Interesting - Blog Posts
Imagine getting one of these caught on something and it ripping your finger off! Whole finger. Nothing but bone left
Nails by nail_unistella for Dazed Korea.
WHITE NOISE
General Topic : Science Why Does White Noise Help People Sleep? A white noise machine is the simplest solution to blocking out noise. On its face, flipping on white noise before hitting the sack must be the most counterintuitive idea out there. Want to sleep better? Simple solution: make a bunch of noise. Sweet dreams ahoy. And yet, not only do some people swear they can't get to sleep without a fan running, there are even companies that will sell you optimized noise-makers for helping you get the best of your bed rest. What is up with our brains and our ears? The short answer: white noise is betternoise. At least for (some) sleepers. White noise, if you're using the technical definition, is a consistent noise that comes out evenly across all hearable frequencies. Say you're a musician. To play a middle C note, you play something that's about 261.6 hertz, the unit of frequency. White noise is just an equal amount at every frequency, from low to high, that a human being can hear. To keep the music analogy going, it's a gigantic band all playing a slightly different note. (Machines pushed to the limit, like fans, are especially good at hitting these notes.) When a noise wakes you up in the night, it's not the noise itself that wakes you up, per se, but the sudden change or inconsistencies in noise that jar you. White noise creates a masking effect, blocking out those sudden changes that frustrate light sleepers, or people trying to fall asleep. "The simple version is that hearing still works while you're asleep," says Seth S. Horowitz, a neuroscientist and author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. "This is why the majority of bedpartners prefer the constant white noise of a CPAP machine rather than their spouse’s crescendo-decrescendo snoring sounds," Clete A. Kushida, director of the Stanford Center for Human Sleep Research, writes in an email to Popular Science. Makes sense, right? But it's not always that straightforward.  For one thing, there's pink noise. There's some semi-complicated math involved, but essentially, pink noise is white noise, but with the higher frequencies turned down in intensity. White noise has equal power across all frequencies; pink noise comes out louder and more powerful on the lower ends of the sound spectrum. That could be helpful for people suffering from tinnitus, or who just find the upper registers of true white noise unpleasant. The noise family tree doesn't stop there, either: depending on which frequencies you tone down or up, you might also produce Brown noise, (named for a person, not a color) violet noise, and a mess of other colors. Different folks might prefer different sounds. And, of course, not everyone needs that noise. In some people, the masking effect of white noise can do the exact opposite of what it does for most people--actually increasing sensitivity to underlying sounds, Horowitz says. In the strange, not-totally-explained world of stochastic resonance, people are occasionally able to pick up noises "masked" with white noise better than they are at picking up the noise in total silence. But that's an explanation article for another time. You look like you need some rest. Credits: Colin Lecher February 17, 2014
thefactsworld:Pure Vanilla extract has at least 35% alcohol in… http://ift.tt/2jyvRJO
A Visualisation of the Recent Rapid Change in Temperature.
(GreenPeace)
Seer of Seers Sage of Sages Prognosticator of Prognosticators Weather Prophet Extraordinary
So reads the official title of Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous weather-predicting groundhog/woodchuck/marmot/whistle pig (yes, they are, in fact, all the same animal… surprises abound in the world of meteorological mammals).
Phil hails from the town of Punxsutawney, PA, where every year on February 2, a group of grown men sporting top hats and waxed mustaches pull him out of a box and ask him when winter will end. I can never keep straight whether seeing the shadow means spring will come early or if we’ll have a long winter, but this doesn’t really matter, since rodents are not good weather prediction tools.
Despite being about as reliable as a coin flip, Phil is joined in this annual tradition by more than a dozen North American groundhogs like Shubenecadie Sam, General Beauregard Lee, and Wisconson’s humbly-named Jimmy the Groundhog, seen here:
Surprise! Groundhogs can bite! And I would too, if you forcibly removed me from my warm, comfy house, held me aloft in the frigid air in front of thousands of gaping onlookers and flashing lights and asked me about a subject in which I have no expertise.
Rodents might not be real educated in the fields of meteorology and astronomy, but humans are! We’ve got Earth’s orbital mechanics and their corresponding effect on annual temperature cycles down to a literal science. We smart. Just look…
I dug into the science of seasons this week, and I discovered that our system of defining “winter” and “summer” and “spring” and “autumn”, at least the way that most of us non-meteorologists think of them, doesn’t really make sense when you compare it to the weather.
You might already know that we define “winter” or “summer” based on Earth’s position in relation to the sun, namely the solstices. This makes the seasons easy to keep track of, but for most of us these dates are unreliable, illogical, and remarkably disconnected from the actual weather. The little boxes on your calendar that say “First Day of Winter”, “First Day of Spring” and so on don’t line up very well with how cold or hot it is outside.
Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you try to apply a single calendar to an entire planet… could there be a better way?
You can learn the rest of the story by watching this week’s It’s Okay To Be Smart up at the top of this post. Enjoy!
December 17, 1965 – Stunning images of Earth captured by the astronauts of Gemini 7 as their craft raced around the planet.
(NASA/ASU)
Flying to New Heights With the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission
A mission studying Earth’s magnetic field by flying four identical spacecraft is headed into new territory.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, has been studying the magnetic field on the side of Earth facing the sun, the day side – but now we’re focusing on something else. On February 9, MMS started the three-month-long process of shifting to a new orbit.
One key thing MMS studies is magnetic reconnection – a process that occurs when magnetic fields collide and re-align explosively into new positions. The new orbit will allow MMS to study reconnection on the night side of the Earth, farther from the sun.
Magnetic reconnection on the night side of Earth is thought to be responsible for causing the northern and southern lights.
To study the interesting regions of Earth’s magnetic field on the night side, the four MMS spacecraft are being boosted into an orbit that takes them farther from Earth than ever before. Once it reaches its final orbit, MMS will shatter its previous Guinness World Record for highest altitude fix of a GPS.
To save on fuel, the orbit is slowly adjusted over many weeks. The boost to take each spacecraft to its final orbit will happen during the first week of April.
On April 19, each spacecraft will be boosted again to raise its closest approach to Earth, called perigee. Without this step, the spacecraft would be way too close for comfort – and would actually reenter Earth’s atmosphere next winter!
The four MMS spacecraft usually fly really close together – only four miles between them – in a special pyramid formation called a tetrahedral, which allows us to examine the magnetic environment in three dimensions.
But during orbit adjustments, the pyramid shape is broken up to make sure the spacecraft have plenty of room to maneuver. Once MMS reaches its new orbit in May, the spacecraft will be realigned into their tetrahedral formation and ready to do more 3D magnetic science.
Learn more about MMS and find out what it’s like to fly a spacecraft.
The Strangest Eclipse Fact Of All: The Moon’s Shadow Isn’t A Circle
“These imperfections along the edge of the lunar limb don’t just reflect peaks and valleys on the Moon’s surface, but result in sharp edges and corners appearing on the Moon’s shadow as well. Thanks to incredibly accurate mapping of elevation of the entire lunar surface by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we know exactly what the profile of the Moon looks like. Combine that information with the Earth-Moon-Sun orbit, and we can derive what irregularities will be present during the August 21st, 2017 (or any) solar eclipse, when the Moon’s shadow passes across Earth’s surface.”
The Moon is spherical, and so its shadow should be a circle by simple geometry, right? Only, if we view it when it strikes Earth, it’s not even close to a circle. It’s stretched into an ellipse, and further complicated by irregular, sharp edges and corners. Why would it appear that way? As it turns out, three factors combine to get us there. The first is the fact that Earth is a sphere, not a disk, so any shadow falling on it gets stretched. The second is that the Moon’s sharp peaks, valleys and craters mean that its shadow gets irregularly distorted in a way that changes as its orbit continues. And the third is that Earth isn’t smooth, but exhibits significant changes in elevation and terrain.
Add them all up, and you’ve got the incredibly bizarre and ever-changing shape of the Moon’s shadow. Come see what the eclipse of August 21, 2017 will hold!
The First Galaxies: What We Know And What We Still Need To Learn
“As we look farther back in time, we find that younger galaxies formed stars at faster rates than galaxies do today. We can measure the star-formation rate, and find that at earlier and earlier times, it was more intense. But then we find it hits a peak when the Universe is about two billion years old. Go younger than that, and the rate goes down again.”
We’ve come incredibly far in our quest to learn how the Universe came to be the way it is today. We can see out in space for tens of billions of light years, to galaxies as they were when the Universe was only a few percent of its present age. We can see how galaxies evolve, merge and the stars inside change. And we can see to even before that, when no stars or galaxies existed at all. But how did we get from there to here? There are still plenty of gaps in the story. We’ve never seen the first stars or galaxies; we’ve never witnessed the start of cosmic reionization; we’ve never seen the star formation rate jump from zero to a real, finite number. Yet with James Webb and WFIRST on the horizon, these gaps in our knowledge may – if we’re lucky – all disappear.
Come get the story on what we know about the first galaxies, and what we hope and have left to still learn!
A tesla coil gun made from a giant coil that uses re-purposed MRI capacitors with a water-cooled backpack. This looks like something out of Ghostbusters. (Source)
Cloud Chambers: Visualizing Radiation
The cloud chamber, also known as the Wilson chamber, is a particle detector used for detecting ionizing radiation.
In its most basic form, a cloud chamber is a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapor of water or alcohol. When a charged particle (for example, an alpha or beta particle) interacts with the mixture, the fluid is ionized. The resulting ions act as condensation nuclei, around which a mist will form (because the mixture is on the point of condensation).
The high energies of alpha and beta particles mean that a trail is left, due to many ions being produced along the path of the charged particle. These tracks have distinctive shapes, for example, an alpha particle’s track is broad and shows more evidence of deflection by collisions, while an electron’s is thinner and straight. -(x)
More science and gifs on my blog: rudescience Gif made from: This video by The Royal Institution References: (x), (x).
Chemistry Valentine’s Cards by Nick Uhlig.
dreamy 🌿✨
Why Does Life Exist only on Earth
The conditions on earth that support the existence of life seem to be so fine-tuned that it led many scientists to believe that the universe had been designed by something or someone who paid that much attention to detail.
One idea that is used to explain this is the concept of MULTIVERSE. (Yes, kinda like Doctor Strange) According to this, all possible combinations of such conditions do exist in parallel universes. It then seems more natural that life should have developed only in our universe because the conditions in this one were just right.
art and science exist in harmony in the universe, both require the transcending of the limits of creativity to create something that is in its simplest form, nothing more than a piece of truth.
interestingly enough, many of the great scientists of our time have also been great musicians, be it einstein, kelvin or heisenberg.
did you know
from the ends of our universe, light takes time to travel through a long distance to reach our eyes. therefore, the far-away objects at the edge of the visible universe are viewed by us as the way they once were and not how they are at the time we are looking at them.
Can we really travel backward in time?
I was watching a video that talked about how travelling to the future is possible in theory but travelling to the past is although not completely unlikely, mostly impossible.
If we substitute -t instead of t in the equations we use, they still give results to a certain extent, but practically thinking about it, what is the direction of time?? It moves forward right? Is it then possible for us to physically move in a direction opposite to it?
<33
just watching videos about time trying to understand how the world works
in August 1993, Sky and Telescope magazine sponsored a contest to rename the big bang theory, out of thirteen thousand entries, judges couldn't find a better one
did you know that the first person in history to explain why the night sky is black was american mystery writer edgar allan poe, amateur astronomer, who published a rambling poem about his observations and ended up solving the olbers' paradox
never underestimate urself
People say they don't like video-eassyists rambling in videos but honestly I think that's where they get their charm
People always talk about what fandom is the most toxic like the usual culprits are Hazbin hotel, undertale, BTS,Marvel, LOL, the classics but I think everyone is ignoring sports. People are literally fuckin insane when it comes to literally any sport at least in the US. The only difference between it and online fandoms are is the fact that people don't have shipping wars and talk about whether or not its problematic to ship baseballs with soccer balls this shit also goes back like decades most tumblr fandoms go back at most like 20 years.
I love how in Sci-fi humans are either unforgivable ontological evil beings made of hate and prejudice or we are literally perfect gods that desvere constant praise from our lesser alien neighbors and literally no in-between.
A really interesting idea that I've had that I'm surprised no one had thought of before is the idea of switching the stories of old Gothic horror with modern analog horror. Like ya know how people like vibingleaf have taken old shittly written creepy pasta and put a spin on them I would love to see a modern version of Frankenstein especially the scene of him yelling "ITS ALIVE!!". You also have the reverse which is funny to hink about like the backrooms is considered classic literature and I also like the idea of 12 ft halloween home depot skeletons being replaced with Gabriel, it would also change halloween episodes of kids shows like imagine Charlie brown wearing a Vita Carnis outfit or something like that.
I've had a really goofy idea of a game in my head for a little bit so basically you would control every single part of your body individually like every muscle is mapped to a certain key and depending on how long you hold it down it flexes it for that long and you alone have to control every other function that your brain does you have to like breath and all that I just like the idea of using every single key on your keyboard and having to press all of them to move one step so kinda manual smauel but it 3d, also yeah its been a bit sorry I switched phones so hope yall understand 🙏.
I'm late by a day but it still can't believe it's been 10 years since fnaf released I wasn't around for all of the 10 years but I've around for a lot and it's still insane to me I remember being REALLY scared of the game as a kid before I decided to watch coryxkenshin play it just absolutely insane