[Brian Haidet] published on his AlphaPhoenix channel a laser beam recorded at 2 billion frames per second. Well, sort of. The catch? It’s only a one pixel by one pixel video, but he repeats it over and over to build up the full rendering. It’s a fascinating experiment and a delightful result. For this project […]
If you’ve been following the hubbub about 3I/ATLAS, you’re probably either in the camp that thinks it’s just a comet from ridiculously far away that’s managed to find its way into our solar system, or you’re preparing for an alien invasion. (Lukewarm take: it’s just a fast moving comet.) But that doesn’t stop it from […]
The overall theme of the early part of the Cold War was that of subterfuge — with scientific missions often providing excellent cover for placing missiles right on the USSR’s doorstep. Recently NASA rediscovered Camp Century, while testing a airplane-based synthetic aperture radar instrument (UAVSAR) over Greenland. Although established on the surface in 1959 as […]
Bismuth is known for a few things: its low melting point, high density, and psychedelic hopper crystals. A literal deep-dive into any molten metal would be a terrible idea, regardless of low melting point, but [Electron Impressions]’s video on “Why Do Bismuth Crystals Look Like That” may be the most educational eight minutes posted to […]
As frustrating as having an atmosphere can be for physicists, it’s just as bad for astronomers, who have to deal with clouds, atmospheric absorption of certain wavelengths, and other irritations. One of the less obvious effects is the distortion caused by air at different temperatures turbulently mixing. To correct for this, some larger observatories use […]
Every time we check in on [Project326], he’s doing something different with X-rays. This week, he has a passive X-ray imager. On paper, it looks great. No special tube is required and no high voltage needed. Actually, no voltage is needed at all. Of course, there’s no free lunch. What it does take is a […]
Nature is known for its intense beauty from its patterns and bright colors; however, this requires going outside. Who has time for that insanity!?!? [Bleuje] provides the perfect solution with his mesmerizing display of particle behavior. Agents follow defined paths created by other agents. These patterns of color and structure, based on 36 points, are […]
Perhaps the most surprising thing about shadowgraphs is how simple they are: you simply take a point source of light, pass the light through a the volume of air to be imaged, and record the pattern projected on a screen; as light passes through the transition between areas with different refractive indices, it gets bent […]
If you need to create a high vacuum, there are basically two options: turbomolecular pumps and diffusion pumps. Turbomolecular pumps require rotors spinning at many thousands of rotations per minute and must be carefully balanced to avoid a violent self-disassembly, but diffusion pumps aren’t without danger either, particularly if, like [Advanced Tinkering], you use mercury […]
While William Rowan Hamilton isn’t a household name like, say, Einstein or Hawking, he might have been. It turns out the Irish mathematician almost stumbled on quantum theory in the or around 1827. [Robyn Arianrhod] has the story in a post on The Conversation. Famously, Newton worked out the rules for the motion of ordinary […]