Loading...
 

Interest of the day

A blog about miscellaneous topics.

Swam manufacturing

morreale Saturday 13 of July, 2013
MIT is at it again. Silkworms covered a dome substructure with silk. Will insects build our homes in the future. Swam manufacturing is a crazy concept that I never saw coming.

Image

Worm watch lab

morreale Sunday 07 of July, 2013
Calling all citizen scientist. There is a new science project that needs your help. The Worm Watch Lab asks user to mark the time when a nematode worm C lays an egg. The study is looking to understand the relation between genes and the neurotransmitter serotonin that is associated with egg laying in worms. Serotonin is associated with mood in humans and will help with understanding neurotransmitter in the brain.

Image

Levitating Superconductor on a Möbius strip

morreale Saturday 29 of June, 2013
The Royal Institution of Great Britain produced this short video on a Levitating Superconductor on a Möbius strip. The Möbius strip contains 2000 magnets and the superconductor is made of Yttrium barium copper oxide. The magnet track must of cost a fortune, but it's pretty cool to see the superconducting "car" zip around the track. The only direction the "car" will move is where the magnetic field isn't changing due to the currents induced in the superconductor.

Image

TEDx CERN

morreale Friday 21 of June, 2013
I missed the TEDx CERN talks but now some are on archive.
  • Hiranya Peiris speaks on multi-dimensions.
  • Ian Foster speaks about grid computing.
  • Eliezer Rabinovici and Zehra Sayers speak about how science trumps politics.
  • Steve Myers and Andrew Vanden Heuvel speaks how they used Google Glass to take students on a trip to the Large Hadron Collider.
  • Gian Giudice speaks about what the Higgs mass might tell us about the fate of the universe.
  • Becky Parker speaks about inspiring students.

Neutrinos: Nature's Ghost?

morreale Wednesday 19 of June, 2013
Don Lincoln gives us the history and some background on those elusive neutrinos in his video Neutrinos: Nature's Ghosts? Neutrinos only interact with gravity and the weak nuclear force so they are very hard to detect. Wolfgang Pauli theorized their existence in the 1930 but it tool 30 years to detect the first one.

Gwynne Shotwell TED talk

morreale Tuesday 18 of June, 2013
Gwynne Shotwell COO of SpaceX talks about STEM education and building space hardware in her TED talk. She points out that the US is slipping in education, innovation, and manufacturing. My T=0 for the start of our slide or failure to keep up with exponential innovation, is the cancellation of the Super Collider. I wish someone would provide some insight into why we don't produce stuff on the "Moon Landing" scale any more.

Multiverse

morreale Tuesday 11 of June, 2013
The World Science Festival had wonderful discussion on the Multiverse. The session was moderated by John Hockenberry and the speakers included:
  • Andreas Albrecht
  • Alan Guth
  • Andrei Linde
  • Neil Turok

Image

Supersymmetry lesson

morreale Tuesday 11 of June, 2013
Don Lincoln gives A 10-minute lesson in supersymmetry. Basically, a theory is supersymmetric if it treats force and mass as interchangeable. Supersymmetry helps the explain the mass of the Higgs boson, force unification, and provide a candidates for dark matter.

Image