Puritans, Goths, Avant-garde Artists, Hell-raising Poets And Fashion Icon Coco Chanel All Saw Something

The dihydrogen monoxide hoax involves calling water by the unfamiliar chemical name “dihydrogen monoxide” (DHMO), and listing some of water’s effects in an alarming manner, such as the fact that it accelerates corrosion and can cause severe burns. The hoax often calls for dihydrogen monoxide to be regulated, labeled as hazardous, or banned. It illustrates how the lack of scientific literacy and an exaggerated analysis can lead to misplaced fears.

The hoax gained renewed popularity in the late 1990s when a 14-year-old student collected anti-DHMO petitions for a science project about gullibility. The story has since been used in science education to encourage critical thinking and avoid the appeal to nature.

Forty-three students favored banning DHMO, six were undecided, and only one correctly recognized that ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ is actually plain old water.

Here’s the information he gave the students:

Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

Dihydrogen monoxide:

is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.

contributes to the “greenhouse effect.”

may cause severe burns.

contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.

accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.

may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.

has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Contamination is reaching epidemic proportions!

Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property damage in the midwest, and recently California.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

as an industrial solvent and coolant.

in nuclear power plants.

in the production of styrofoam.

as a fire retardant.

in many forms of cruel animal research.

in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.

as an additive in certain “junk-foods” and other food products.

Companies dump waste DHMO into rivers and the ocean, and nothing can be done to stop them because this practice is still legal. The impact on wildlife is extreme, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer!

The American government has refused to ban the production, distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its “importance to the economic health of this nation.” In fact, the navy and other military organizations are conducting experiments with DHMO, and designing multi-billion dollar devices to control and utilize it during warfare situations. Hundreds of military research facilities receive tons of it through a highly sophisticated underground distribution network. Many store large quantities for later use.

Source: [x]

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Adieu 2016 - Best of FYP!

2016 has been a great year for FYP!

And we would like to conclude it with some of the best posts that we have been able to produce

1. Black hole are not so black - series

Part - I , II, III

2.‘Katana’ - A sword that can slice a bullet

3. A denied stardom status - Jupiter

4. The Pythagoras Cup

5. On Pirates and Astronomers                                                           

6. Behold- The Space Shuttle Tile

7. Principle of Least Effort

8. Leidenfrost Effect

9. Major Types of Engines

10. A holy matrimony of Pascals and Sierpinski’s Triangle

11. Curves of constant width

12. Smooth Ride, Bumpy Road

Thank you so much following us ! Have a great weekend :D

 - Fuck Yeah Physics!

What is glass?

When most people think of glass, their mind probably jumps straight to windows. And perhaps they’ve heard that old myth - that glass is actually a liquid, not a solid.

So what is glass?

Well, you’ve probably seen something like this before:

The three common phases of matter - gas, liquid, and solid. But you’ll notice that the solid picture is labeled crystalline state. Most people consider glass to be a solid, but it doesn’t quite look like that.

Crystals have a well defined structure, exhibiting long-range order. Glass is what’s called an amorphous material, exhibiting only short-range order. 

Basically, glass is a different kind of solid:

The quartz shown above is an example of a crystalline material. The molecules of glass on the other hand are disordered - yet still solid. 

To create glass, the liquid melt has to be cooled fast enough to prevent the substance from crystallizing. This fast cooling locks the atoms or molecules in the disordered state that looks like the liquid phase. 

Characterizing a substance as a glass also means that this glass transition is reversible. 

While most glass is optically transparent, the properties depend on the composition of the glass. Most of what you see every day is soda-lime-silicate glass, but there are many different kinds of glasses, including sodium borosilicate glass (Pyrex), lead-oxide glass, and aluminosilicate glass.

Sources: x x

Dude, bullets are literally made to shatter on impact. It's to prevent over-penetration. Bullets frequently shatter if they hit human bone inside a body, for example. So congrats, a katana is as good at stopping bullets as a human bone. Or a regular butter knife. Or even a regular piece of old steel. Like the ones used in a target range. Ever wonder why the steel plates at target ranges don't have holes in them even tho rifle caliber bullets hit them? It's cause the bullet shatters on impact.

To be very clear, the intention of the post was never to say that Katana is the ultimate sword. It was merely to enlighten the possibility of the bullet getting shattered by a sword/Knife.

Yes, bullets do shatter on impact.

But I am not so sure about what you say about the human bone though.

I believe it really depends on that kinetic energy of the bullet, the bullet size and the place of impact of the bullet on the body.

And even with the tissues surrounding the bone, there have been many instances where the Femur ( thigh bone ) fractured on impact.

If anyone reading this has a background in the field, would highly appreciate to hear your stance on this.

Thanks for asking anon ! :D

Centrifugal force and seat belts

The basic concept of a seatbelt is to protect you in an automobile collision by holding you in your seat. This prevents you from flying forward and colliding with the dashboard or windshield.

How do you do that ?

Many common seat belts design have something known as a centrifugal clutch. This arrangement has a weight attached to the end of a spool

When the spool rotates at a low speed, the weight is held through spring action and is allowed to spin freely.

But you must have noticed that if you try to pull the seat belt faster then it kinda gets stuck.

This is because as you rotate the spool faster, centrifugal force causes the weight to be pushed out and that stops the spool from rotating further.

This adds tension to your seat belt and holds you to your seat at the time of a crash. 

Have a great day!

* Other seatbelt mechanisms

** Seatbelt physics

Does one of these LEGO men look bigger than the other? They’re actually the exact same size, but are in an Ames room - a false-perspective illusion room that tricks your brain into thinking things are smaller, or larger, than they really are.

You can make one of these models to try this for yourself. Download our free template from here. And it even works in full size, if you can make one large enough!

Why most metals are silver (but copper and gold aren’t)

If we want to understand what gives a metal its color we first need to understand a little bit about the definition of a metal. Metals are materials that experience metallic bonding - wherein the atoms are so close that there is a veritable “sea of electrons” in the substance. (This is also what makes metals conductors, but that’s another story). Basically each atom donates an electron or two that is free to flow throughout the material, unattached to any particular nucleus. 

This proximity leads to an overlap in the allowed energy levels of electrons (shown in the lower left hand image above); basically the higher empty electronic levels are so close to the uppermost filled levels (also called the Fermi level) that they form an essentially continuous band of allowed energies. 

Now, backtracking a little bit, color in a substance is caused when a material doesn’t absorb a particular wavelength of light. Because of the empty energy levels mentioned above, metals generally can absorb all wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum. This implies that a metal should look black, except that the excited electron can immediately fall back to the state that it came from, emitting exactly the same energy, causing a flat piece of metal to appear reflective. Thus, the reason why most metals are silver. (Also, the flatter a metal, the more reflective, thanks to diffuse vs. specular reflection).

For a few select metals, like copper and gold, the absorption and emission of photons are noticeably dependent on wavelength across the visible part of the spectrum. The graph in the lower right image above shows the reflectance of aluminum, silver, and gold, including wavelengths in the infrared and ultraviolet. Aluminum is pretty reflective overall, and silver is highly reflective in the visible region (about 400 to 700 nm), but gold clearly absorbs wavelengths about 500 nm or below. Thus, it most strongly reflects yellow, giving it its characteristic appearance. 

Sources: (first image), 2 (second image), 3 (third image), 4

That Time We Flew Past Pluto…

Two years ago today (July 14), our New Horizons spacecraft made its closest flyby of Pluto…collecting images and science that revealed a geologically complex world. Data from this mission are helping us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system.

The spacecraft is now venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt…a relic of solar system formation…to reach its next target. On New Year’s Day 2019, New Horizons will zoom past a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69.

The Kuiper Belt is a disc-shaped region of icy bodies – including dwarf planets such as Pluto – and comets beyond the orbit of Neptune. It extends from about 30 to 55 Astronomical Units (an AU is the distance from the sun to Earth) and is probably populated with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 62 miles across, and an estimated trillion or more comets.

Nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto, you may be asking how the spacecraft will function for the 2014 MU69 flyby. Well, New Horizons was originally designed to fly far beyond the Pluto system and explore deeper into the Kuiper Belt. 

The spacecraft carries extra hydrazine fuel for the flyby; its communications system is designed to work from beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.

What have we learned about Pluto since its historic flyby in 2015?

During its encounter, the New Horizons spacecraft collected more than 1,200 images of Pluto and tens of gigabits of data. The intensive downlinking of information took about a year to return to Earth! Here are a few things we’ve discovered:

Pluto Has a Heart

This image captured by New Horizons around 16 hours before its closest approach shows Pluto’s “heart.” This stunning image of one of its most dominant features shows us that the heart’s diameter is about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago. This image also showed us that Pluto is a complex world with incredible geological diversity.

Icy Plains

Pluto’s vast icy plain, informally called Sputnik Planitia, resembles frozen mud cracks on Earth. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs.

Majestic Mountains

Images from the spacecraft display chaotically jumbled mountains that only add to the complexity of Pluto’s geography. The rugged, icy mountains are as tall as 11,000 feet high.

Color Variations

This high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. The surface of tPluto has a remarkable range of subtle color variations. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story.

Foggy Haze and Blue Atmosphere

Images returned from the New Horizons spacecraft have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realized. The haze even creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, which makes them visible to the cameras aboard the spacecraft.

Water Ice

New Horizons detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto. Scientists are eager to understand why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places.

Stay updated on New Horizons findings by visiting the New Horizons page. You can also keep track of Pluto News on Twitter via @NASANewHorizons.

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

Fallstreak holes are natural phenomena that often get mistaken for UFOs. These ‘hole punch clouds’ occur when water droplets inside a cloud freeze and fall beneath it, creating a large gap that looks like a perfect hiding place for a flying saucer.

Aliens, obvi.

The rarity of fallstreak holes is what tends to throw people.

That paired with the tendency to look at anything in the sky and cry ‘UFO!’ is the perfect makings of a false alien alarm.

Sometimes these clouds have little rainbows inside.

They aren’t always circular, though…

They make all kinds of crazy shapes.

Including airplane/sword/cross/wieners.

Photos via: Rantplaces

Source

How did the Greeks know ?

Greeks had a strong geometric approach towards problems and as a result their methods are very intuitive.

In this post, we will look at the Method of exhaustion formulated by Archimedes that stands out as a milestone in the history of mathematics

Method of Exhaustion - Archimedes

                                                       Source

In order to find the bounds of pi, Archimedes came up with a remarkably elegant ‘algorithm’, which is as follows:

Lower bound

Inscribe a n-sided polygon in a circle —> Measure its perimeter(p) —> Measure its diameter(d) —> pi_min = p/d —-> Repeat with  n+1 sides.

Upper bound

Circumscribe a n-sided polygon in a circle —> Measure its perimeter(p) —> Measure its diameter(d) —> pi_max = p/d —-> Repeat with  n+1 sides.

And by following this procedure one could obtain the upper and lower bounds of pi !

Heres an animation made on geogebra for a circle of diameter 1. Watch how the lower and upper bounds vary.

Archimedes did this for a 96 sided polygon and found the value of pi  to be between 3.14103 and 3.1427. This is a good enough approximation for most of the calculations that we do even today!

Happy Holidays !