This 3D Printed Concept Is The Future Of Automaking onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This 3D Printed Concept Is The Future Of Automaking

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EDAG is a German design and engineering firm that has been working with most car manufacturers for the past four decades and also built a Pontiac Solstice shooting brake because wagons rock. Their latest concept is a 3D-printed composite passenger cell that was inspired by turtles and goes beyond today's possibilities.

3D printing is a fantastic tool used by the industry for rapid-prototyping. That speeds up the designing phase quite significantly together with 3D modeling, but what if they could actually print parts of a car as well? In fact, let's go one step further and imagine if they could produce structural parts or even a complete vehicle using this technology! It would change the way we think about and make cars forever.

For starters, cars would become lighter. Printed parts could use all sorts of hollow and cleverly balanced designs to get rid of all the fat. Designers could be let loose as well since almost no shapes would be impossible for series production anymore. And when the crazy shapes all came together, carmakers could lose most of their tooling. Today's complex assembly lines could become much more basic if the entire body would be a solid piece of plastic fantastic that only needs the drivetrain, the interior, lots of wiring and a few other bits here and there before rolling out the factory. But it's not just about car manufacturing.

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Such an advanced level of 3D-printing could mean that damaged parts could be reproduced at your local service station while you're having a coffee observing the magical machinery at work. Ready in five minutes, ten, maybe an hour if it was a big one, depending on how much tech advances over time.

It also means flexibility in the build process. Without set jigs, an age of customized factory coachbuilding could emerge. Unique designs could be easier than ever and factory options and body styles could be wider than ever. It's a very exciting piece of tech for designers.

And engineers.

Like we said, parts could become lighter. Right now, that excites Christian von Koenigsegg. A lot. He said he saw a time in the future where there could be lighter weight structural components that were 3D printed. What that means is a typically solid structure could instead of a lattice work inside to maintain rigidity and reduce weight. It's a dream for an engineer to shave weight in areas they never dreamed of before.

It's all very Star Trek and could go way beyond the car industry as well, but despite all the excitement, don't hold your breath just yet.

While companies like Koenigsegg see 3D printing as a way to make intricate parts that a supplier would charge outrageous amounts to create the pieces in limited supply. That means they have been able to 3D print their titanium exhaust tip for the Koenigsegg One:1, a three day process. It's also the largest piece of 3D printed titanium in the world.

But a full car? Well, that's decades off. Right now, EDAG says we're at the point of 3D printing something the size of a rearview mirror, not a whole car for series production. But through new methods, that's coming. It just might take a while.

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Having said that, I remember when carbon fiber was an exotic material...

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This 3D Printed Concept Is The Future Of Automaking

Oliver and Deathstroke go to war in this epic 3-minute Arrow trailer onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Oliver and Deathstroke go to war in this epic 3-minute Arrow trailer

If you thought Arrow has been pretty good so far this year, get ready to have your mind blown. The show just released this three-minute trailer for the rest of the season, and it looks honestly more exciting than most superhero movies.

I mean, besides the creation of the Suicide Squad, the return of the Huntress, Roy's continuing descent into Arsenal, and the potential murder of all of Ollie's friends and family, we get the inevitable Arrow/Deathstroke confrontation which looks exactly as epic as we'd hoped. I actually cackled with happiness during the trailer's last shot. Yes, pun intended.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Oliver and Deathstroke go to war in this epic 3-minute Arrow trailer

Is Earth's infrared radiation a potential energy source? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Is Earth's infrared radiation a potential energy source?

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At any given moment, our planet bleeds 100 million gigawatts of infrared radiation back into space. Needless to say, converting this wasted heat to a renewable energy source would be a sure-fire game changer. Physicists from Harvard University may have just figured out how to do it.

Our Earth, which is heated by the sun, is much warmer than the frozen space that surrounds it. This creates a heat imbalance that could be transformed into direct-current (DC) power. But making this happen is considerably easier said than done.

"It's not at all obvious, at first, how you would generate DC power by emitting infrared light in free space toward the cold," noted principal investigator Federico Capasso in a statement. "To generate power by emitting, not by absorbing light, that's weird. It makes sense physically once you think about it, but it's highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the use of physics at the nanoscale for a completely new application."

Capasso, along with his colleagues Steven Byrnes and Romain Blanchard, have proposed two designs for a device they call an emissive energy harvester (EEH). Once developed, they would convert infrared radiation (IR) into usable power. And somewhat paradoxically, they would run in reverse.

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Earth's light differences: Image: NASA/JPL.

The first type of EEH is comparable to a solar thermal generator. It would consist of a "hot" plate at the same temperature as the Earth and air, with a "cold" plate on top of it. Facing up towards the sky, the cold plate would feature a material that cools by very efficiently radiating heat. The resulting heat difference between the plates could generate a few watts per square meter — day or night. And in fact, the researchers are basing these measurements on a case study conducted at a location in Larmont, Oklahoma. The researchers admit that keeping the cold plate cooler than the ambient temperature will be a challenge, but it illustrates an important principle — that difference in temperature can generate work.

"Solar panels for heating and cooking are already used in much of the world," he says. "You could easily couple that to the (infrared) harvester."

As for the second device, it would rely on temperature differences between nanoscale electronic components (namely diodes and an antenna) rather than a temperature that can be felt with touch.

"If you have two components at the same temperature, obviously you can't extract any work, but if you have two different temperatures you can," says Capasso. "But it's tricky; at the level of the electron behaviors, the explanation is much less intuitive."

Unfortunately, the technology to build these devices doesn't exist — at least not yet. But the groundwork certainly makes it look promising.

"Now that we understand the constraints and specifications, we are in a good position to work on engineering a solution," adds Byrnes. In fact, he envisions a sheet printed with thousands of tiny IR-harvesting rectennas that could be laminated on a solar panel or integrated into a solar water heater.

As an aside, this could be potential bad news as far as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is concerned; wide-scale energy capture measures like these could make an alien planet appear invisible to us.

Read the entire study at PNAS: "Harvesting renewable energy from Earth's mid-infrared emissions." Additional source: IEEE Spectrum.

Top image: Infrared Earth taken by GOES 9 weather satellite.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Is Earth's infrared radiation a potential energy source?

After a global pandemic, monsters stalk post-apocalyptic Scandinavia onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com After a global pandemic, monsters stalk post-apocalyptic Scandinavia

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Minna Sundberg, creator of the marvelous and magical webcomic A Redtail's Dream is back with a new webcomic, and this time she's destroying the world. What begins as mysterious rash ends up radically altering Northern Europe as we know it—but what is lurking in the woods outside the human settlements?

Sundberg has a remarkable ability to balance the charming and the creepy, and that talent is present from the opening pages of Stand Still, Stay Silent. There is the ominous text, "Year 0, Day 0, Norway," leading into a scene in which folks are discussing their flooded roads and the rash illness spreading through the country. But the tone is light; folks are discussing taxes and making fun of one another. Sundberg gradually swings the camera around to different places and different groups of people, all of whom are trying to deal with the outbreak and the accompanying government shutdowns in their own ways. They are vaguely concerned about the illness, which hasn't been fully explained by medical professionals, but they're also worried about keeping their jobs, about their relationships, about everything they think they'll need to do in the coming weeks.

Sundberg introduces the characters in Stand Still, Stay Silent in much the way she does in A Redtail's Dream, with a bit of cheeky text that gives us a little insight into the character's personality. But the implication is clear: These people may not survive to the next chapter. We may never hear about them again. While for a few pages, they may be the most important people in the comic, their significance is fleeting.

But Stand Still, Stay Silent isn't a comic about the destruction of the world. We aren't simply going to watch the world fall apart; we're going to see how humans have adjusted to the new status quo decades later. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have all formed distinct civilizations based on their geography, language, history, and traditions—and what happened to them during the initial outbreak. But the world hasn't yet been reclaimed by humanity; there is something dangerous lurking in the forbidden zones, and chilling admonitions to travelers who would venture there.

What's especially remarkable about Stand Still, Stay Silent is that Sundberg has managed to create an engrossing comic when she hasn't yet introduced us to our main cast. She has just ended the comic's rather beefy prologue, one that drops some intriguing hints about this post-apocalyptic world and invites us to plumb its secrets.

[Stand Still, Stay Silent]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com After a global pandemic, monsters stalk post-apocalyptic Scandinavia

Physicists find a new 'state of matter' in the eyes of chickens onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Physicists find a new 'state of matter' in the eyes of chickens

An unusual arrangement of particles has been discovered in the cells of chicken eyes. It's the first time scientists have seen such a system in a biological system — one that allows materials to behave like both a crystal and a liquid.

The unique arrangement is called "disordered hyperuniformity," and it could help researchers design advanced materials, such as optics that can transmit light with the efficiency of a crystal and the flexibility of a liquid.

When matter is organized into states of disordered hyperuniformity, it exhibits order over large distances and disorder over small distances. At one level, it's like a crystal that greatly suppresses differences in the density of particles across large spatial distances. But at another scale, it's liquid-like in that it exhibits similar physical properties in all directions.

Image: Left: visual cell distribution in chickens; right: a computer-simulation model showing pretty much the exact same thing. The colored dots represent the centers of the chicken's eye cells (Courtesy of Salvatore Torquato, Princeton University).

"We've...discovered that such physical systems are endowed with exotic physical properties and therefore have novel capabilities," noted Princeton researcher Salvatore Torquato in a statement. "The more we learn about these special disordered systems, the more we find that they really should be considered a new distinguishable state of matter."

Neat, right? But why would a chicken need such a seemingly advanced biological trait?

It has to do with the way the chicken's four photoreceptors — violet, blue, green, and red — and a fifth light-detecting type are crammed into a single tissue layer on the retina. Finding a way to organize these five elements in an optimal way is a huge technical challenge (which is called a "packing problem) — but evolution found a way.

Image: At left, two cells appear randomly placed. The exclusion regions for both the black (center) and red cells (right) push against nearby cells and give the cell arrangements structure. The black cells fall into a triangle-like pattern in the absence of other cell types. (Courtesy of Salvatore Torquato, Princeton University).

"Because the cones are of different sizes it's not easy for the system to go into a crystal or ordered state," Torquato said. "The system is frustrated from finding what might be the optimal solution, which would be the typical ordered arrangement. While the pattern must be disordered, it must also be as uniform as possible. Thus, disordered hyperuniformity is an excellent solution."

This means that the arrangement of photoreceptors in chickens, although not perfectly regular, are, in fact, as regular as they can be given the packing constraints in the cellular tissue.

Read the entire study at Physical Review E.

Related: Watch people walk, run and dance on a liquid that thinks it's a solid | New evidence that plants get their energy using quantum entanglement

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Physicists find a new 'state of matter' in the eyes of chickens

The Clone Wars' final season may finally tie all the prequels together! onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Clone Wars' final season may finally tie all the prequels together!

The first real trailer for Star Wars: Clone Wars — The Lost Missions has arrived, and holy womprats does it look amazing. So amazing, in fact, I think maybe we should throw out all the prequels and let this be the only pre-New Hope material.

Look at all the stuff from the prequels it's meshing together, either introducing them early so they actually make sense in the movies, or bringing back in order to tie up loose ends! The existence of Force ghosts! Qui-Gon's mission to train Anakin! Dagobah! A much better set-up for the clone army's betrayal and Order 66, so it no longer comes completely out of nowhere! Plus new stuff like the home planet of the Sith! And there's also plenty of awesome action too, obviously.

If nothing else, this trailer reminds me that while Clone Wars started out pretty rough — especially if you were misfortunate enough to have watched the movie — it built into some really special. Rebels may look poor in comparison now, but there's no reason to suspect that Dave Filoni and his crew can't do it again.

[Via Coming Soon]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Clone Wars' final season may finally tie all the prequels together!

The Worst Blunders People Make in Inventing Fictional Alien Worlds onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Worst Blunders People Make in Inventing Fictional Alien Worlds

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We love stories that take us to alien planets and let us explore whole new environments. But not every alien planet is totally realistic, especially given how much we've learned about exoplanets lately. So we asked six experts to tell us the biggest mistakes they see in fictional habitable worlds — and here's what they told us.

Until recently, science fiction creators had to imagine alien planets, without knowing that much about real-life exoplanets. But in the past 20 years, we've discovered over 1000 confirmed exoplanets, and learned a lot more in the process. Here's what our six experts told us bugs them about alien planets in science fiction:

Not being weird enough

Given the amazing variety of exoplanets we've been finding out there, and "the remarkable range of orbital and physical characteristics they seem to have," writers and creators really should be more bold in the kinds of planets they choose to portray, says Andrew Fraknoi, chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA.

"The diversity of exoplanets is apparently so great that nearly any rendering in science fiction could occur in cosmic nature," adds Geoff Marcy, Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley, who's credited with discovering 70 out of the first 100 exoplanets we found.

In fact, the best candidates for supporting life at the moment appear to be tidally locked planets orbiting red dwarfs, says Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer with the SETI Institute. "And if you have biology on planets around such stars, it will be mostly confined to a thin strip along the terminator. That would be interesting, of course, and quite unlike most of the planets you see in films."

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Assuming exoplanets must have ecosystems as diverse as our own

People often criticize science fiction for having planets with a single ecosystem — we've leveled that criticism in the past, in fact. Science fiction is full of "desert planets" (like Tatooine) or "ice planets" (like Hoth.) But in fact, there's nothing wrong with aplanet with a more homogenous ecosystem than Earth, says Greg Laughlin, Professor and Chair in the Department of Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

"I've often thought that both Hoth and Tatooine are quite convincingly presented as representative habitable 'worlds,'" says Laughlin. "Hoth could credibly be an Earth-like planet in the grip of a "snowball earth" geologic period, similar to what we know that Earth has experienced at least twice in its history, and recent research suggests that desert planets such as Arrakis (Dune) or Tatooine might be better suited to resist long-term greenhouse warming than a moist planet such as Earth."

"The binary Sun for Tatooine was a brilliant visual shorthand that immediately telegraphs that the planet is extraterrestrial," adds Laughlin. If anything, the biggest mistake in imagining fictional alien worlds might be "to envision planets that are too similar to Earth. I have a sense that Earth is somehow less monochromatic than many worlds that present habitable (or marginally habitable) environments," Laughlin says.

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Picking the wrong star

There are two ways that happens, which irritate Stanford University physics professor Bruce A. Macintosh:

[The first problem is picking] a star that's highly unlikely to ever host a habitable planet. A good example is Epsilon Eridani. It's got a good name, very popular choice. But it's also far too young a star to have a planet that is likely to be habitable - there's good astronomical evidence that the star is only about 500 million years old - far too young to have really built up a ecosystem that would build up an oxygen atmosphere. In part because it's young, the system has a huge number of comets and asteroids (so the planet is probably getting massively bombarded with meteors), etc. Another very common example (though less common these days) is to pick a massive hot star (like say Vega), because massive stars are almost always young (since they have short lifetimes.)

My second pet peeve is picking a star based on recent and trendy discoveries - a star which has hints of a habitable planet from current astronomical measurements. All the possibly-habitable planets we have now are all marginal and uncertain and the odds that any given one will ultimately prove to be habitable are very slim.

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Not having enough oceans

For a long time, most alien planets "used to all look like the landscapes around Los Angeles, for obvious reasons," says Shostak, but at least that's no longer the case. Still, Shostak says one thing is missing: "How often do you see oceans on these alien worlds? They seem to be 'all continents,' as far as I can tell."

In fact, Marcy says that continents may be the rarity:

The Earth may be very rare in one attribute few people realize. The Earth has 0.03% of its mass in ocean water. Yet, the continents, stemming from plate tectonics, just barely poke above sea level. Many "Earth-like" planets may receive twice as much water, or even 5 or 10x as much. Why not? If so, such planets would be more like a bad Kevin Costner film. Without continents, the development of technology would be slowed and compromised, if not impossible. How can an intelligent species invent fire, the printing press, or iPhones on a water world? It seems difficult.

Perhaps planets enjoying a thin veneer of water, with land barely poking above sea level, are actually rare.

Shoving planets too close together

One thing that bothers Abel Méndez, Associate Professor of Physics and Astrobiology with University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo is when you see "multiple planets or moons close to each other, when viewed from space." It may look cool, but it's a recipe for planetary collision. "Planets could not be that close in reality," he warns.

Alien creatures that don't make sense

That could be a whole other article — but Shostak has a few major gripes about the inhabitants of alien worlds. For example, "megafauna on planets that look barely able to sustain bacteria."

There's a huge problem with "assuming native complex life or even intelligent life in desert planets when there are no traces of primary food source (e.g. plants) to support these life forms," adds Méndez. "This has problems with how the food chain works and evolution."

Shostak also points to the fact that "intelligent inhabitants are (1) generally very similar to us in appearance (four appendages, etc.), and (2) more or less at our level of technical sophistication, which means we can take them on in dogfights, etc."

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Worst Blunders People Make in Inventing Fictional Alien Worlds

Here's 15 minutes of deleted scenes from Game of Thrones season 3 onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here's 15 minutes of deleted scenes from Game of Thrones season 3

Haven't been able to pick a copy of Game of Thrones: The Complete Season 3 on DVD or Blu-ray yet today? At least you can watch 15 minutes of deleted and extended scenes now, while you wait for your chance to buy it (or for it to be delivered).

Here's what's included in the vid: a longer version of Jon Snow meeting Mance Rayder; one of Robb's war councils, and his admonishment of his uncle Edmure Tully; a deleted scene of Tywin Lannister having a very revealing discussion with Grand Maester Pycelle; King Joffrey's small council discussing the wildling threat; and finally, Jon Snow taking a walk.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here's 15 minutes of deleted scenes from Game of Thrones season 3

The first video footage of Star Wars: Rebels is playing with fire onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The first video footage of Star Wars: Rebels is playing with fire

Two promos for Disney XD's new Star Wars cartoon Rebels have finally been released, giving up us our first look at the show in action! At a glance it looks like Clone Wars, except we don't recognize any of the characters. Also, the promos' narrator seems to be a bit of a pyromaniac.

He keeps talking about sparks and igniting while newly revealed character Ezra scampers around his sleepy, wheat-covered planet, until he witnesses a fight between a Rebel ship and some TIE Fighters above. It's reminiscent of one of the deleted scenes from the first Star Wars movie, which featured Luke staring up at the movie's opening space battle through his space binoculars. Ezra sounds suspiciously spunky here, but as long as he doesn't whine about picking up power converters in the first episode, he'll be doing better than Luke.

Also, that Rebel Alliance/Phoenix logo is pretty sweet. I am very much looking forward to spending my money to purchase merchandise with that symbol on it.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The first video footage of Star Wars: Rebels is playing with fire

Watch a heroic father-son hovercraft crew rescue deer stranded on ice onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Watch a heroic father-son hovercraft crew rescue deer stranded on ice

Now this video should warm you up during those cold winter days. A father and son in Minnesota took out their (multiple) hovercrafts in order to save a few stranded, wobbly deer who couldn't get their way back off the ice.

James Nolastname saw a Facebook post about a few deer stuck out on the frozen Albert Lea Lake, so he and his father got out the hovercraft and put it to good use. It's nice, plus the cheesy music will make you feel feelings. To celebrate here are some gifs of Bambi on ice.

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[via Geekologie]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Watch a heroic father-son hovercraft crew rescue deer stranded on ice

JL8 creator Yale Stewart is writing a series of Superman kids' books onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com JL8 creator Yale Stewart is writing a series of Superman kids' books

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One of the best things to come out of the DC Universe recently is Yale Stewart's touching and funny fan webcomic JL8, which imagines the members of the Justice League as eight-year-olds. Soon Stewart will have a series of licensed DC children books on the shelves: The Amazing Adventures of Superman.

Stewart posted an image of Superman's shield to Instagram a while back, saying that he had just finished his first children's book, and today Bleeding Cool pointed to a listing on Amazon for The Amazing Adventures of Superman by Yale Stewart, published by Capstone Publishing. We reached out to Capstone Publishing, who sent us info on four titles from The Amazing Adventures of Superman: Alien Superman! featuring Wonder Woman and Lex Luthor; Battle of the Superheroes! featuring Batman, the Flash, and Clayface; Creatures from Planet X! featuring Green Lantern; and Escape from Future World! featuring Brainiac and Cyborg. Rather than comics, the books are illustrated early chapter books for young readers, and feature adult versions of the characters. A representative from Capstone says they will be carrying the titles this coming fall.

Marvel announced in November that Stewart would be handling art duties on Nova #100, but given his obvious affinity for the Justice League, it's great to see that he's getting an officially licensed DC project as well. I can only hope that this means we'll see Stewart coming out with more work in the vein of JL8—and getting paid to do it.

[via Bleeding Cool]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com JL8 creator Yale Stewart is writing a series of Superman kids' books

All the studios and the Marvel heroes they own in one handy graph onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com All the studios and the Marvel heroes they own in one handy graph

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If you're not a professional nerd, it can be tough remember which studios have the rights to which Marvel comics characters, especially since Marvel Studios only has some. So the Geek Twins have made this handy (and adorable) chart to help you keep 'em straight. I totally forgot Universal had Namor. Get on that, guys.

[Via Geeks Are Sexy]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com All the studios and the Marvel heroes they own in one handy graph

Read an excerpt from Andy Weir's space thriller, The Martian onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Read an excerpt from Andy Weir's space thriller, The Martian

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Andy Weir's novel The Martian, out today, falls squarely within an emerging genre in space adventures that emphasize realism. Like Gravity, it tells the story of a stranded astronaut battling the elements beyond Earth when a mission goes wrong. And it promises to be a white-knuckler. We've got an excerpt.

Here's a plot summary:

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to kill him first.

But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

Here's the excerpt:

CHAPTER 1

LOG ENTRY: SOL 6

I'm pretty much fucked.

That's my considered opinion.

Fucked.

Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.

I don't even know who'll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now.

For the record . . . I didn't die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can't blame them. Maybe there'll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, "Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars."

And it'll be right, probably. 'Cause I'll surely die here. Just not on Sol 6 when everyone thinks I did.

Let's see . . . where do I begin?

The Ares Program. Mankind reaching out to Mars to send people to another planet for the very first time and expand the horizons of humanity blah, blah, blah. The Ares 1 crew did their thing and came back heroes. They got the parades and fame and love of the world.

Ares 2 did the same thing, in a different location on Mars. They got a firm handshake and a hot cup of coffee when they got home.

Ares 3. Well, that was my mission. Okay, not mine per se. Commander Lewis was in charge. I was just one of her crew. Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be "in command" of the mission if I were the only remaining person.

What do you know? I'm in command.

I wonder if this log will be recovered before the rest of the crew die of old age. I presume they got back to Earth all right. Guys, if you're reading this: It wasn't your fault. You did what you had to do. In your position I would have done the same thing. I don't blame you, and I'm glad you survived.

I guess I should explain how Mars missions work, for any layman who may be reading this. We got to Earth orbit the normal way, through an ordinary ship to Hermes. All the Ares missions use Hermes to get to and from Mars. It's really big and cost a lot so NASA built only one.

Once we got to Hermes, four additional unmanned missions brought us fuel and supplies while we prepared for our trip. Once everything was a go, we set out for Mars. But not very fast. Gone are the days of heavy chemical fuel burns and trans-Mars injection orbits.

Hermes is powered by ion engines. They throw argon out the back of the ship really fast to get a tiny amount of acceleration. The thing is, it doesn't take much reactant mass, so a little argon (and a nuclear reactor to power things) let us accelerate constantly the whole way there. You'd be amazed at how fast you can get going with a tiny acceleration over a long time.

I could regale you with tales of how we had great fun on the trip, but I won't. I don't feel like reliving it right now. Suffice it to say we got to Mars 124 days later without strangling each other.

From there, we took the MDV (Mars descent vehicle) to the surface. The MDV is basically a big can with some light thrusters and parachutes attached. Its sole purpose is to get six humans from Mars orbit to the surface without killing any of them.

And now we come to the real trick of Mars exploration: having all of our shit there in advance.

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A total of fourteen unmanned missions deposited everything we would need for surface operations. They tried their best to land all the supply vessels in the same general area, and did a reasonably good job. Supplies aren't nearly so fragile as humans and can hit the ground really hard. But they tend to bounce around a lot.

Naturally, they didn't send us to Mars until they'd confirmed that all the supplies had made it to the surface and their containers weren't breached. Start to finish, including supply missions, a Mars mission takes about three years. In fact, there were Ares 3 supplies en route to Mars while the Ares 2 crew were on their way home.

The most important piece of the advance supplies, of course, was the MAV. The Mars ascent vehicle. That was how we would get back to Hermes after surface operations were complete. The MAV was soft-landed (as opposed to the balloon bounce-fest the other supplies had). Of course, it was in constant communication with Houston, and if there had been any problems with it, we would have passed by Mars and gone home without ever landing.

The MAV is pretty cool. Turns out, through a neat set of chemical reactions with the Martian atmosphere, for every kilogram of hydrogen you bring to Mars, you can make thirteen kilograms of fuel. It's a slow process, though. It takes twenty-four months to fill the tank. That's why they sent it long before we got here.

You can imagine how disappointed I was when I discovered the MAV was gone.

It was a ridiculous sequence of events that led to me almost dying, and an even more ridiculous sequence that led to me surviving.

The mission is designed to handle sandstorm gusts up to 150 kph. So Houston got understandably nervous when we got whacked with 175 kph winds. We all got in our flight space suits and huddled in the middle of the Hab, just in case it lost pressure. But the Hab wasn't the problem.

The MAV is a spaceship. It has a lot of delicate parts. It can put up with storms to a certain extent, but it can't just get sandblasted forever. After an hour and a half of sustained wind, NASA gave the order to abort. Nobody wanted to stop a monthlong mission after only six days, but if the MAV took any more punishment, we'd all have gotten stranded down there.

We had to go out in the storm to get from the Hab to the MAV. That was going to be risky, but what choice did we have?

Everyone made it but me.

Our main communications dish, which relayed signals from the Hab to Hermes, acted like a parachute, getting torn from its foundation and carried with the torrent. Along the way, it crashed through the reception antenna array. Then one of those long thin antennae slammed into me end-first. It tore through my suit like a bullet through butter, and I felt the worst pain of my life as it ripped open my side. I vaguely remember having the wind knocked out of me (pulled out of me, really) and my ears popping painfully as the pressure of my suit escaped.

The last thing I remember was seeing Johanssen hopelessly reaching out toward me.

I awoke to the oxygen alarm in my suit. A steady, obnoxious beeping that eventually roused me from a deep and profound desire to just fucking die.

The storm had abated; I was facedown, almost totally buried in sand. As I groggily came to, I wondered why I wasn't more dead.

The antenna had enough force to punch through the suit and my side, but it had been stopped by my pelvis. So there was only one hole in the suit (and a hole in me, of course).

I had been knocked back quite a ways and rolled down a steep hill. Somehow I landed facedown, which forced the antenna to a strongly oblique angle that put a lot of torque on the hole in the suit. It made a weak seal.

Then, the copious blood from my wound trickled down toward the hole. As the blood reached the site of the breach, the water in it quickly evaporated from the airflow and low pressure, leaving a gunky residue behind. More blood came in behind it and was also reduced to gunk. Eventually, it sealed the gaps around the hole and reduced the leak to something the suit could counteract.

The suit did its job admirably. Sensing the drop in pressure, it constantly flooded itself with air from my nitrogen tank to equalize. Once the leak became manageable, it only had to trickle new air in slowly to relieve the air lost.

After a while, the CO2 (carbon dioxide) absorbers in the suit were expended. That's really the limiting factor to life support. Not the amount of oxygen you bring with you, but the amount of CO2 you can remove. In the Hab, I have the oxygenator, a large piece of equipment that breaks apart CO2 to give the oxygen back. But the space suits have to be portable, so they use a simple chemical absorption process with expendable filters. I'd been asleep long enough that my filters were useless.

The suit saw this problem and moved into an emergency mode the engineers call "bloodletting." Having no way to separate out the CO2, the suit deliberately vented air to the Martian atmosphere, then backfilled with nitrogen. Between the breach and the bloodletting, it quickly ran out of nitrogen. All it had left was my oxygen tank.

So it did the only thing it could to keep me alive. It started backfilling with pure oxygen. I now risked dying from oxygen toxicity, as the excessively high amount of oxygen threatened to burn up my nervous system, lungs, and eyes. An ironic death for someone with a leaky space suit: too much oxygen.

Every step of the way would have had beeping alarms, alerts, and warnings. But it was the high-oxygen warning that woke me.

The sheer volume of training for a space mission is astounding. I'd spent a week back on Earth practicing emergency space suit drills. I knew what to do.

Carefully reaching to the side of my helmet, I got the breach kit. It's nothing more than a funnel with a valve at the small end and an unbelievably sticky resin on the wide end. The idea is you have the valve open and stick the wide end over a hole. The air can escape through the valve, so it doesn't interfere with the resin making a good seal. Then you close the valve, and you've sealed the breach.

The tricky part was getting the antenna out of the way. I pulled it out as fast as I could, wincing as the sudden pressure drop dizzied me and made the wound in my side scream in agony.

I got the breach kit over the hole and sealed it. It held. The suit backfilled the missing air with yet more oxygen. Checking my arm readouts, I saw the suit was now at 85 percent oxygen. For reference, Earth's atmosphere is about 21 percent. I'd be okay, so long as I didn't spend too much time like that.

I stumbled up the hill back toward the Hab. As I crested the rise, I saw something that made me very happy and something that made me very sad: The Hab was intact (yay!) and the MAV was gone (boo!).

Right that moment I knew I was screwed. But I didn't want to just die out on the surface. I limped back to the Hab and fumbled my way into an airlock. As soon as it equalized, I threw off my helmet.

Once inside the Hab, I doffed the suit and got my first good look at the injury. It would need stitches. Fortunately, all of us had been trained in basic medical procedures, and the Hab had excellent medical supplies. A quick shot of local anesthetic, irrigate the wound, nine stitches, and I was done. I'd be taking antibiotics for a couple of weeks, but other than that I'd be fine.

I knew it was hopeless, but I tried firing up the communications array. No signal, of course. The primary satellite dish had broken off, remember? And it took the reception antennae with it. The Hab had secondary and tertiary communications systems, but they were both just for talking to the MAV, which would use its much more powerful systems to relay to Hermes. Thing is, that only works if the MAV is still around.

I had no way to talk to Hermes. In time, I could locate the dish out on the surface, but it would take weeks for me to rig up any repairs, and that would be too late. In an abort, Hermes would leave orbit within twenty-four hours. The orbital dynamics made the trip safer and shorter the earlier you left, so why wait?

Checking out my suit, I saw the antenna had plowed through my bio-monitor computer. When on an EVA, all the crew's suits are networked so we can see each other's status. The rest of the crew would have seen the pressure in my suit drop to nearly zero, followed immediately by my bio-signs going flat. Add to that watching me tumble down a hill with a spear through me in the middle of a sandstorm . . . yeah. They thought I was dead. How could they not?

They may have even had a brief discussion about recovering my body, but regulations are clear. In the event a crewman dies on Mars, he stays on Mars. Leaving his body behind reduces weight for the MAV on the trip back. That means more disposable fuel and a larger margin of error for the return thrust. No point in giving that up for sentimentality.

So that's the situation. I'm stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I'm dead. I'm in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days.

If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I'll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death.

So yeah. I'm fucked.

Excerpted from The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir. Copyright © 2011, 2014 by Andy Weir. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Read an excerpt from Andy Weir's space thriller, The Martian

This cyborg mystery novel is what Intelligence could have been onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This cyborg mystery novel is what Intelligence could have been

S

One of the reasons Intelligence has fizzled is that it took a solid premise—a government agent with a chip in brain—and failed to do anything interesting with it. K.B. Spangler's novel Digital Divide, on the other hand, takes the idea of cyborg agents and runs with it in a tale of murder and anti-cyborg prejudice.

Rachel Peng was a promising US Army Warrant Officer on her way to West Point and a career as an officer when she was recruited by the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies, the federal agency that placed a computer chip in her head and turned her and a few hundred other brilliant young people into cyborgs. Five years later, Rachel and her fellow Agents are still dealing with the physical and psychic scars of the OACET pilot program, and they are freshly out to a public that isn't sure they like the idea of cyborgs running around their country. Rachel has been assigned as the OACET liaison to Washington, DC's Metropolitan Police, where she and her partner, non-enhanced Detective Raul Santino, deal with constant resentment from the rest of the police force while spending their days doing paperwork on lost smart phones and reseting passwords.

The monotony is finally broken when Rachel and Santino find themselves assigned to a murder case, one that involves technological feats few people could pull off. As Rachel begins to suspect that the crime is somehow aimed at OACET, she also finds herself pulled into the orbit of an anti-cyborg politician who claims that cyborgs represent walking violations of certain Constitutional privacies—which they very well may. All the while, she has to remain a model cyborg in the public eye as OACET's public relations campaign marches on and her fellow cyborgs bid for wider acceptance.

Digital Divide is the first in a series of Rachel Peng novels and it's set in the same universe as and features many of the characters from Spangler's long-running and popular webcomic A Girl and Her Fed. I'll admit that I've attempted to read A Girl and Her Fed on a few occasions, but had difficulty getting past the goofiness of the first few pages. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Digital Divide isn't a goofy book—and, in fact, explains the initial silliness of AGAHF. It is, however, a rather funny book. Even before she became a cyborg, Rachel was accustomed to dealing with harassment and prejudice, and she has developed an armor of biting humor. Santino is her perfect match, a quick-witted, hard-drinking physics and technology geek who easily trades barbs with Rachel and wishes someone had asked him to become a cyborg. And, happily, there is no sexual tension between this buddy cop pair; Rachel is gay.

While there is a mystery running over the surface of the novel, Digital Divide is to a large extent an exercise in world-building. It asks, in part, "If we woke up tomorrow and learned that the government employed cyborgs, how would American society react?" Spangler doesn't entirely demonize the people who hate and fear cyborgs, suggesting that, while some of Rachel's adversaries are genuine assholes, others are simply people wary of such a huge leap in transhumanism (and some just view cyborg hate as a convenient campaign platform).

Where Spangler really shines, however, is in her development of OACET itself. The network of cyborgs functions as a quasi-hive mind, a perverse family where everyone knows everyone else's business and no one is ever truly alone. Spangler clearly has great fun imagining the ways the Agents interact, how they function as a unit (especially in their own bizarre headquarters which I found myself wishing was a real place), and how they tailor the chip to their individual personalities. With hundreds of different Agents, and a good many appearing within the pages of the book, we're treated to the myriad ways someone might use a networked computer in their brain. There isn't always a perfect scientific explanation for the sorts of things the Agents can do, and on occasion we have to really suspend our disbelief, but Spangler sets forth a lot of neat ideas about how different people might develop different abilities with a little technological enhancement, and how groups of network people might share those abilities and information. Perhaps it's wise that Rachel is one of the less developed cyborgs, although she has some unique talents of her own.

The story's twisty, turny mystery does reach a solution, but not a conclusion. It's clear that, if anything, solving this particular series of crimes only plunges Rachel into a more profound mystery, one that could have major consequences for OACET. And after spending the length of the novel with her, I'm eager to pick up the next one to see what's next for Rachel Peng—and to dive into the archives of A Girl and Her Fed to learn more about the world OACET inhabits.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This cyborg mystery novel is what Intelligence could have been

Have we found the key to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript code? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Have we found the key to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript code?

S

The mysterious, 15th century Voynich Manuscript is full of codes and bizarre illustrations. Most experts believe it's a hoax, a nonsense book created to fire our imaginations. But now there's new evidence that it may be written in a lost Aztec language, Nahuatl.

Don't get too excited — people have been saying they've unlocked the code to the Voynich Manuscript for decades. It's such a common idea that it's turned up in fantasy tales from Codex, by Lev Grossman, to Assassin's Creed. But now, reports Lisa Grossman in New Scientist, there's a new wrinkle. A botanist named Arthur Tucker has discovered that several of the plant illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript look like plants found only in the New World.

She writes:

Botanist Arthur Tucker of Delaware State University in Dover noticed similarities between certain plants in the manuscript and illustrations of plants in 16th century records from Mexico . . . On the basis of these similarities, [he and colleague Rexford Talbert suggest] that the manuscript came from the New World, and that it might be written in an extinct form of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Deciphering the names of these plants could therefore help crack the Voynich code.

The great Aztec civilization, located partly in the region now called Mexico, was known to have produced many great works of literature and philosophy. Most of these were lost in the wars and plagues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So this idea is intriguing.

Of course, the similarities to illustrations of Mexican plants could also be part of a centuries-old hoax. If the hoaxer had lived during the fifteenth century, he or she might have seen illustrated books about the New World and copied images of plants from there. Another possibility is that the hoaxer lived long after the fifteenth century, which would have made access to such books even easier.

As linguist Gordon Rugg put it to Grossman:

It's pretty good odds that you'll find plants in the world that happen to look like the Voynich manuscript just by chance. If I sat down with a random plant generator software and got it to generate 50 completely fictitious plants, I'm pretty sure I could find 20 real plants that happen to look like 20 of the made up plants.

Nicely put.

Read more at New Scientist

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Have we found the key to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript code?

Why Astronauts Were Banned From Drinking Wine In Outer Space onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why Astronauts Were Banned From Drinking Wine In Outer Space

The story behind NASA's brief embrace of extraterrestrial sherry is a curious one. In the early seventies, the agency's focus was shifting from short, Moon-focused missions to possibility of longer-term inhabitation of space. A revamped menu was among the most pressing challenges: food on the Gemini and Apollo programs came in dehydrated cube form, or squeezed from a pouch, and was universally regarded as inedible.

According to Ben Evan's book, At Home in Space: The Late Seventies into the Eighties, in May 1969, Don Arabian, NASA's spacecraft project manager, tried living on Apollo fare for three consecutive days, and subsequently reported that he had "lost the will to live" and that, in particular, "the sausage patties tasted like granulated rubber."

After a year of working on the food program for Skylab, the United States' first space station, Evans reports that "the situation had improved significantly: the station would include both a freezer and an oven and foods would be provided in five varieties—dehydrated, intermediate moisture, 'wet-packed,' frozen, and perishable."

Spaghetti, prime ribs, ice-cream, and—for a brief moment—alcohol were all on the menu.

Apollo-era space food, via Space1.

The tough role of Space Sommelier fell to Charles Bourland, who spent more than three decades at NASA Johnson Space Center developing food and food packages for spaceflight.

Bourland shared his recipes and reminiscences in The Astronaut's Cookbook:

My boss was Mormon and consequently, the job of heading the wine selection process for the Skylab missions fell to me. Selecting a wine was an interesting project for the people in the food laboratory, and we had no shortage of volunteers for the taste panel.

After consulting with several professors at the University of California at Davis, it was decided that a Sherry would work best because any wine flown would have to be repackaged. Sherry is a very stable product, having been heated during the processing. Thus, it would be the least likely to undergo changes if it were to be repackaged.

The winner of the space Sherry taste test was Paul Masson California Rare Cream Sherry. A quantity of this Rare Cream Sherry was ordered for the entire Skylab mission and was delivered to the Johnson Space Center. A package was developed that consisted of a flexible plastic pouch with a built-in drinking tube, which could be cut off. The astronaut would simply squeeze the bag and drink the wine from the package. The flexible container was designed to be fitted into the Skylab pudding can.

Astronauts Robert Crippen (left) and Joe Kerwin, Paul Weitz, and Pete Conrad (right) "prepare and eat food in a mockup of the wardroom in the spring of 1973." Photographs by NASA, via At Home in Space: The Late Seventies into the Eighties by Ben Evans.

An article in The Milwaukee Journal, dated August 1, 1972, gleefully reported the news that "the era of prohibition is about to end in space."

Dr. Malcolm Smith, a nutritionist on Bourland's team, explained that the wine chosen was American, that astronauts were rationed to just four ounces every four days, and that "the question of whether wine promoted better health was still open." He continued: "I would tend to believe that there is some value besides pure energy, either in the calming effect or promoting digestion. Somewhere in there, there's probably a beneficial effect from wine."

Yet the sherry never went to space.

Food Lab personnel Jane McAvin and Gloria Mongan test food packages on the zero G plane (NASA).

First of all, early tests in NASA's low-gravity, "Vomit Comet" plane, designed to see whether the packaging worked in weightless conditions, produced unfortunate results, as Bourland recalled in his official oral history:

As it turned out, the odors released by the wine, combined with the residual smell of years-worth of people getting sick on the plane, had an unplanned effect on the crew. Many grabbed for their barf bags.

In response, NASA surveyed the crew as to whether they wanted the sherry on board, and "it was about half and half. They didn’t really care."

The final nail in the drinks cabinet coffin came when Skylab 4 commander, Gerry Carr, mentioned the presence of alcohol on the menu in a public lecture, and NASA received a flurry of angry letters from the general public. As the Milwaukee Journal article reports, the team had anticipated that the sherry plan might not go over well:

"Let’s just say that no one here is enthused about publicizing this thing any more than necessary,” said scientist-astronaut Edward G. Gibson, who will fly on the third Skylab mission. “The problem is that you have got some extremists around and we (astronauts) kind of represent a form of purity. As soon as you taint that purity with alcohol, they really get upset,” Gibson said.

Gibson's comments were prescient. The official end of NASA's alcohol program came just ten days later, in a memorandum from Kenneth S. Kleinknecht, Skylab's manager in Houston, to Chris Kraft, director of the Johnson Space Center:

In accord with our discussion on Tuesday, August 8, 1972, I have reconsidered the requirement for a fruit beverage (wine) in the Skylab menu and have concluded that there is no basic requirement for such a beverage.

This conclusion is based on the following:

a. It is not necessary either for nourishment or to provide a balanced diet.

b. It is not a fully developed menu item, and, therefore, an unnecessary expense is involved.

c. The PI for experiment MO71, mineral balance, is opposed to its use because it will affect his experimental results.

d. This beverage will aggravate, to a small degree, a minor problem of galley stowage capacity for beverage.

e. We can expect continued criticism and ridicule throughout the Skylab Program if such a beverage is provided.

Based on the above rationale, I am, by copy of this memorandum, notifying Deke Slayton that wine will not be included in the Skylab menu, and requesting Dick Johnston to immediately terminate all activity associated with developing and providing wine for Skylab.

Sherry's death knell, as seen in a faxed response to a 2006 Freedom of Information Act request by space historian Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.

The good news is that the sherry did not go to waste. At the time the fateful decision was being made, a crew of astronauts were preparing to spend fifty-six days in a vacuum chamber, simulating a Skylab stay as closely as possible.

The SMEAT chamber; photograph from Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story.

The experiment was called SMEAT (Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test), and in Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, astronauts Owen Garriott and Joe Kerwin, writing with co-author David Hitt, describe the role that sherry played in it:

Fortunately for the SMEAT crew, however, by the time the decision was made to remove the sherry from the Skylab menus, the SMEAT menus had already been made out, and it was too late to go back through the process of completely rebalancing the various nutritional factors that would have to be changed if the sherry was removed. “We had it,” Crippen said, “and we really looked forward to it.”

Of course, not all countries share the United States' prohibitionist tendencies. Russia, has its own, differently dysfunctional relationship to alcohol, which, as Mir space station resident Alexander Lazutkin explained to NBC, means that cognac is prescribed to cosmonauts on extended missions in order "to stimulate our immune system and on the whole to keep our organisms in tone."

Russian cosmonauts celebrate with cognac aftera fire emergency on the Mir space station. Alexander Lazutkin is on the far right. The picture was taken by NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger, who did not drink.

As it turns out, there is some scientific evidence for the benefits of alcohol in space. A 2011 paper published in the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology concluded that resveratrol, a phenolic compound found in red wine, "could be envisaged as a nutritional countermeasure for spaceflight," following an experiment that hung rats upside down to simulate the bone density loss that accompanies zero-gravity living.

Sadly, both cognac and sherry are made from white wine grapes, and contain very little resveratrol. But with longer term missions to Mars on the horizon, as well as Virgin Galactic-style space joyrides, perhaps it's time for a new crew of Space Sommeliers to step up.

If you're intrigued by the potential of future space cocktails, and you're in London this Sunday, don't miss "A Brief History of Drinking in Space" featuring Sam Bompas of Bompas & Parr and David Lane of The Gourmand, previously mentioned on Gizmodo.

The event will explore the forgotten cultural history of offworld alcohol:

To date, there has been relatively little consumption of alcohol in space and on the moon, but that could be set to change. With space tourism taking off, new lunar missions on the horizon and manned expeditions aiming further into space – with all its stresses – could a new era of zero gravity libations be next? From Buzz Aldrin's legendary Holy Communion on the moon to sherry experiments aboard Skylab and ceremonial "vodka" consumption aboard the ISS, we'll discuss the secret history of a slightly tipsy space age and ask what role our favourite poison will play in the future colonisation of the moon.

Better still, the £5 ticket price includes the chance to sample Bompas & Parr's Parabolic Sherry, a limited edition, plastic-pouched tipple based on the Skylab-era research about alcohol in space. If you manage to get to the event on Sunday, please report back with tasting notes!

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A different version of this post was previously published on Edible Geography.

Lead image: Bompas & Parr's Parabolic Sherry is available for purchase at the Pop Rock Moon Shop.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why Astronauts Were Banned From Drinking Wine In Outer Space

Guy Pierce can't get beyond Thunderdome in post-apocalyptic Rover movie onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Guy Pierce can't get beyond Thunderdome in post-apocalyptic Rover movie

Sorry, when you combine post-apocalyptic movies and Australian accents, all I can think of are the Mad Max movies. But Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson look like they have far bigger troubles than Tina Turner in The Rover, director David Michôd's follow-up to Animal Kingdom.

According to the film's official plot summary:

10 years following the collapse of society, a man will go to any lengths to take back the one thing that still matters to him.

Given Guy Pierce's speech in the trailer, I'm going to guess... slippers?

The Rover will be released at some point this summer.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Guy Pierce can't get beyond Thunderdome in post-apocalyptic Rover movie

This simple chemistry trick can take the bitter out of your coffee onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This simple chemistry trick can take the bitter out of your coffee

I love this new web series, Reactions, from the American Chemical Society. In the first episode they offer several chemistry lifehacks, including one that can make bitter coffee drinkable and another to ripen bananas fast.

Plus, you learn about the chemistry of everyday life. Nicely done.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This simple chemistry trick can take the bitter out of your coffee

Why does beer overflow when you tap one bottle on top of another? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why does beer overflow when you tap one bottle on top of another?

Depending on your point of view (or how drunk you are), tapping another person's beer bottle so that it overflows is either incredibly obnoxious or a funny prank. But only recently have physicists explained exactly why that motion causes the beer to foam so rapidly.

You're sitting with a friend (preferably outside), drinking a couple of beers out of bottles. When you aren't paying attention, your friend taps the mouth of your bottle with their bottle, causing foam to shoot up from the mouth of your bottle and spill everywhere. Your friend has a good laugh as you either rush to drink the foam or end up a bit wet.

Members of the Fluid Mechanics Group at Carlos III University of Madrid were at a tavern when someone played this boozy joke and they began to throw out hypotheses as to what caused this overflow. When they weren't satisfied by any of their own explanations, Javier Rodriguez-Rodiguez , Almudena Casado-Chacon, and Daniel Fuster decided to put the trick to the test. They performed two experiments: First, they filled commercial beer bottles with deionized water at a hydrophone was placed at various depths to measure pressure wave propagation in the liquid when brass weights were dropped on the mouths of the bottles from various heights. Then the bottles were filled with beer and impacted with the same brass weights; the evolution of the bubbles following each impact was recorded with a high-speed camera.

What they observed was that the impact of a weight against the mouth of a bottle triggers a compression wave, which hits the bottom of the bottle and bounces off as an expansion wave. Then the expansion wave hits the free surface of the liquid and bounces back as a compression wave, and so on and so on until the waves are damped out. Because the free surface is relatively close to the bottom of the bottle, we get a train of expansion and compression waves, driving the rapid cavitation of the air bubbles in the beer.

The air bubbles collapse due to the train of expansion-compression waves, forming clouds of much smaller daughter bubbles. These daughter bubbles have a larger surface to volume ratio than their parent bubbles, and therefore expand much more quickly. This turns the liquid to foam and results in buoyant clusters of expanding air bubbles that rise to the surface—and swiftly make their way to the mouth of the beer bottle.

So the next time you tap a friend's beer and watch it overflow, tell them that you're not being a jerk; you're just appreciating fluid mechanics in action.

Image credit: Rikard Fröberg.

Why does a beer bottle foam up after a sudden impact on its mouth? [arXiv via PhysOrg]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why does beer overflow when you tap one bottle on top of another?