Dead Poets Society (1989)

If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch, you’ve probably noticed the billowing clouds around the launch pad during lift-off. What you’re seeing is not actually the rocket’s exhaust but the result of a launch pad and vehicle protection system known in NASA parlance as the Sound Suppression Water System. Exhaust gases from a rocket typically exit at a pressure higher than the ambient atmosphere, which generates shock waves and lots of turbulent mixing between the exhaust and the air. Put differently, launch ignition is incredibly loud, loud enough to cause structural damage to the launchpad and, via reflection, the vehicle and its contents.

To mitigate this problem, launch operators use a massive water injection system that pours about 3.5 times as much water as rocket propellant per second. This significantly reduces the noise levels on the launchpad and vehicle and also helps protect the infrastructure from heat damage. The exact physical processes involved – details of the interaction of acoustic noise and turbulence with water droplets – are still murky because this problem is incredibly difficult to study experimentally or in simulation. But, at these high water flow rates, there’s enough water to significantly affect the temperature and size of the rocket’s jet exhaust. Effectively, energy that would have gone into gas motion and acoustic vibration is instead expended on moving and heating water droplets. In the case of the Space Shuttle, this reduced noise levels in the payload bay to 142 dB – about as loud as standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. (Image credits: NASA, 1, 2; research credit: M. Kandula; original question from Megan H.)

“People who never met her except across the footlights did not realize how, in her private life, she had such compassion and interest in everyone. After I returned from Hong Kong I was ill with a virus and she rang me up reproachfully later to say, ‘Why didn’t you let me know? I would have come and sit with you.’ Giving flowers to sick people is easy. Giving that precious commodity time is far more expensive for someone who had such a full life. But she always found time for everyone.” -Godfrey Winn

Theodore Isaac Rubin, American Psychiatrist (via books-n-quotes)

Have you considered that if you don’t make waves, nobody including yourself will know that you are alive?

Why can we find geometric shapes in the night sky? How can we know that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head? And why can patterns be found in just about any text — even Vanilla Ice lyrics? Is there a deeper meaning? 

The answer is no, and we know that thanks to a mathematical principle called Ramsey theory. So what is Ramsey theory? Simply put, it states that given enough elements in a set or structure, some particular interesting pattern among them is guaranteed to emerge.

The mathematician T.S. Motzkin once remarked that, “while disorder is more probable in general, complete disorder is impossible.” The sheer size of the Universe guarantees that some of its random elements will fall into specific arrangements, and because we evolved to notice patterns and pick out signals among the noise, we are often tempted to find intentional meaning where there may not be any. So while we may be awed by hidden messages in everything from books, to pieces of toast, to the night sky, their real origin is usually our own minds.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The origin of countless conspiracy theories - PatrickJMT

Animation by Aaron, Sean & Mathias Studios

This supercapacitor battery can be recharged 30,000 times

A thin, flexible supercapacitor boasts high energy and power densities. Credit: University of Central Florida

Everyone and anyone with a smartphone know it is not long before your phone holds a charge for less and less time as the battery begins to degrade. But new research by scientists at the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida (UCF), USA, could change that. The team have developed a new method for producing flexible supercapacitors that can store greater amounts of energy and can be recharged over 30,000 times without degradation. This new method could transform technology such as electric vehicles and mobile phones in the future.

‘If you were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week,’ said University of Central Florida researcher Nitin Choudhary.

The UCF team has attempted to apply newly discovered 2D materials that measure just a few atoms thick to supercapacitors. Other scientists have also tried formulations with other 2D materials including graphene, but had only limited success. The new supercapacitors are composed of millions of nanometre-thick wires coated with shells of 2D materials. The core facilitates the super-fast charging and discharging that makes supercapacitors powerful, and the 2D coating delivers the energy storage ability.

‘We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials,’ said Yeonwoong Eric Jung, assistant professor of the study. Jung is working with UCF’s Office of Technology Transfer to patent the new process. ‘It’s not ready for commercialisation,’ Jung said. ‘But this is a proof-of-concept demonstration, and our studies show there are very high impacts for many technologies.’

Zillertal Alps // Tom Klocker

Studio Ghibli + Food

Hold a buoyant sphere like a ping pong ball underwater and let it go, and you’ll find that the ball pops up out of the water. Intuitively, you would think that letting the ball go from a lower depth would make it pop up higher – after all, it has a greater distance to accelerate over, right? But it turns out that the highest jumps comes from balls that rise the shortest distance. When released at greater depths, the buoyant sphere follows a path that swerves from side to side. This oscillating path is the result of vortices being shed off the ball, first on one side and then the other. (Image and research credit: T. Truscott et al.)