air
dr. dolittle | May 8, 2014Here is a neat video that I watched at the David Bruce Undergraduate Poster session at the Experimental Biology conference last week. It describes the amazing physiology of the avian lung and was created by an undergraduate student researcher, Peter Luu for the Physiology Video Contest sponsored by the American Physiological Society. This video won the Viewer's Choice Award:
To see more of the submitted videos, visit the American Physiological Society website.
dr. dolittle | January 17, 2014Amazon Prime Air might want to pay attention to this research. Scientists have studied the flight patterns of albatrosses to understand how the animals are able to sustain flight with minimal energy expenditure.
esiegel | June 8, 2012"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen." -Larry Niven
Here on the solid ground of the Earth, the Sun and Moon rise and set on a daily basis. During the hours where the Sun is invisible, blocked by the solid Earth, the stars twirl overhead in the great canopy of the night sky.
Image credit: Chris Luckhardt at flickr.
In the northern hemisphere, they appear to rotate around the North Star, while in the southern hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate about the South Celestial Pole. The longer you observe -- or for photography, the longer you…
esiegel | June 4, 2012"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties." -James Jeans
Here on Earth, every living thing is based around four fundamental, elemental building blocks of life: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and, perhaps most importantly, carbon.
Image Credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania.
From diamonds to nanotubes to DNA, carbon is indispensable for constructing practically all of the most intricate structures we know of. Most of the carbon in our world comes from long-dead stars, in the form of Carbon-12: carbon atoms containing six…
gregladen | March 27, 2012There is a spreading belief that if you put Nitrogen (instead of regular air) in your car tires, that you will get better gas mileage. The reasoning behind this may be sound, but the facts on which the reasoning is based are not correct. Therefore, the answer is no, it is not advantageous for the average person to use Nitrogen in their car tires. On even more detailed examination, it maybe that regular air is better than Nitrogen for most people. Nitrogen is in fact used in certain tires, and there may be a good reason for that, though the information I have is probably missing something…
drorzel | August 19, 2010At the tail end of Tuesday's post about wind and temperature, I asked a "vaguely related fun bonus question:"
If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn't the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s?
This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by. The answer is simply that in a sound wave, the air molecules don't really go anywhere. When something creates a sound-- say a foolish dog barking at a perfectly harmless jogger going by outside, to choose an example completely at random-- there isn't any actual thing that travels from the noisy dog…
rallain | April 14, 2010I was going through and tagging some old posts. While looking at a post attacking the movie Sunshine, I accidentally found something else on youtube.
Gravity in Sunshine
I could not find a clip online of the scene I want, so I made a cartoon. Basically, (oh - spoiler alert) some guys are trying to get from one spaceship to another by shooting out of the airlock and into the other. They fly through space and into the other airlock, close the door and emergency pump the air in. When the closed air lock fills with air, they all fall down. Since there was no online video version, I made a…
bioephemera | April 27, 2009
This air purifier ad from Sharp is a little creepy, in a Spongebob Squarepants way. I love how you can see their fluorescent organelles! Unfortunately I don't see anything here that resembles a virus, but with swine flu all over the news, this serves as a good reminder to wash your hands.
Ad by Takho Lau for ad agency M&C Saatchi of Hong Kong. Found via Next Nature
esiegel | March 28, 2008I remember being a kid and taking karate lessons. How cool was it to go somewhere for the purpose of learning how to kick ass? It was fun, of course, and one of the things you learned how to do was to attack (strike, kick, and punch) with your entire body, not just with your limbs.
Maybe the coolest parlor trick we learned was how to break a wooden board with our bare hands. (I remember surprising the hell out of Leon Hodge years later in High School by doing it in a history class one day; Hi Leon!) We also heard the story that the way this worked was that you compressed air molecules so much…