Julie of Stuff to Blow Your Mind explains why your face is blushing!
When can playing dead save you from a nasty death by shark jaws? Cristen Conger explains in “Can playing dead help save me from a shark attack?”
On July 30, 1945, during World War II, the U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in the Philippine Sea near Guam. Nearly 900 sailors were left stranded in the water for four days without help. Soon after the sinking, sharks began to attack many of the men. When rescue arrived, only 316 people remained alive, although it isn’t clear how many of those victims died from shark attacks.
In rare situations like this one, playing dead could work to your advantage. If sharks are in a feeding frenzy around you, they may ignore your fresh meat and continue biting at others. It may sound inhuman not to try to fight off a swarm of sharks attacking dozens of people around you in the water, but it may be your only hope for survival.
Image: © Larry Duke/Illustration Works/Corbis
The basic idea of a plasma display is to illuminate hundreds of thousands of tiny, colored fluorescent lights to form an image. Each pixel is made up of three fluorescent lights — a red light, a green light and a blue light.
The central element in a fluorescent light is a plasma, a gas made up of free-flowing ions (electrically charged atoms) and electrons (negatively charged particles).
Xenon and neon atoms, the elements used in plasma screens, release light photons when they are excited. Mostly, these atoms release ultraviolet light photons, which are invisible to the human eye. But ultraviolet photons can be used to excite visible light photons.
The xenon and neon gas in a plasma television is contained in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells positioned between two plates of glass. Long electrodes are also sandwiched between the glass plates, on both sides of the cells. The address electrodes sit behind the cells, along the rear glass plate. The transparent display electrodes, which are surrounded by an insulating dielectric material and covered by a magnesium oxide protective layer, are mounted above the cell, along the front glass plate. Both sets of electrodes extend across the entire screen.
To ionize the gas in a particular cell, the plasma display’s computer charges the electrodes that intersect at that cell. It does this thousands of times in a small fraction of a second, charging each cell in turn.
When the intersecting electrodes are charged (with a voltage difference between them), an electric current flows through the gas in the cell. The current creates a rapid flow of charged particles, which stimulates the gas atoms to release ultraviolet photons.
The released ultraviolet photons interact with phosphor material coated on the inside wall of the cell. Phosphors are substances that give off light when they are exposed to other light. When an ultraviolet photon hits a phosphor atom in the cell, one of the phosphor’s electrons jumps to a higher energy level and the atom heats up. When the electron falls back to its normal level, it releases energy in the form of a visible light photon.
Are humans getting smarter or dumber?
What measures our intelligence? Genetics? Technology? Reaction time? Scientists differ, and it skews the perceptions of our intelligence.
Gravity-Defying 3D Printing
3D printing has taken a new gravity-defying platform with Mataerial, an innovation that allows the creation of three-dimensional structures without the help of any supports.
Traditionally, 3D printing involves printing in horizontal layers and requires a framework to support the structure. However, Mataerial is able to produce upright forms on a surface regardless of its angle or texture. Its robotic arm is able to produce and guide long polymer tubes in to natural, curving shapes.
This method of printing, called Anti-Gravity Object Modelling (patent pending), was invented by Petr Novikov and Saša Jokić during their internship at Joris Laarman Lab. Petr and Saša, both from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, felt that printing in layers, as 3D printers currently do, was inefficient and wanted to print with fibres instead.
Crucial to Anti-Gravity Object Modelling is the fact that it uses a different polymer than current 3D printing. Instead of thermoplastics, Mataerial uses thermosetting polymers. These tubes of plastic are able to remain standing because of a chemical reaction between two polymers. Upon being mixed together, the two liquid polymers react and harden, enabling the structure to stand on its own.
For more details, visit Mataerial’s site.(Source: Dezeen/Fast Company)
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
Autograph notes on the satellites of Jupiter, 14–25 January 1611On this scrap of paper (an unfolded envelope), Galileo recorded the positions of four satellites of Jupiter over a period of several nights. He had observed the moons with the aid of his newly constructed telescope and published his findings in his revolutionary book The Starry Messenger (1610). He then worked to define more precisely the periods of the orbits of the Jovian moons, setting up his telescope night after night and making notes such as these. In a radical departure from his university training, Galileo insisted that scientific theory be grounded in observation and physical evidence rather than reliance on ancient authority.
The Morgan Library
via centuriespast
(via smithsonianmag)
FYI: Can A Bionic Eye See As Well As A Human Eye?
It’s the difference between a grainy black-and-white film and HD.
Previously blind patients who receive the recently FDA-approved Argus II bionic eye system will regain some degree of functional sight. The retinal implant technology, developed and distributed by Second Sight, can improve quality of life for patients who have lost functional vision due to retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes retinal cells to die. But the implant doesn’t facilitate a sudden recovery of 20/20 vision.
(via stufftoblowyourmind)
Fw:Thinking: Driving to the Moon
The same force that let a standard V8 pickup truck tow the space shuttle Endeavour may one day take us to space via elevator. Jonathan explains in this week’s episode of Fw:Thinking.
You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think: Scientific American
In a series of studies, Epley and Whitchurch showed that we see ourselves as better looking than we actually are. The researchers took pictures of study participants and, using a computerized procedure, produced more attractive and less attractive versions of those pictures. Participants were told that they would be presented with a series of images including their original picture and images modified from that picture. They were then asked to identify the unmodified picture. They tended to select an attractively enhanced one.
Epley and Whitchurch showed that people display this bias for themselves but not for strangers. The same morphing procedure was applied to a picture of a stranger, whom the study participant met three weeks earlier during an unrelated study. Participants tended to select the unmodified picture of the stranger.
People tend to say that an attractively enhanced picture is their own, but Epley and Whitchurch wanted to be sure that people truly believe what they say. People recognize objects more quickly when those objects match their mental representations. Therefore, if people truly believe that an attractively enhanced picture is their own, they should recognize that picture more quickly, which is exactly what the researchers found.
Inflated perceptions of one’s physical appearance is a manifestation of a general phenomenon psychologists call “self-enhancement.” Researchers have shown that people overestimate the likelihood that they would engage in a desirable behavior, but are remarkably accurate when predicting the behavior of a stranger. For example, people overestimate the amount of money they would donate to charity while accurately predicting others’ donations. Similarly, people overestimate their likelihood to vote in an upcoming presidential election, while accurately predicting others’ likelihood to vote.
(Source: eupraxsophy)
Stuff to Blow Your Mind: The Big Itch
Scratching an itch actually makes the itch worse — it excites the nerves around the affected nerve ending. Plus, scratching is contagious the way yawns are contagious. Julie explains in this episode of STBYM’s Epic Science.
Centerbody Flames
The images shown are photographs of ethylene/air/nitrogen diffusion flames stabilized behind a bluff centerbody. The two images on the top show the centerbody flame photographed from the side (top left) and top views (top right). The blue regions are associated with the flame front and the other colors of the flame are largely due to blackbody radiation from the soot. The intense yellow radiation is from soot trapped in a tight ring vortex downstream of the stabilizing bluff body. The motion of the soot trapped in the vortex can be seen in the longer exposure photograph taken from the top.
The bottom two images are of a centerbody flame with the same inlet flow velocities as the case shown above but with higher nitrogen content in the feed gases. The image on the lower left shows a blue ring flame that forms around the main flame immediately downstream of the centerbody. This blue ring flame exhibits a slight oscillation in the vertical direction. The image on the lower right shows the region downstream of the ring flame for the same conditions. The disturbances in the downstream region of the flame are amplified as it passes through the tube, resulting in the large structures shown in the short exposure (0.8 ms) photo.
Credit: Scott Stouffer, Garth Justinger (University of Dayton Research Institute), Mel Roquemore, Amy Lynch, Vince Belovich, Joe Zelina, Jim Gord (Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright Patterson Air Force Base), Keith Grinstead, Vish Katta and Kyle Frische (Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated)
(via crookedindifference)
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