Elevated Bus That Drives Above Traffic Jams

Flat tires could eventually be a thing of the past. Michelin has unveiled the concept for a 3-D printed, airless tire.

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A portal to another universe ?

That my dear friends is a CT scan machine. Stripped off all the body parts, you can see clearly see what goes on inside.

A computerized tomography (CT) or computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan combines data from several X-rays to produce a detailed image of structures inside the body.

                                            CT scan of Brain

Pretty cool, don’t you think ?

Extras

Difference between MRI and CT scan

Why dont you spin the patient instead ? - Awesome reddit thread

Better quality gifs : here

Source Video: Micheal Jonnson

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

Coloring Book Celebrates Mathematical Beauty of Nature with Hand-Drawn Golden Ratio Illustrations

This is how scientists think birds see the Earth’s magnetic field.

See how the black patches align over certain areas? That dark patch at the base of their vision shows South, with the reverse indicating North. Researchers think this might be how birds like pigeons can use magnetic fields to navigate.

Here’s how it works: there’s a protein in their eyes called cryptochrome. When blue light hits it, it becomes active, and stays active for a little while. How long it stays active for, though, depends on the Earth’s magnetic field, and since cryptochrome is known to affect the sensitivity of the birds’ retinas to light, we think this is the effect it has on their vision.

We have this very same molecule in our eyes, but the molecule that lets it stay active for long enough to be affected by the magnetic field, superoxide, is toxic, so the antioxidants in our eyes lock it down too quickly.  Researchers think we’ve traded longevity for magnetovision.

Want to know more? We made a whole video answering the question, do blind birds can navigate!? Watch it here: https://youtu.be/7yBMUrlpe5s

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

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

coolest physics thing that u know??

The coolest physics thing that I know keeps changing over time. But here is one that is extremely fascinating ( and also exaggerated for the effect ; but true! ):

Person living at the top of a skyscraper experiences time faster than one at the bottom

It is a known fact that the higher you are in the earth’s ** atmosphere, the lesser the effect of gravity is.

But the lesser the effect of gravity is, the faster the time ticks.

By how much you ask? Even if you live on the top floor of the Burj Khalifa  your entire life, you would have aged more only by a few milliseconds than your friends at the bottom. 

( Sure, doesn’t seem like much, but hell would break loose if we don’t consider this on the bigger scale of things )

This is known as Gravitational time dilation and is at the foundations of General Theory of Relativity. (More about this in an upcoming post)

Have a great day and thanks for asking!

EDIT: ** Lets just say hypothetically the earth is not spinning( just to ignore special relativistic effects) and we are looking at only the effects of height.

The simple physics behind a Fidget Spinner

When you want something to spin for a really long time you need to make sure that the friction does not slow it down.

And we can do this by adopting ball bearings. This is so because friction offered due to rolling is much smaller than due to sliding.

And many Fidget spinners indeed use ceramic ball bearings to keep them spinning for a long time. **

Mass Distribution

The next most crucial component is the Angular Momentum. Angular momentum is equal to the product of rotational velocity and the moment of inertia. 

And by distributing more mass towards the edge, the fidget spinner gains high moment of inertia keeping it spinning longer. 

That’s why the spinners have that weird peculiar shape.

But, Why do they feel alive ?

The angular momentum of a fidget spinner happens to point outwards from the spinner’s center.

And so to change the direction of the momentum — rotating the spinner with your fingers — you must apply a force. You push on the spinner, and the spinner pushes back on you.

That’s why a fidget spinner feels like it fights you, like it’s alive.

- Nerdist

A very fascinating toy nevertheless!

** Spin Test : Ceramic Vs Steel ball bearings

*** Fidget spinner trick shots