Happy Halloween from the cosmic pumpkin in the sky
Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO
NASA recently wished a Happy Halloween to their fans on Instagram and Facebook with a photo of the sun looking like a cosmic jack-o’-lantern. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this ultraviolet image in October 2014, showing active regions on our home star.
The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.
You can find more images as well as download hi-resolution versions of this image on NASA.
For those unfamiliar, XKCD is the Internet-famous webcomic created in 2005 by author and ex-NASA scientist, Randall Munroe. It’s witty, informative, and if you’ve spent any significant time on the Internet, you’ve probably come across one of his comics.
It’s not actually an acronym. It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation — a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.
In addition to the standard webcomic format, Munroe has also become well known for his always-entertaining infographics. Some are a quick chuckle while others are incredibly detailed and informative.
Below you will find our 10 favorites. Did we miss one? Let us know in the comments below!
NASA captures Jupiter’s moon, Io, blocking out the sun
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
A recent series of images released by NASA on September 12th, 2019, captured a solar eclipse on Jupiter as its moon, Io, casts a shadow on the colossal planet’s north equatorial belt.
The raw images were then processed by NASA software engineer and data wrangler, Kevin M. Gill, in the gallery you see here.
For those curious as to why the moon’s shadow on Earth during an eclipse appears fuzzy while Io’s shadow is so sharp, astrophysicist Dr. Katherine Mack explains:
Io is so big & close that it more than blocks the Sun (it appears 4x as big as the Sun from Jupiter’s perspective) and it’s so close that the penumbra (fuzzy outer edge of shadow) is super thin. [source]
NASA MSL ECAM team lead, Doug Ellison, also adds that the ‘sun is significantly smaller as seen from Jupiter – hence shadows are much sharper.’
It’s the first and only vehicle in the world in Vantablack
To hype up the world premiere of the third-generation BMW X6, the world’s first and only vehicle in Vantablack will be unveiled at this month’s Frankfurt Motor Show.
The name Vantablack has already become synonymous with an entire range of extremely black coatings and paints such as VBx2. It contains an acronym of the technology enabling this superior black in its first two syllables, which stand for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array, a matrix made out of carbon. Each of these carbon nanotubes has a length of 14 to 50 micrometres, with a diameter of 20 nanometres, making it around 5,000 times thinner than a human hair.
As a result, around a billion of these vertically aligned carbon nanotubes fit into one square centimetre. Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected, and effectively converted into heat.
A surface coated in Vantablack loses its defining features to the human eye, with objects appearing two-dimensional. This can be interpreted by the brain as staring into a hole or even a void, making Vantablack a rather unsuitable vehicle paint finish, as it blots out virtually all the design details and highlights.
For this reason, the BMW X6 was coated in the VBx2 variant initially developed for use in architectural and scientific applications. This coating can be sprayed on and has a one-per-cent total hemispherical reflectance (THR), meaning it is still considered “super black” while enabling a small amount of reflection from every angle. Thus, materials painted with it seem to lose their three-dimensional appearance.
This technology was initially developed for coating space-borne components. As Vantablack can be applied at temperatures from as low as 430 degrees Celsius, it is suitable for delicate materials such as aluminium, and optical components coated in Vantablack enable observation of faint stars and distant galaxies that stray light from the sun makes difficult to detect.
The first generation of Vantablack introduced by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 absorbed up to 99.965 per cent of light, almost completely eliminating reflectance and stray light.
If you’re in Dorian’s path, please stay safe and take all precautions
Currently off the east coast of Florida and moving north, Hurricane Dorian has already devastated the Bahamas and is now threatening Florida and the Carolinas.
Dorian is the sixth named storm of the 2019 Hurricane Season, originally forming in the Atlantic Ocean. Earlier this week, Dorian reached category 5 status with maximum winds near 175 mph (281 kph) and gusts over 200 mph (322 kph).
A key factor in the development of a hurricane is the warmth of the ocean surface. Warm water is the fuel that leads a storm to intensify, as heat and moisture move from the ocean to the atmosphere.
Below you will see what the menacing storm looks like from space as seen by astronauts on board the International Space Station and satellite imagery from NASA.
If you’re in the potential path of Dorian please stay safe and take all recommended precautions.
While there are many variations of a ‘Useless Machine’, the general idea is to build a machine that has one purpose, to flip off a switch any time someone turns it on.
It typically involves the use of an Adruino board programmed with some basic commands (i.e., if the switch is on, turn it off!). YouTube user fritend1 took things one step further, giving his ‘useless machine’ a little personality.
You can see some build photos below and if you’re interested, you can view/copy/edit the Arduino code here!
An intro to the machine learning ai that’s like ‘faceswap for video’
For the uninitiated, ‘Deepfake‘ is a technology that uses machine learning ai to “combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a technique known as generative adversarial network“. [source]
Think of it as ‘faceswap for video’, with applications ranging from the banal and harmless to malicious and dangerous (e.g., fake news, hoaxes, conspiracies).
To get a sense of the technology, check out the videos below by Ctrl Shift Space, who uses deepfake technology to create videos for entertainment but to also raise awareness that you can’t believe everything you see online. People know images can be doctored, and now video can with relative ease.
In the embedded videos below, we see comedian and actor Bill Hader on various talk shows doing his impersonations of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Pacino, and Tom Cruise. Only this time, deepfake technology has been used to subtly superimpose the actors he’s impersonating onto Hader’s own face while he does the impersonation. The end result is something totally surreal and bizarre.
Airborne particles like sea spray, smoke, and dust, visualized.
Image Credit: NASA/Joshua Stevens/Adam Voiland
[NASA, Yvette Smith] Take a deep breath. Even if the air looks clear, it is nearly certain that you will inhale millions of solid particles and liquid droplets. These ubiquitous specks of matter are known as aerosols, and they can be found in the air over oceans, deserts, mountains, forests, ice and every ecosystem in between.
If you have ever watched smoke billowing from a wildfire, ash erupting from a volcano or dust blowing in the wind, you have seen aerosols. Satellites like NASA’s Earth-observing satellites, Terra, Aqua, Aura and Suomi NPP, “see” them as well, though they offer a completely different perspective from hundreds of kilometers above Earth’s surface. A version of a NASA model called the Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS FP) offers a similarly expansive view of the mishmash of particles that dance and swirl through the atmosphere.
The visualization above highlights GEOS FP model output for aerosols on August 23, 2018. On that day, huge plumes of smoke drifted over North America and Africa, three different tropical cyclones churned in the Pacific Ocean, and large clouds of dust blew over deserts in Africa and Asia. The storms are visible within giant swirls of sea salt aerosol (blue), which winds loft into the air as part of sea spray. Black carbon particles (red) are among the particles emitted by fires; vehicle and factory emissions are another common source. Particles the model classified as dust are shown in purple. The visualization includes a layer of night light data collected by the day-night band of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP that shows the locations of towns and cities.
Named after 19th-century physicist and optics pioneer Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Sean Augustine March’sFresnel Lamps are a sight to behold.
Made from dichroic glass, LEDs pass through metal particles embedded in the glass of the lamp’s double-box construction. The lamps come in two sizes, Major (10″ cube) and Minor (5″ cube), and are available for purchase through March’s website.
If the explanation above didn’t make sense, perhaps a gallery and some video would help do these functional sculptures justice. For more, be sure to check out Sean’s work on Instagram.
In the Jura Mountains, outside the French village of Plagne, you will find a ~500ft/150m long stretch of dinosaur footprints dating back 150 million years.
After examination, scientists from the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon (CNRS / ENS de Lyon / Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University), the Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans (CNRS / Université Clermont Auvergne / Université Jean Monnet / IRD), and the Pterosaur Beach Museum concluded the tracks were left by a Sauropod measuring at least 115ft/35m long and weighing no less than 35 tonnes. Today it is recognized as the longest Sauropod dinosaur trackway ever discovered.
You can read more about this fascinating discovery at the CNRS.
