Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Monday, March 09, 2009

Thunderf00t rejects Atheism

Monday, September 08, 2008

Atom Smashing Machine

Billions of bits of currency to build a machine that can fire two beams of protons in opposite directions and bend them around a 27 kilometer circle track buried 100 meters beneath the surface of our planet to smash into each other so scientists can check out what the big bang was like.

Some say the machine will create dark matter, others say it'll give God a rash. The health and saftey mob gave the project the go-ahead and said if it creates a black hole, no-one will notice because everyone will be dead.

All good then!

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Potholer54 Made Easy

This guy makes videos explaining what science has learned about life, the universe and everything. He has a bit of a poke at religion throughout his series with a very dry sarcastic wit. I like it.



I would recommend his series because he's Aussie, he's funny and he can explain stuff so that it's very easy to understand.

Enjoy.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

May Day Explosions

Okay, so I had a slack blogging month. That's because there has been nothing to blog about. But today there was a little bit of excitement. Some guys that are working on the Kirkwood Road Project came around and asked me if they could put a sensor near my house to detect the effect of the explosives they are using to blast away rock on the road construction. So that was pretty cool. Nothing like some big explosions to start the day.

They used a little box full of sensors which stood on four little spikes that stuck into the ground and a little microphone on a stand next to it. I was going to take a photo of it but our little digital camera died a couple of weeks ago. Then they left to set up a second sensor on the other side of the blast area because they needed two sensors within 500m of the blast site to take their measurements. The guy told me that it measures sound, vibration, temperature, time of day and several other things and was sensitive enough to detect people walking anywhere near it. One of them came back to keep an eye on the sensor while the blasting took place. I could hear the chatter on his two-way radio - warning sirens, people checking in and giving all clear and then the ten second countdown. About five or six cracks went off in quick succession and it was over. From my place I couldn't see anything, but you could certainly hear it. I thought the sound would be a deeper booming sound but it was more like gunshots.

Pretty cool though. Some excitement for the day!

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Fusion to power Google

Trivia: Google could build its own fusion reactor for less than the cost of their annual electricity bill.



A black screen on your monitor will use less power than a white screen. If Google's home page was black, it could save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year according to the maths equations on this blog.

Introducing Blackle.

So...

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Zeusaphone



If electric guitars just aren't electric enough for you, check out this for an instrument. High voltage sparks are flying from this solid-state tessler coil and actually creating notes. Apparently it was very loud and had people in the crowd covering their ears. It least you get a light show included!

They are still trying to figure what to call it. Zeusaphone or Thoremin have been suggested. Who else would play lightning?

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

On demand power from water.

www.fuelfromh2o.com


Here you can purchase a water to hydrogen generator/converter that is supposed to attach your car and supplement your normal fuel to improve fuel efficiency and engine power. The video below supposedly shows a F150 V8 running only on the hydrogen generated from the converter. If it's true, thats pretty impressive. That is a big engine and it's apparently running on just water. Cool.

Friday, February 23, 2007

A bright light and three periods... dark ones...

Some people say they don't feel safe with a tank of hydrogen residing under their derriere, but I gotta say if we don't do something about reducing pollution, we're all going to be up the creek... or the creek is going to come up to us.



They kinda lost me a bit about membranes and electrons and stuff but they had me back at clean and quiet and having an intellectual video like this on my blog makes me look smarter! I did like the bit about how it doesn't pollute and only makes water and heat. Yay, lets all avoid extinction and use electric fuel cells to run everything!

This guy in the next video seems to be onto something. Oxy torch... but runs on water. Car that runs on water. Government contract to make military vehicles that run on water...



Don't seem to hear much about it. It doesn't look like an April Fools joke or anything. Can anyone elaborate? Did goons buy this guy out? Has he gone missing? Is he going to save the world?

This is the kind of technology that should be made public domain. Imagine a seawater desalinating plant being run off the water it pumps out of the ocean. Imagine that same power supply pumping fresh water into the middle of deserts in Africa, Australia, Asia and the US. That's the kind of technology that one imagines would go a long way towards world peace. A clean and reliable source of water could put an end hunger worldwide. And I don't believe for a second that this would put people out of jobs. In fact I reckon it'd create lots new ones. Someone would have to build and maintain the water pipes and generators, farming would be rejuvenated, the areas of land that would become habitable would be able to help support our fast growing population... maybe. People would have more time to innovate and advance technology. People would be less worried about dying due to advances in medicine, and that could in itself could lower birth rate, lessen that primeval urge to propagate quickly so as to preserve the species.

Am I babbling? I'll stop now...




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Sunday, January 28, 2007

Larson Ice Shelf


This is a map of Antarctica that I lifted from the U.S. Geological Survey website. Antarctica has the largest mass of ice in the world by far. The white areas are land mass above sea level, the greenish areas are floating ice and blue is ocean.

If someone to ask "How much water do you think is stored in the ice in Antarctica?", I reckon it'd be fair to say there is a small ocean worth there. So what would happen if you added an ocean worth of water to our oceans?

Ice reflects 90% of the suns rays and absorbs 10%. Water on the other hand reflects only 10% and absorbs 90%. So when pools of water started forming on the Larsen Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, the bit on the top-left of the map that points to South America, the water started to heat up and melt holes in the ice, drilling tunnels into it and making it like Swiss cheese, eventually causing it to collapse under its own weight into the ocean. These ice shelves are what is holding back the ice on the land and when they melt, huge chunks of ice slide off the land and into the ocean. The video on my post "Cool Science" may give you some idea of the consequences of that.

This is a photo of the Larson B Ice Shelf on the 31st January 2002.You can see the the pools of water that have formed on top of the ice shelf. The shelf was a plate of ice two hundred and twenty meters thick floating on the water in the middle of the photo. Ice covered mountains can be seen on the left side of the photo.

This photo was taken on 17th February 2002, 18 days later.You can see the where the ice has shattered and let thousands of icebergs drift away. The rest of the shelf is still dotted with rows of pools still absorbing heat from the suns rays and boring holes through the ice.

This photo was taken on the 23rd, of FebruaryThe shelf degrades further, but what becomes noticeable at this point is that without the shelf to hold it up, the ice on the mountains is shifting and sliding into the ocean.

This photo was taken on 5th of March, 2002.In less than five weeks, three thousand two hundred and fify square kilometers of ice has separated itself from the Antarctic continent, not only floating ice from the shelf, but the ice on the land which adds vast amounts of water to our oceans.

This photo was taken on the 7th of March, 2002.
I got these photos from the NASA Earth Observatory.

This is not an isolated incident. The great glaciers of the world are melting and quite a number have completely gone. The ice in Greenland is cracking and threatening to slide into the North Atlantic. The ice at the North Pole is melting. Some scientist say that it could be gone in only ten years. Have a look around on the net. The scientist all agree that we could be looking at a world that is very hard for people to live on possibly in as little as ten years and if we keep going the way we are now, vast areas of Earth will certainly be unlivable in fifty years.

Comments are welcome.

Cool Science