Interest of the day

Astronaut Don Pettit demonstrates the effects of sound waves on water drops in microgravity using a small speaker and tones form a mp3 player. Then the water drops rock out to ZZ Top. It's cool to see the standing waves form on the water drops and how they change with frequency.

I enjoyed the short video Beauty of Pollination shown as at the TED 2011 conference. Louie Schwartz has a YouTube site with more of his films.

Now you can see all your favorite University of Nottingham videos at Test Tube. This includes PeriodicTableofVideos, SixtySymbols, and Numberfile by Brady Haran.

The Porsche 918 Spyder 700 hp gas-electric hybrid gets 78 miles/gallon, cost like $845,000 and should be available in 2013. The 700 hp converts to 522.2 kW. I hope someone does a teardown of the electronic drive system. The power electronic should be really impressive.

PHD comic has produces a short animation explaining the Higgs Boson. It actually explains more about what we don't understand about particle physics and what we are looking for with the LHC. It's nicely done. I wish the voice recording was made without so much background noise. It's a bit distracting.

This short entertaining and informative video answers the question: Just how small is an atom?. Spoiler alert, pretty darn small.

A star or perhaps two in the Egg Nebula output huge amounts of energy. The source of the jets are unclear, but could be a binary star system or a dying star.

Brian Greene's 2012 TED talk is finally available on archive. Yay. Professor Greene describes the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate due to a dark energy, and how this related to the multiverse. It's all totally fascinating.

History fans might be interested in the Madness of King George webinar on the possible sources of King George's madness. See it Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 2:00-3:00 pm ET. It's free but registration is required (don't let all the questions put students of all ages off).

This short video shows the air traffic flow around the world in a 24 hour period. It's pretty cool to see the flow patterns, and the number of aircraft in action.