Science

Climbing Mount Everest

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This multimedia piece from the Washington Post takes you on an immersive journey from sea level to summit of Chomolungma, known to westerners as Mount Everest.

The rarest Pi Day of them all

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Happy Pi Day. Huzzah! Please do commence with the celebrating and the carousing.

So why is this Pi Day special? Read on.

The snakes that ate Florida

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This well-drawn graphic novel format tells the true story of the Burmese pythons that came to Florida as an accidental invasive species, and started gobbling up all the animals.

The invisible boyfriend or girlfriend

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Washington Post:

When you sign up for the service, you can design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications — kind of like picking the genes for a designer baby, except for an imaginary adult.

Virtual traffic lights on your windshield get you home faster

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The idea here is to remove traffic lights from intersections and embed them on your windshield instead. As your car approaches an intersection, a virtual traffic light appears on your windshield telling you to stop, then turns green when it is your turn to go. If there are no other cars approaching the intersection, you roll on through without having to slow down.

iPhone separation anxiety

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This study at the University of Missouri is making its way around the blogosphere. Not sure I agree with the science.

Predicting the future

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In April of 2013, less than two years ago, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins announced the Glass Collective, “an investment syndicate among our three firms, to provide seed funding to entrepreneurs in the Glass ecosystem to help jumpstart their ideas.”

Follow this link and take a look at the picture. Does this look like the future? Two years ago, it did, at least to some pretty smart people.

How hardware is emailed to space

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Made In Space is a startup whose goal was to build the first 3D printer designed specifically for the rigors of space travel and for use in zero-G. They just emailed a wrench to the International Space Station.

How Stephen Hawking speaks and spells

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EE Times:

When he was diagnosed, Hawking had not even finished his doctorate in physics. He was given two years to live. However, with the help of technology from the self-proclaimed “rocket scientist” Walt Waltosz, who personally wrote the software that allowed him to get his life back, Hawking was able not only to speak to others but also to write the book A Brief History of Time…

A boy and his atom

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IBM made the world’s smallest movie by using a pair of electron scanning microscopes to move a series of atoms to create a stop motion effect. Truly astonishing.

The relentless power of nature

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Imagine waking up one day and seeing a lava flow creeping towards your neighborhood. Watch the video below.

Feathers, bowling balls, dropping in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber

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[VIDEO] Aristotle taught that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. It wasn’t until Galileo’s time that the concept of air resistance entered the zeitgeist.

The video embedded below is shot in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber, NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio. The money shot starts at about 2:50, but the whole thing is worth watching.

An iPad filled with apps weighs more than one with nothing installed

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This sound like the premise of a bar trick, but not so.

Why? Because data stored on flash drives has weight. The difference is almost infinitesimally minute, but it is there. The extra weight comes from flash storage storing more data in memory. The transistors in flash memory distinguish between a 1 and a 0 by trapping electrons.

15 year old Google Science Fair finalist, an iPhone, and a huge boost for Alzheimer’s patients

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[VIDEO] 15 year old Kenneth Shinozuka lives in New York City with his parents, aunt and grandfather. He’s one smart kid.

Kenneth’s grandfather suffers from Alzheimer’s and tended to wander out of their apartment at night, getting out in the streets of New York City, causing a number of accidents, not to mention a lot of worry.

Kenneth’s solution won him one of the 15 finalist slots at the 2014 Google Science Fair. Watch the video. Incredible work.

The power of friction

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[VIDEO] Bet you’ve never seen this sort of welding before. It’s called friction welding.

Technically, because no melt occurs, friction welding is not actually a welding process in the traditional sense, but a forging technique. However, due to the similarities between these techniques and traditional welding, the term has become common. Friction welding is used with metals and thermoplastics in a wide variety of aviation and automotive applications.

So very cool. Science! [h/t Daniel Mark]

MIT’s slick new UI merges your iPhone and laptop interaction

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[VIDEO] MIT’s experimental THAW UI project lets you overlay your iPhone over your computer screen, capturing data from your computer and interacting with objects, creating a single, fluid environment. To get a sense of it, watch the video below. The real fun starts about 45 seconds in.

Proof that light travels so much faster than sound

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[VIDEO] Phil McNamara captures the eruption of Mount Tavurvur volcano from a boat off Papua New Guinea (eastern edge of New Britain island). When you see the explosion, keep your eyes on the clouds surrounding the island, then count the beats until the boom hits. Fantastic video.

Humans need not apply

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[VIDEO] The video below is long, but thoughtful and riveting. It make the case that just as horses have been replaced by technology, humans are next. If that sounds like silly logic, invest one minute, just to see what you think.

From the narrative:

Self driving cars aren’t the future. They’re here and they work. Self-driving cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles up and down the California coast and through cities, all without human intervention. The question is not if they’ll replace cars, but how quickly. They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be better than us. Human drivers, by the way, kill 40,000 people a year with cars, just in the United States. Given that self-driving cars don’t blink, don’t text while driving, don’t get sleepy or stupid, it’s easy to see them being better than humans because they already are.

Self driving cars replacing human drivers is already a done deal. That die is cast. This is just one small example of what is coming.

30 year old blood test billionaire

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Elizabeth Holmes is only 30 years old, but has a lifetime of success. Back in 2003, Holmes was a sophomore at Stanford University and envisioned a process of performing blood tests with a device that required much less blood (just a drop) than existing blood tests (normally requiring a vial or two of blood).

This is a fascinating story, one that reminds me in many ways of Steve Jobs and Apple.

Why your ice cream sandwich doesn’t melt

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[VIDEO] There’s a buzz going around the net about ice cream sandwiches not melting. It started with a woman in Cincinnati who accidentally left a Walmart ice cream sandwich out in the sun for a bit and noticed that it was not behaving the way “real” ice cream behaved.

Was this true? Watch the embedded video, but then read on for the science.