Posts tagged: Science
X-ray vision tracks lightning bursts
Blink and you’ve missed it. Researchers in the US have captured the world’s first X-ray images of lightning, by creating a special camera that can capture radiation at 10 million frames per second. They presented their new findings at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco and they say that this new view of lightning could help to solve some of the mysteries of this spectacular natural phenomenon.
The research was carried out at the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing, located in Florida. It is one of the few sites in world where lightning is initiated and studied under controlled conditions. By firing rockets with trailing wires into thunder clouds, scientists are able to generate electric fields that are large enough to trigger bolts of lightning, which then propagate back down towards the rocket launch tower.
Joseph Dwyer and colleagues at the Florida Institute of Technology became interested in the fact that lightning emits X-rays as it propagates through the air, a phenomenon that was only noted in the past decade. But given that X-ray sources in lightning travel through the Earth’s atmosphere at velocities approaching the speed of light, it is difficult to catch them on camera before they disappear. In addition, they cannot be imaged with standard mirrors and lenses because huge amounts of material are required to prevent X-rays and gamma rays from entering through the sides of a camera.
Dwyer’s team has created a customized camera that has 30 detectors made from a combination of sodium iodide and photomultiplier tubes, each measuring 3 × 3 inch. The device, which is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator, is also equipped with a 3 inch pinhole aperture, and can record X-rays at 10 million frames per second. “This is actually a very old technique for making images, like that seen in a camera obscura,” Dwyer says.
During July and August this year, Dwyer’s team studied four rocket-triggered lightning flashes at the Florida test site. Each flash lasted for approximately two seconds and the resulting sequences of images revealed that X-rays emerged primarily from the vicinity of the lightning tip as it propagated towards the Earth. As the lightning crashed into the control tower it also triggered large bursts of gamma radiation, which were also captured by the camera.
“For the first time we’re catching a glimpse of lightning in the X-ray emission,” says Dwyer. “We’re seeing lightning as Superman would see it with his X-ray vision”.
Credit: James Dacey/physicsworld.com
What happens when you rotate Copper Sulfate while it is on fire!
GUYS! how does this not have 10000 notes already?! Seriously! this is awesome…
COME MY MINIONS, RISE FOR YOU MASTER! LET YOUR EVIL SHINE!
This must be a muggle equivalent to floo powder!
This Explains Everything
I’m really proud of this one guys
SCIENCE!
science has figured out how to open a portal to hell
There’s two types of people
I am legitimately disturbed.
Why stop at a small town? I mean, with fancy science like this you might as well aim a little higher
I’ve created these flyers for a school activist project where I bring more attention to the women in history that have been forgotten or ignored. This blog will be an extension of those flyers where I post longer biographies of these women and other bad-ass women like them. Too often women’s achievements have been pushed aside, either by others in their lives, or else by the historians who choose to ignore them. This tumblr is dedicated to celebrating them and bringing their achievements to light!
“MILK GIVES YOU STRONG BONES”
MYTH DEBUNKED – Why the dairy industry doesn’t campaign the strong bones mantra anymore:
The truth is the dairy industry never had the science to prove this claim. When research was requested to prove that animal milk (such as cow’s/goat’s/sheep’s, etc. milk) gives humans strong bones, they quickly discovered that animal milk consumption actually does the opposite – it depletes the body from calcium.
How does animal milk deplete your body from calcium?
Like all animal protein, animal milk acidifies the body pH which in turn triggers a biological correction, and it turns out that calcium is an excellent acid neutralizer. The biggest storage of calcium in the body is obviously in the bones. So the very same calcium that our bones need to stay strong is utilized to neutralize the acidifying effect of animal milk. Once calcium is pulled out of the bones, it leaves the body via the urine so that the surprising net result after this is an actual calcium deficit and possible kidney stones. Knowing this, you will understand why statistics show that countries with the lowest consumption of dairy products also have the lowest fracture incidence in their population.
Source: www.milkdocumentary.com
Watch the trailer for the Milk Documentary here:www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m6VErjH5VY
See some of the dairy alternatives in the US here (not in the US? Let us know so we can help):http://tinyurl.com/d6nxogjI’m down with almond milk. No cow-boob juice.
Almond milk or coconut milk. PALEO 4LYF
Hey Tumblr, how about you back up your arguments with science?
I’m going to disagree with this post, and give you a little bit of the evidence (only a little because I’m not here to do your damn homework for you).
Here’s a paper saying the cause of kidney stones is a whole lot more complex than ‘milk steals your calcium’.
And here is a systematic review showing that calcium is a part of effective treatment for problems with bone density, albeit as a supplement rather than in milk.
Both those papers are free, so there’s no reason not to take a look!
Also? If people could check their sources on this sort of thing, that would be fabulous. When I checked out the director of the documentary, one of the things I found was this, which is full of misinformation- things like ‘milk causes cancer’. It’s not as simple as that, and it’s unnecessary scaremongering.
Fun fact, valid and reliable sources don’t kill you (Unlike misinformation. That can. Just sayin’)
Yesteryear’s stereotype-defiers: Kick-ass vintage public domain photos of women in science.
Rock on, ladies!! Decades of inspiration here.
I’m certainly partial to science on Tumblr, because … well, I’m biased, and Tumblr is better :) But over on Facebook, pages like I Fucking Love Science are daily reminding millions of people how awesome it is to discover how the world works (or at least that science memes apparently never get old). Earlier this week, the world “found out” that the creator of that page “turned out” to be a woman, when Elise Andrew posted a link toher new Twitter account.
You can probably guess what happened next. To everyone’s dismay and no one’s surprise, most of the 1,000+ comments on that post expressed surprise that a popular page was published by a woman. Many of them took it a step further, calling her a “babe” and saying “damn that’s hot” and “sexy and smart!”.
Listen, it’s 2013. The world is not gender neutral, and Elise being a woman matters in some ways. I mean, imagine if the fact that a page like that is run by a woman motivates other young women to pay attention to science or gives them pride in their intellectual abilities. That’s awesome. But every time someone expresses surprise that a woman could do it, or mentions their looks in the same breath as their accomplishments … it’s one step forward and one step back, and here we are spinning our wheels instead of driving into the future. Everyone needs to call this kind of stuff out when they see it.
I know this because I have been the guy making those comments to some women at other points in my life. I didn’t understand why what I was saying or staring at or equating was hurtful or sexist, much less completely ineffective in terms of looking cool in front of women. But people talked to me, and I learned. Now I’m trying to be an ally, forever imperfect, but trying to help others achieve what they deserve. We can all do that.
Biological gender (which doesn’t even begin to get into gender identity) is nothing more than everyone’s random lot in drawing one of two chromosomal combinations (there’s actually more than that, but you get the point) from their parents. It doesn’t make anyone smarter, more capable, prettier, uglier, softer, tougher or sciencier than anyone else.
Anyway, go follow Elise on Twitter and tell her you’ve got her back. It takes an army to change things like this, and we science folks need to stand up for one another!
I know we’re on the Internet here, and anonymity will inspire trolls to say whatever they want, but the surprised overreaction from the public that a woman is fully capable of creating a science-loving based community is obscene. I continue to receive sexist comments on my own videos: a favorite one recently was something like, “Your new name is Nerd Hot. How’s it going, Nerd Hot?” that made me want to vomit, so I continue to have to ignore them. Also, there have been quite a few insinuating that I need to hurry up and get married, as if I’m not going to reach my full potential as a human being until I’m someone’s wife. Also nauseating.
A friend pointed out a while ago that the success of my channel is due in part because I am a woman, which also troubles me somewhat — why is it such a surprise? In our lab, we have always had more women volunteers than men for whatever reason, but the demographic is skewed largely in favor for ladies. I get that there’s a dichotomy of traditions here, and it’s ‘unexpected’ that a woman would be so interested in something gross, but that’s the mentality I would expect out of the 1950’s, not today.
Elise has created a fantastic online community that has fostered a general love of all things science-related. The fact that so many were surprised that this was created by a woman - as if that possibility had never crossed their minds - is almost as shameful as the sexist remarks. We can do better than this.
So it seems the White House just issued a memo saying any federally funded research done by its agencies should release the reports to the public. That’s going to be some interesting information being released…
