Does One Of These LEGO Men Look Bigger Than The Other? They’re Actually The Exact Same Size, But Are

5 things you didn’t know about... Concorde

Credit: British Airways

1. Operated by British Airways and Air France, Concorde went into operation in 1976, following 5,000 hours of flight testing. Seating 100 passengers, it catered to the privileged or business traveller. Concorde was withdrawn from service in 2003, after 27 years.

2. The most popular route for the British carrier was from London Heathrow to New York JFK in just three hours and 20 minutes. Cruising at Mach 2.02, passengers experienced heights of 60,000ft, a vantage point from which they could see the curvature of the Earth below and dark skies above at midday.

3. The four Olympus 593 engines that powered Concorde were twin spool turbojets.

4. The materials used for Concorde’s structure needed to withstand temperature extremes – subsonic speeds, the aircraft fuselage would experience lows of  -35°C, but at Mach 2 the temperature reached 127°C at the nose.

5. Concorde’s long, pointed nose cone played a key role in landing. Formed of resin-bonded glass fibre, as metals would interfere with the signals detecting storm clouds, the hydraulically powered nose cone could be moved independently to an angle of 12.5° on landing, allowing the pilot to see the approaching runway.

To find out more see page 60 of the June issue of Materials World or visit http://bit.ly/2qDPjJC. 

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Reaching out into space yields benefits on Earth. Many of these have practical applications — but there’s something more than that. Call it inspiration, perhaps, what photographer Ansel Adams referred to as nature’s “endless prospect of magic and wonder.“ 

Our ongoing exploration of the solar system has yielded more than a few magical images. Why not keep some of them close by to inspire your own explorations? This week, we offer 10 planetary photos suitable for wallpapers on your desktop or phone. Find many more in our galleries. These images were the result of audacious expeditions into deep space; as author Edward Abbey said, "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”

1. Martian Selfie

This self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the robotic geologist in the “Murray Buttes” area on lower Mount Sharp. Key features on the skyline of this panorama are the dark mesa called “M12” to the left of the rover’s mast and pale, upper Mount Sharp to the right of the mast. The top of M12 stands about 23 feet (7 meters) above the base of the sloping piles of rocks just behind Curiosity. The scene combines approximately 60 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, camera at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. Most of the component images were taken on September 17, 2016.

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2. The Colors of Pluto

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution, enhanced color view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode.

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3. The Day the Earth Smiled

On July 19, 2013, in an event celebrated the world over, our Cassini spacecraft slipped into Saturn’s shadow and turned to image the planet, seven of its moons, its inner rings — and, in the background, our home planet, Earth. This mosaic is special as it marks the third time our home planet was imaged from the outer solar system; the second time it was imaged by Cassini from Saturn’s orbit, the first time ever that inhabitants of Earth were made aware in advance that their photo would be taken from such a great distance.

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4. Looking Back

Before leaving the Pluto system forever, New Horizons turned back to see Pluto backlit by the sun. The small world’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture. The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles called tholins. This image was generated by combining information from blue, red and near-infrared images to closely replicate the color a human eye would perceive.

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5. Catching Its Own Tail

A huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn’s northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet in this true-color view from Cassini. This picture, captured on February 25, 2011, was taken about 12 weeks after the storm began, and the clouds by this time had formed a tail that wrapped around the planet. The storm is a prodigious source of radio noise, which comes from lightning deep within the planet’s atmosphere.

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6. The Great Red Spot

Another massive storm, this time on Jupiter, as seen in this dramatic close-up by Voyager 1 in 1979. The Great Red Spot is much larger than the entire Earth.

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7. More Stormy Weather

Jupiter is still just as stormy today, as seen in this recent view from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, when it soared directly over Jupiter’s south pole on February 2, 2017, from an altitude of about 62,800 miles (101,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops. From this unique vantage point we see the terminator (where day meets night) cutting across the Jovian south polar region’s restless, marbled atmosphere with the south pole itself approximately in the center of that border. This image was processed by citizen scientist John Landino. This enhanced color version highlights the bright high clouds and numerous meandering oval storms.

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8. X-Ray Vision

X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by our Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by our Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The NuSTAR data, seen in green and blue, reveal solar high-energy emission. The high-energy X-rays come from gas heated to above 3 million degrees. The red channel represents ultraviolet light captured by SDO, and shows the presence of lower-temperature material in the solar atmosphere at 1 million degrees.

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9. One Space Robot Photographs Another

This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows Victoria crater, near the equator of Mars. The crater is approximately half a mile (800 meters) in diameter. It has a distinctive scalloped shape to its rim, caused by erosion and downhill movement of crater wall material. Since January 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been operating in the region where Victoria crater is found. Five days before this image was taken in October 2006, Opportunity arrived at the rim of the crater after a drive of more than over 5 miles (9 kilometers). The rover can be seen in this image, as a dot at roughly the “ten o'clock” position along the rim of the crater. (You can zoom in on the full-resolution version here.)

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10. Night Lights

Last, but far from least, is this remarkable new view of our home planet. Last week, we released new global maps of Earth at night, providing the clearest yet composite view of the patterns of human settlement across our planet. This composite image, one of three new full-hemisphere views, provides a view of the Americas at night from the NASA-NOAA Suomi-NPP satellite. The clouds and sun glint — added here for aesthetic effect — are derived from MODIS instrument land surface and cloud cover products.

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Americas at night

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

apparently one whale years ago was observed doing this for hours and now more and more whales in the area are seen copying it so we think it’s a whole new behavior and it seems to be a response to shrinking food sources.

Instead of expending any energy actively hunting, the whale just holds its mouth open wherever fish are being hunted by birds. To escape the birds, the fish try to hide in the whale’s mouth because it’s a darker area that looks like shelter. …They’re turning into giant, sea-mammal pitcher plants.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/mms.12557?referrer_access_token=bXLTS5BeSw_vlIKHkM0bYIta6bR2k8jH0KrdpFOxC654HjreJ8D19K86UreR5JPsSRb0CuGhiJSV1L1ht-N1Gf_K_1a9MREFzQGU9oJDNctsKDin_HXcYEdsLg3EbcTl

New superglue allows for bonding stretchable hydrogels

A team of researchers at Johannes Kepler University Linz has developed a new type of glue that can be used to bond hydrogels to other hard or soft objects. In their paper published on the open-access site Science Advances, the group explains their development process, the structure of the glue, how it works and in what ways.

Hydrogels, as the name suggests, are materials made mainly out of water. They are typically rubbery and are often elastic. Many of them have been developed to allow for the creation of materials that are more like those found in living creatures. Some examples include soft contact lenses, soft bone replacement in the vertebrae and even jelly-like robots. But one thing that has been holding back more advanced applications is the inability to glue or bond hydrogels with other objects in ways that allow for bending or stretching, or even for attaching well to hard objects. In this new effort, the researchers report they have developed a glue that solves this problem.

Read more.

How does sand from Sahara end up in your windshield ?

TBH cleaning your car is a rather mundane task. But when you fill your head with some interesting physics the task actually gets rather pretty interesting. Here’s some good for thought on such an occasion :

The dust on your windshield might actually be from the Sahara desert

To understand how, lets start with some simple physics.

The stacked ball drop

You basically take couple of balls, align them up and drop them to the ground. The ball at the top reaches the most highest due to the subsequent transfer of energy from the other balls.

                                    Source Video : Physics Girl

Here is an exaggerated but amazing slow motion of the same energy transfer with a water balloon. Notice how the transfer of energy takes place between the water balloon and the tennis ball.

                                     Source Video : Slow Mo Lab

Sandstorms in the desert

Sandstorms/ Dust storms as you might be aware, are pretty common in the desert. . Dust storms arise when a gust front or other strong wind blows loose sand and dirt from a dry surface.

And this can cause something phenomenal to happen:

If the wind speed is sufficient then larger sand particles can propel finer ones high into the atmosphere. ( just like the stacked ball )

Then these fine particles are caught in the global wind pattern and are transported across the globe until they fall down to the earth as rain.

How cool is that ! Have a great day!

* Tracking saharan dust in 3D - NASA video

** All the World’s a Stage … for Dust - NASA article

** Wiki on Saltation

Handy Tool Definitions

I found some handy definitions of tools on edn.com for those of you who are unclear about them. So, I put together this reference guide. 

http://ow.ly/VyRt30dOlwi 

If you trace the orbits of Earth and Venus over 8 years, this is the pattern that emerges

Science Fact Friday: Bird lungs! Just like every other part of a bird, they’re weird.

This gif shows the path of a single breath, but the circuit holds 2 breaths at a time. So when the bird inhales, the just-inhaled breath goes through Inhalation 1 while the previous breath goes through Inhalation 2. Rinse, repeat. Thus, the lungs are constantly receiving oxygen - in mammals, our oxygen content dips slightly between inhalations because there’s no fresh air coming in. We also don’t empty 100% of our lung volume so some air is “stale” even during an inhalation.

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Transcript below the break.

Keep reading

The fifth conic section - Straight line

Although many textbooks regard the straight line to be a specific case of the hyperbola and proclaim only four conic sections, it is something worth noting that the straight line is also a conic section.

Due to the Mandela Effect, we remember things that didn’t happen or exist. Get the answer and why in our NEW VID: https://youtu.be/hvu4D1jngCY