Favourite science websites, amazing facts, awesome videos and more effing great SCIENCE!

[HAL9000]

 

[HAL9000]

How Nuclear Weapon Treaties Led To The Discovery That Thunderstorms Produce Antimatter!

NASA released a really cool piece of science this week. The story starts with the nuclear arms reduction treaties signed in the 1960’s between the U.S. and Russia. This was back in the middle of the cold war, and neither side trusted the other. Probably for good reason. So how could we be sure...

blogs.agu.org

When the positron hit, it annihilated itself and produced gamma rays. This set off the detector on the telescope! Even though the thunderstorm was out of sight.

 

[gosub]

Extinct Human Genomes Studies Win Nobel Prize for Medicine 2022 | Quanta Magazine

Svante Pääbo has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studying our extinct ancestors’ DNA.

www.quantamagazine.org

 

[littlebabyjesus]

My new favourite maths people, 3Blue1Brown. Phenomenally beautiful visual explanations and proofs.

Here's one dealing with the Basel problem.



And here's another explaining quaternions, which is a truly magnificent journey through different dimensions.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

More maths. Numberphile is great.

Tony Padilla has a great knack of explaining things. 'If you tried to store all that information inside your head, it would collapse into a black hole.'

Meet TREE(3).

 

[Knotted]

littlebabyjesus I would recommend Burkard Polster aka Mathologer as my favourite maths youtuber. He reaches those parts that get neglected in degree courses and he's a great educator.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

littlebabyjesus I would recommend Burkard Polster aka Mathologer as my favourite maths youtuber. He reaches those parts that get neglected in degree courses and he's a great educator.

Just watched his latest one on Pythagoras twisted squares. I love that he started off simple with a bunch of stuff I was familiar with then swerved off very naturally into things I didn't know, and it had me wondering why I didn't know them because they were still pretty simple at heart.

He's great. He assumes that we're all just as satisfied with the pure mathsiness of it all as he clearly is. With me, this is a very safe assumption. I normally don't want to know what it is useful for.

 

[Knotted]

Just watched his latest one on Pythagoras twisted squares. I love that he started off simple with a bunch of stuff I was familiar with then swerved off very naturally into things I didn't know, and it had me wondering why I didn't know them because they were still pretty simple at heart.

He's great. He assumes that we're all just as satisfied with the pure mathsiness of it all as he clearly is. With me, this is a very safe assumption. I normally don't want to know what it is useful for.

That's pretty typical. He starts off fairly basic and goes into some quite to very difficult territory eg. he did a video about partition theory which is a particularly nortorious head fuck of a topic. But he approaches it all with an infectious enthusiasm.

For something completely different try Victoria Hart vihart. She's a sort of creative mathematician/muscian/general musings on life. Think maths as an artform. She doesn't post very often nowadays though.

 

[hash tag]

Hannah Fry is my go to scientist/mathematician of choice and is my choice of dinner date.
I have just finished Hello World; brilliant, Hello World - Hannah Fry

A link from her prog The Secret Genius of Modern Life that was on last night https://connect.open.ac.uk/science-technology-engineering-and-maths/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life

 

[Indeliblelink]

Inside the Great Pyramid | Giza Project

This is the interior three chambers of Khufu Pyramid, also known as the Great Pyramid, on the Giza Plateau. The pyramid interior includes the King's, Queen's, and subterranean chambers as well as the initial excavation tunnel. Credits: This tour was created on-site by the following people...

giza.mused.org

 

[8ball]

Hannah Fry is my go to scientist/mathematician of choice and is my choice of dinner date.
I have just finished Hello World; brilliant, Hello World - Hannah Fry

A link from her prog The Secret Genius of Modern Life that was on last night https://connect.open.ac.uk/science-technology-engineering-and-maths/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life

I find Hannah Fry very personable, but her take on maths, it’s place in society and its relation to technology and culture feels very “1999 Blairite propaganda” to me.

Instrumental, managerialist, sleek in presentation but kind of dead on the inside.

 

[MapWatcher]

For those of you who like maps, this site has some nice pictures of old maps of English & Welsh conties from the 16th (I think) to the early 20th century:

Cartophilia

 

[hash tag]

For those of you who like maps, this site has some nice pictures of old maps of English & Welsh conties from the 16th (I think) to the early 20th century:

Cartophilia

There is a map thread if you so desire

https://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/an-orgy-of-maps.379866/

 

[Signal 11]

Loads of good spaceflight footage in this one - 100 Space Moments Part 1 (100-51) - 3 hours 30 minutes.

 

[Signal 11]

Loads of good spaceflight footage in this one - 100 Space Moments Part 1 (100-51) - 3 hours 30 minutes.

Part 2 (50-11) just dropped. Nearly 6 hours long.

If you click the "show more" in the description there are timestamp links so you can skip to the bits you want.

 

[Signal 11]

Loads of good spaceflight footage in this one - 100 Space Moments Part 1 (100-51) - 3 hours 30 minutes.

Final part with the top 10 - another 4 hours.

 

[HAL9000]

Mitochondria

I found this podcast requires a lot of concentration to understand what's going on, but that might be because I studied engineering not biology

In Our Time - Mitochondria - BBC Sounds

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the power-packs within cells in all complex life on Earth.

www.bbc.co.uk

some interesting points

• Its believed that the mitochondria orginally came from bacteria, the energy process the mitochondria follows is called the krebs cycle. If the krebs cycle goes in reverse, it starts generating nucleic acid and lipids, this drives growth and is associated with cancer. One suggestion in the podcast this reverse kreb cycle, its almost as if the mitochondria is behaving in the same way as early bacteria, taking hydrogen and reacting with CO2 to make organic molecules, the building blocks of life.
• Another interesting point, mitochondria are probably what limits human life span, suggestion that the maximum possible age is around 120 years.

Background Info...

Mitochondria are membrane-bound cell organelles (mitochondrion, singular) that generate most of the chemical energy needed to power the cell's biochemical reactions. Chemical energy produced by the mitochondria is stored in a small molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

 

[HAL9000]

(from 6 minutes onwards its an advert)

 

[HAL9000]

 

[HAL9000]

Annual number of objects launched into space

This includes satellites, probes, landers, crewed spacecrafts, and space station flight elements launched into Earth orbit or beyond.

ourworldindata.org

 

[Signal 11]

Behold—the Best Space Images of 2023

End-of-year lists, especially those displaying astronomical imagery, tend to be splashy and colorful. That’s understandable, but what they sometimes miss are the more subtle photographs, those that hide momentous discoveries in minor visual details or offer fresh perspectives on familiar objects. They may not leap off the page, but they still have an impact.

That’s what I’ve kept in mind while sorting through this year’s celestial treasure trove. This gallery is by no means complete, but it shows what I think are some of the most interesting astronomical portraits to have emerged in 2023.

 

[editor]

I used to really like the IFLS website but they've resorted to some awful clickbaity bullshot on social media. Real shame.

 

[HAL9000]

Many people might find this video heavy going if you don't know what's inside a microprocessor and some of the design challenges. I thought it was interesting, key points..

DRAM (1 transistor + capacitor)
SRAM (6 transistors)

microprocessors....



when he talks about embedded memory, he's talking SRAM. Latest chip manufacture can make things as small as 3 nanometres or 3/1 000 000 000 meters, BUT, the SRAM can only be made using 5 nanometer technology. So there's a scaling problem with something that makes up the majority of a microprocessor, now a solution to this problem might be found, we'll have to wait and see.

 

[8ball]

Many people might find this video heavy going if you don't know what's inside a microprocessor and some of the design challenges. I thought it was interesting, key points..

DRAM (1 transistor + capacitor)
SRAM (6 transistors)

microprocessors....

View attachment 409978

when he talks about embedded memory, he's talking SRAM. Latest chip manufacture can make things as small as 3 nanometres or 3/1 000 000 000 meters, BUT, the SRAM can only be made using 5 nanometer technology. So there's a scaling problem with something that makes up the majority of a microprocessor, now a solution to this problem might be found, we'll have to wait and see.

I misread post as saying “the end of SPAM”.

 

[yield]

Move over, solar eclipse: Scientists predict a once-in-a-lifetime nova explosion in the coming months

The nova T Coronae Borealis explodes about once every 80 years.

www.bbc.com

How can they predict that?

 

[Storm Fox]

Move over, solar eclipse: Scientists predict a once-in-a-lifetime nova explosion in the coming months

The nova T Coronae Borealis explodes about once every 80 years.

www.bbc.com

How can they predict that?

See this youtube vid

Spoiler: Novas

 

[Storm Fox]

View attachment 339181

And a song to go with it.

 

[HAL9000]

 

[yield]

Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean
BBC. 22 July 2024

“I first saw this in 2013 - an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science. “I just ignored it, because I’d been taught - you only get oxygen through photosynthesis.

“Eventually, I realised that for years I’d been ignoring this potentially huge discovery,” he told BBC News.

He and his colleagues carried out their research in an area of the deep sea between Hawaii and Mexico - part of a vast swathe of seafloor that is covered with these metal nodules. The nodules form when dissolved metals in seawater collect on fragments of shell - or other debris. It's a process that takes millions of years.

And because these nodules contain metals like lithium, cobalt and copper - all of which are needed to make batteries - many mining companies are developing technology to collect them and bring them to the surface.

But Prof Sweetman says the dark oxygen they make could also support life on the seafloor. And his discovery, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, raises new concerns about the risks of proposed deep-sea mining ventures.

 

[yield]

Srinivasa Ramanujan Was a Genius. Math Is Still Catching Up.
Quanta Magazine. October 21, 2024

One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada leapt onto his desk and started dancing. He wasn’t alone: Some of the graduate students who shared his Paris office were there, too. But he didn’t care. The mathematician realized that he could finally confirm a sneaking suspicion he’d first had while writing his doctoral dissertation, which he’d finished a few months earlier. He’d been studying special points, called singularities, where curves cross themselves or come to sharp turns. Now he had unexpectedly found what he’d been looking for, a way to prove that these singularities had a surprisingly deep underlying structure. Hidden within that structure were mysterious mathematical statements first written down a century earlier by a young Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had come to him in a dream.

Ramanujan brings life to the myth of the self-taught genius. He grew up poor and uneducated and did much of his research while isolated in southern India, barely able to afford food. In 1912, when he was 24, he began to send a series of letters to prominent mathematicians. These were mostly ignored, but one recipient, the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, corresponded with Ramanujan for a year and eventually persuaded him to come to England, smoothing the way with the colonial bureaucracies.

It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results, often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had been bestowed on him by the gods.