Misc. science facts

[haswrong]

The light powered by GRAVITY: Lamp uses energy from falling weight to illuminate homes without electricity


It works using a pulley system where a weight can be fixed at one end and as it drops the force drives a generator through a series of low torque gears.
The generator produces just under a tenth of a watt which powers an LED light on the unit itself and two smaller satellite lights that can be hung over a desk or bed.

The designers of GravityLight claim that with a 26lb (12kg) weight it is possible to provide between 25 minutes of light if installed at a height of six feet (1.8 metres).


Jim Reeves and Martin Riddiford, who are based in London, invented the device.
They point out that unlike devices that rely upon solar energy to provide power to remote communities, gravity does not disappear at night.
The device is installed to the ceiling of a room and a bag filled with around 26ft (12kg) of rocks or sand is attached to a cord that runs through the unit.
A beaded cord running through the unit allows the weight to be lifted into the air and it then falls slowly to the ground.
A system of gears and a generator inside the device convert the kinetic energy released by the bag as it falls under the influence of gravity into electricity.
Once the bag reaches the ground it can be raised back up to the ceiling to produce more power.
The energy produced can be used to power the light and other devices attached to a DC power outlet.

The generator produces just under a tenth of a watt which powers and provides between 20 to 30 minutes of light if installed at a height of over 6ft (1.8 metres).

The GravityLight comes with a bag that can be filled with sand or rocks to provide the weight needed to power it

in the past, clocks were powered by gravity..

 

[Ahhzz]

Science is fun

 

[twilyth]

9 biggest mysteries in physics - http://www.livescience.com/34052-unsolved-mysteries-physics.html

 

[Steevo]

They have found people who were considered mentally ill could and did paint/draw certain specific things as if they understood the chaos in the physical world.

 

[twilyth]

Faraday cages leak - http://physicsworld.com/cws/article...-cages-less-effective-than-previously-thought

 

[twilyth]

A couple of small changes to a harmless bacterium created yersinia pestis - The Black Death.

But fleas are only part of the story of the plague’s development. While Hinnebusch was working on urease, Lathem was examining another small genetic change that allowed the plague to defeat one of the body’s main defense mechanisms: blood clots.

When a flea bites into flesh, the body responds by clotting blood to prevent bleeding and promote healing. If a plague bacterium gets trapped in this clot, it can’t multiply and spread itself through its new host. Lathem showed that Y. pestis has a gene called pla that its ancestors lack. This gene encodes for a protein that helps to dissolve blood clots. Without a clot, the bacterium is free to spread to the nearest lymph node, where it makes billions of copies of itself.

Lathem’s work, which was published in Science, showed that pla is required for pneumonic plague, a form of plague that can be transmitted from person to person and can kill its host in under 24 hours. But Lathem didn’t know whether pla was the only factor necessary. He turned to several ancestral strains of Y. pestis that continue to circulate in rodents in the highlands of China and Central Asia, likely the ancestral home of the bacterium. These strains provided an intermediate version between Y. pseudotuberculosis and modern Y. pestis. More importantly, some of these particular strains lacked pla.

See the following for BD tour dates

 

[twilyth]

I think I've posted before about plasma wakefield accelerators. Now it looks like you can build a pretty powerful accelerator with just a little silica.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/shrinking-the-accelerator

The speeding electrons then entered a chip made of silica and traveled through a microscopic tunnel that had tiny ridges carved into its walls. Laser light shining on the chip interacted with those ridges and produced an electrical field that boosted the energy of the passing electrons.

In the experiments, the chip achieved an acceleration gradient, or energy boost over a given distance, roughly 10 times higher than the existing 2-mile-long SLAC linear accelerator can provide. At full potential, this means the SLAC accelerator could be replaced with a series of accelerator chips 100 meters long, roughly the length of a football field.

 

[Ahhzz]

Hmmm.. to wake this thread up a little, let's throw some Quantum Mechanics in.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.167802

https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-researchers-discover-new-state-water-molecule

A situation in which water acts like neither liquid, gas, nor solid....

“At low temperatures, this tunneling water exhibits quantum motion through the separating potential walls, which is forbidden in the classical world. This means that the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are ‘delocalized’ and therefore simultaneously present in all six symmetrically equivalent positions in the channel at the same time. It’s one of those phenomena that only occur in quantum mechanics and has no parallel in our everyday experience.”

 

[rtwjunkie]

Hmmm.. to wake this thread up a little, let's throw some Quantum Mechanics in.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.167802

https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-researchers-discover-new-state-water-molecule

A situation in which water acts like neither liquid, gas, nor solid....

“At low temperatures, this tunneling water exhibits quantum motion through the separating potential walls, which is forbidden in the classical world. This means that the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are ‘delocalized’ and therefore simultaneously present in all six symmetrically equivalent positions in the channel at the same time. It’s one of those phenomena that only occur in quantum mechanics and has no parallel in our everyday experience.”

My head....it's threatening to explode.....

 

[Drone]

Manchester astronomers detect precious element in space

 

[Drone]

Can't stand asap bullshit but this one is awesome

And this one too

Because these guys don't take themselves seriously ... ever

 

[Drone]

Short but informative video about how Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel and Turing changed the world. Basically proving that we know jack shit about the things lol


Full transcript is here

 

[Drone]

Supernova explosions that occurred millions of years ago and 300 ly away may have had a significant impact on Earth

Covalent Bonding. Duh .. everybody knows this but it's pretty short simple and informative video

 

[Drone]

MagLab scientists uncover secrets of the highly radioactive element Berkelium

 

[qubit]

@Drone That Bk (Burger King) element sounds fascinating, but even more fascinating is what that background tune is. Has a fantastic, deep bass line and I'd like to know what it is, but alas, they don't say.

 

[Drone]

@qubit burger king lolz

I agree with you, heavy radioactive elements are really mysterious. And yeah music was cool too

 

[twilyth]

IBM's Watson AI creates trailer for Morgan AI movie. Some creepy s*** here.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/ibm-watson-ai-trailer-morgan-movie/

Experts may reassure us that artificial intelligence won’t take over the world anytime soon – but they just might invade the multiplex.

At least that’s the plot developing at IBM, where the Watson artificial-intelligence team programmed a computer to come up with a scary trailer for “Morgan,” a thriller about a genetically modified, AI-enhanced super-human.

GeekWire’s crack team of movie critics gave “Morgan” an average grade of C – but I have to say Watson’s trailer gave me the creeps. Maybe it’s the way short cuts are spliced together to create a sense of ominousness without revealing what the heck is going on. Maybe it’s the eerie music. Or maybe it’s just knowing that a faceless piece of software helped create it.

 

[Ahhzz]

IBM's Watson AI creates trailer for Morgan AI movie. Some creepy s*** here.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/ibm-watson-ai-trailer-morgan-movie/

yup, I wanna see this

 

[Drone]

 

[twilyth]

Galaxy the size of the Milky Way discovered that is 99.99% dark matter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ered-one-made-almost-entirely-of-dark-matter/

Much of the universe is made of dark matter, the unknowable, as-yet-undetected stuff that barely interacts with the "normal" matter around it. In the Milky Way, dark matter outnumbers regular matter by about 5 to 1, and very tiny dwarf galaxies are known to contain even more of the stuff.

But now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy's star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many.

The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the first direct detection of

 

[BiggieShady]

I just watched interview with Leonard Susskind about his holographic principle where he explains it a little better ... well, sort of

 

[twilyth]

I thought the holographic principle had to deal with the firewall problem and last I heard, the best they could come up with was wormholes connecting the sets of particles - the ones going into the wormhole [late edit. was supposed to be ] black hole and the ones going out as Hawking radiation. Now they seem to have refined that to create some sort of identity between these wormholes and the concept of entanglement. Except I think the entanglement idea violates some principle of quantum mechanics.

In yet another thought experiment, Polchinski and his team pondered what would happen if just one of a pair of entangled particles near a black hole’s event horizon fell in, while the other escaped as Hawking radiation. According to complementarity, the escaping particle would also have to be entangled with another Hawking particle. But that’s a no-no in quantum mechanics: Particles entangled with each other outside a black hole cannot also be entangled with particles inside the black hole. Physicists call this forbidden arrangement entanglement polygamy.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mysterious-boundary?mode=magazine&context=188541