The Perseid Meteor Shower Over Mt. Hood

Physicists Predict The Existence of New Particle in the “Material Universe”

Scientists are predicting the existence of the type-II Weyl fermion. This comes after they realized that a metallic crystal material, called tungsten ditelluride, was exhibiting a strange behavior. While most metals turn into insulators once subjected to a magnetic field, tungsten ditelluride becomes either an insulator or a conductor, which one it becomes ultimately depends on the direction of the subjected magnetic field.

After a team investigated the phenomenon, they predicted the presence of an unexpected particle—the previously mentioned type-II Weyl fermion—which caused the behavior.

Read more at: http://futurism.com/links/physicists-predict-the-existence-of-new-particle-in-the-material-universe/

We normally post our tech news roundups on Fridays, but due to turkey, football, and lots of napping, we’re publishing it today instead. Enjoy!

1. The right drones for everyone this holiday season Love is in the air, and here’s a list of UAVs you can use to catch it. There’s never been a better reason to sit around while your relatives drone on and on. Really. With gifts like these the holidays will fly right by. via: Quartz

2. New tech can wirelessly charge your electronics with a standard Wi-Fi router There’s a good reason your Wi-Fi router is always shooting dirty looks at your laptop’s power cord. But rather than stoop to their level, routers everywhere are taking up the slack. Try to be sympathetic when your power cord finally winds up jobless. It’s bound to come as a shock.         via: BGR 3. The Pickle Index is a Delightfully Weird, App-Driven Novel Like No Other Immersive multimedia experiences are becoming more and more advanced every day, but there are plenty of people who still use monomedia to get their virtual realities. With The Pickle Index, techies and bookworms will finally have something to talk about if they’re both forced to interact with other humans. via: WIRED

4. Circuit Board Tattoos That Actually Work Will Make Your Cyborg Fantasies Come True Do yourself a favor and only get tattoos in languages that you understand. Otherwise you might end up with a bunch of spurious output, and it’s going to take forever to find that missing comma. via: Gizmodo

You can grab and fold this drone without hurting yourself

Astronomers Have a New Tool in the Search For Habitable Exoplanets

The quest for habitable alien worlds may get a whole lot easier. http://futurism.com/astronomers-have-a-new-tool-in-the-search-for-habitable-exoplanets/

These are the robots taking our jobs

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"Is There A Santa Claus?-A Physicist View" SPY MAGAZINE Jan. 1990

  Consider the following:

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-½ million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.

On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that ‘flying reindeer’ (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.

We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.> In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

(NOTE: This appeared in the SPY Magazine (January, 1990) )

NASA just released more awesome space tourism posters

Pack your bags, we're moving to Jupiter.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how incredible our Solar System is? Sure, pretty much everywhere other than our own planet is a deathtrap, with acid rain pouring down on Venus and storms three times the size of Earth swirling around Jupiter, but you don’t have to look too hard to find the unique beauty in our neighbouring planets and moons.

And with unique beauty comes… tourism! From the diamond-inspired cloud observatory of Venus to Jupiter’s aurorae-backed balloon ride, the design team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have taken us back to the future with this new batch of retro space tourism posters.

The “Visions of the Future” series features seven original posters released this week, plus seven “Exoplanet Travel Bureau” posters that were published around this time last year. And these haven’t just been dreamt up by anyone - the designers behind the posters have been consulting with JPL scientists and engineers to come up with tourism scenarios that are as realistic as they are fantastical.

One minute blood typing

A collaboration between Monash University and Haemokinesis Pty Ltd has resulted in a momentous breakthrough in world health.  The creation of a novel category of low cost paper diagnostics that can identify a person’s blood group in just one minute the innovation is named Group Legible Immunohematology Format (GLIF).                                

GLIF enables quick and easy blood typing, without the need for laboratory equipment, expertise or interpretation of results.  Within one minute a written result is returned to the user.  This concept can be used anywhere, by anyone, the applications are endless; third world countries, multi-trauma events, countries with heavy conflict to name but a few.

This Australian made and licenced technology was created following a long standing partnership between Monash University and Haemokinesis with funding provided by the Australian Research Council (ARC) under the criteria of a Linkage project.