energy was reflected back into space by the carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.