Baumgartner – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Wed, 01 Aug 2012 05:52:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Baumgartner – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Olympic Science & Red Bull Stratos | SciByte 56 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/22486/olympic-science-red-bull-stratos-scibyte-56/ Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:48:53 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=22486 We take a look at olympic science, an innovative writing technique, morse code, music, and more!

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We take a look at olympic science, an innovative writing technique, morse code, music, an update on the Red Bull Stratos mission, spacecraft update and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes

Olympic Science



Credit: International Olympic Committee for 2012 Summer Olympics

  • Measuring times
  • Time is measured in 1,000th of a second that has to be that close to both actual time and consistent
  • Races are started by electronic starter guns, with starting blocks that indicate when a runner reacts faster than humans can respond, making the runners re-start the race
  • More than 2,000 digital frames a second aid the timing system for the most accurate and precise system possible
  • For longer racing event with a lot of competitors RFID, Radio Frequency Identification, attached to shoes or bicycles allow accurate timing and tracking for each competitor
  • Technology
  • Some Long Jumpers utilize stereoscopic cameras, from BMW, to measure speed and angles of launch
  • Swimmers usitize fluid dynamic measurements so that they can train and compete in the most aerodynamic way as possible to
  • Runners can also use treadmill technology that provides support to minimize the weight of the athlete affecting the legs by creating a pressure bubble that can support part of the athletes weight
  • The Olympic pool utilize a number of different technologies to minimize waves including adjustable depth, gutters along the edges of the pool and lane lines
  • Mechanical engineers analyze top athletes to be able to both help athletes improve their technique and expand knowledge that could help provide information to be used for people with movement disorders, it can also used design more realistic and stronger robotic arms
  • Changing Technology Rules
  • The LZR Racer Suit is a line of extremely high-end swimsuits manufactured by Speedo using a high-technology swimwear fabric composed of woven elastane-nylon and polyurethane.
  • Swimmers wearing the LZR suit at the 2008 Beijing Olympics consisted of : 94% of all swimming races won, 98% of all medals won, and 23 out of the 25 world records broken
  • By 24 August 2009, 93 world records had been broken by swimmers wearing a LZR Racer
  • These results prompted FINA to reevaluate suit policies making the LZR banned for use in competitions
  • Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) is the International Federation (IF) recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for administering international competition in the aquatic sports
  • **Oscar Pistorius
  • South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is the first double-amputee athlete to compete at the Olympics.
  • Pistorius is competing in the regular olympics using prosthetics Carbon fiber spring-like prosthetics designed for sprinter
  • Although the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) deemed him ineligible for the 2008 Summer Olympics based on the belief that he held an unfair advantage further scientific studies have shown he hold no advantage or able-bodied athletes
  • Safety Equipment
  • Safety headgear in different for each sport it will be used in dependent upon the specific needs for the sport
  • Helmet safety foam comes in both the stiff and flexible to maximize the needed protection and comfort
  • Paralympics
  • Paralympic wheelchairs are specifically designed for each sport. With designs for speed, mobility, toughness, etc.
  • Of Note
  • A google search for “London 2012 _” will show a display of the schedule and results of competition on the right side of the window
    Multimedia
  • Video Gallery Science Of The Summer Olympics: Engineering In Sports | Science360
  • Social Media
  • London 2012 @London2012
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • 2012 London Olympics official page
  • Science Of The Summer Olympics: Engineering In Sports | Science360.gov
  • Fina extends swimsuit regulations | news.bbc.co.uk
  • High-Tech Swimsuits: Winning Medals Too | time.com
  • Fast Times: Speedo, Like Michael Phelps, Goes For World Domination in an LZR Suit | The Wall Street Journal: Sports
  • Phelps secures his place in the history books after landing his eighth gold medal! | Speedo.com
  • Best Inventions of 2008 | TIME

— NEWS BYTE —

Writing with your eyes



Credit: YouTube channel h2so4hurts | Credit: Lorenceau et al., Current Biology

  • The low down
  • People “locked in” by paralyzing disorders have long relied on blinks or facial twitches to build sentences one letter at a time
  • Jean Lorenceau of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris may have a new technology might allow people who have almost completely lost the ability to move their arms or legs to communicate freely
  • Significance
  • Eye-writing technology tricks the neuromuscular machinery into doing something that is usually impossible: to voluntarily produce smooth eye movements in arbitrary directions
  • Smooth pursuit, this eye motion is different from saccadic motion, in which we rapidly shift our eyes to, say, skim lines of text or scan a crowd
  • Smooth movements are normally impossible to control those movements smoothly in any direction
  • Lorenceau found by accident with another experiment that he was able to learn to do so.
  • To determine if other people could learn to do this he designed his own reverse-phi display with 200 disks that switch between black and white and are projected on a gray background.
  • When we see two images that are the photographic negatives (dark to light & light to dark) in rapid succession our brain sees the object in the image moving away from the negative image
  • This gives us the impression of motion when there is none
  • Over three 30-minute sessions, he was able to trained six volunteers
  • For the volunteers, who couldn’t see what they were writing, it was like writing with a pen that had run out of ink
  • Although some participants had a harder time of learning to control their eye movements than others by the end of the sessions most could freely draw legible letters and numbers
  • Of Note
  • This technology might also help to improve eye movement control in people with certain conditions such as dyslexia or ADHD and/or for experts, such as athletes or surgeons, whose activities strongly rely on eye movements
  • Now working on a better version of his eye writer, tests should start next year
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Writing in Cursive with Your Eyes Only | h2so4hurts
  • YouTube Reverse Phi Motion | porrophagus
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Writing in cursive with your eyes only | MedicalXPress
  • Write to Me Only With Thine Eyes | ScienceMag.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Morse Code in space



Credit: fit.ac.jp

Musical Variety

  • The low down
  • The Million Song Dataset is a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks.
  • The songs come from nearly 45,000 artists with only 2,650 songs released between 1955 and 1959 and 177,808 songs released between 2005 and 2009.
  • Quantitative analysis for this study examined three aspects of those songs; timbre, pitch, and loudness of nearly half a million songs
  • Timbre accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality
  • Pitch roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements
  • Timbral variety peaked in the 1960’s and has been in steady decline to the present day and implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques
  • While it may be no surprise that music has gotten louder the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today
  • Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod
  • Of Note
  • The Million Song Dataset, huge as it is, may not provide a representative slice of pop music, especially for old songs
  • The database draws on what’s popular now, as well as what has been digitized and made available for download
  • The older digitised music may not be the same that people enjoyed when those songs first came out.
  • Million Song Dataset

— Updates —

Red Bull Stratos dives again



Red Bull Stratos

— Spacecraft Updates —

Curiosity Rover lands on Sunday … stay tuned next week for more

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • August 1, 1774 : 238 years ago : Oxygen : Joseph Priestley, British Presbyterian minister and chemist, identified a gas which he called “dephlogisticated air” – later known as oxygen. Priestley found that mercury heated in air became coated with “red rust of mercury,” which, when heated separately, was converted back to mercury with “air” given off. Studying this “air” given off, he observed that candles burned very brightly in it. Also, a mouse in a sealed vessel with it could breathe it much longer than ordinary air. A strong believer in the phlogiston theory, Priestley considered it to be “air from which the phlogiston had been removed.” Further experiments convinced him that ordinary air is one fifth dephlogisticated air, the rest considered by him to be phlogiston

Looking up this week

Keep an eye out for …

  • Wed | Aug 1 | Full Moon

  • Wed | Aug 1 | Before Dawn | Jupiter will the the

  • Fri | Aug 3 | Evening | The Summer Triangle approaches its greatest height. Face east and look almost straight up after nightfall. The brightest star there is Vega. Toward the northeast from Vega (by two or three fist-widths at arm’s length) is Deneb. Toward the southeast from Vega by a greater distance is Altair.

  • Before Dawn | Jupiter & Venus are in the East they are now about the distance of you pinky finger to your pointer finger stretched out at arm’s length, 14*. Venus is the brighter of the two to the lower left, making Jupiter the higher of the two.

  • Before Dawn | Betelgeuse, the red giant star, is still to the lower right of Venus by about the same distance apart as Jupiter and Venus

  • At Dusk | Mars & Saturn are low in the west-southwest. Saturn is above Spica, by about three finger widths are are nearly the same brightness

  • Further Reading and Resources

  • More on what’s in the sky this week

  • Sky&Telescope

  • SpaceWeather.com

  • StarDate.org

  • For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au

  • Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org

  • Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz

  • AstronomyNow

  • HeavensAbove

The post Olympic Science & Red Bull Stratos | SciByte 56 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/18136/meteorites-lasers-scibyte-38/ Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:43:26 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=18136 We take a look at more Lego’s into space and near space, Venus transit, a meteorite that crashed through a cabin, guiding lightning with lasers, and more!

The post Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at more Lego’s into space and near space, Venus transit, a meteorite that crashed through a cabin, guiding lightning with lasers, updates on Encyclopedia Britannica, near-orbital skydiving, check in on the latest news on Neutrinos and solar storms and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Legoooo’s in Spaaaace … again

  • *The shuttle *
  • Raul Oaidia from Romania launched a Lego space shuttle into the stratosphere on the back of a weather balloon
  • Lego space shuttle model (set number 3367!) and a video camera to capture the voyage
  • Originally he was looking for someone to support project, found a businessman on twitter, who after discussing options decided that a launching something on a weather balloon
  • Launching in Romania required problematic flight clearance and waiting times, while Germany where his father worked had much looser regulations
  • He and his father traveled to Germany to launch the balloon, since that country’s regulations on this sort of project are more relaxed than those in Romania
  • The balloon lofted Lego shuttle flew to an altitude of about 114,800 ft [35,000 m]
  • Lego’s to Jupiter
  • Specially-constructed LEGO mini-figures are of the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno, and “father of science” Galileo Galilei.
  • Jupiter (who was the equivalent of “Zeus” to the Greeks) drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief. While Juno was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature
  • Galileo Galilei first to point a telescope at the sky to make astronomical observations and discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter – named the Galilean moons in his honor.
  • Juno and the mini-figures are scheduled to arrive in July 2016 and orbit Jupiter for a year (33 revolutions) before intentionally crashing into the giant gas planet
  • Made out of space-grade aluminum the figures, basically the size of the normal LEGO figures, were prepared in a very special way
  • * Lego Station*
  • While the actual Space Station (ISS) took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours, at least in LEGO form
  • The Lego station would not be able to bear it’s own weight under gravity
  • The Lego station was used as a demonstration for a series of recorded videos aimed at engaging and educating children about living and working in space
  • Building Lego’s in space are much harder to put together in space, to keep the bricks contained it had to be put together inside a glove box
  • Because of the difficulty of putting it together in a glove box, some pieces of the model were launched partially-preassembled
  • In space you have to worry about the little pieces getting loose and becoming either lost or potentially getting jammed in equipment or even becoming a flammability hazard
  • There are flammability concerns about the Lego’s; due to the flammability hazards, the toy bricks could only be exposed to the open cabin air for two hours
  • Other building brick sets that were launched last year, the LEGO space station was part of an educational collaboration between the Danish toy company and NASA
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : Lego Space Shuttle
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Lego Space Shuttle Takes Flight, Returns to Earth Undamaged @ PCWorld.com
  • Astronaut Builds LEGO Space Station Inside Real-Life Space Station
  • What would you like to see in space? @ microblade.blogspot.com

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Venus Transit

  • The low down
  • Transits of Venus are when it passes in between the Earth and the sun and are among the rarest of planetary alignments
  • Between each occurrence is happens at uneven occurrences at 121.5, then 8 then 105.5, then 8 years again. So only four times every 243 years and only in early Dec or early June
  • Only six Venus transits have occurred since the invention of the telescope (1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874
  • The last transit occurred in 2004
  • Observations
  • Your location north or south on Earth slightly affects the apparent path you see Venus taking south or north across the Sun
  • The transit this year will last about 6.5 hours and will be visible from more than half of the Earth’s surface; northwestern North America, Hawaii, the western Pacific, northern Asia, Japan, Korea, eastern China, Philippines, eastern Australia, and New Zealand.
  • The Sun will set while the transit is still in progress from most of North America, the Caribbean, and northwest South America
  • It will also already be in progress at sunrise for observers in central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and eastern Africa
  • No portion of the transit will be visible from Portugal or southern Spain, western Africa, and the southeastern 2/3 of South America.
  • Significance
  • Edmund Halley first realized that transits of Venus could be used to measure the Sun’s distance which established the absolute scale of the solar system from Kepler’s third law
  • Accurately timing the transit from the surface of the Earth past a certain degree of accuracy due to atmospheric conditions and diffraction
  • The Venus transits in 1761 and 1769 were still able to give Astronomers their first good value for the Sun’s distance.
  • * Of Note*
  • The next pair of Venus transits occur over a century from now on 2117 Dec 11 and 2125 Dec 08.
  • Mercury, the other planet with an orbit between the sun and Earth undergoes transits about 13 or 14 transits of Mercury each century, and fall within several days of 8 May and 10 November
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE : 2012 Venus Transit Map @ skyandtelescope.com
  • IMAGE : A line plotted of the transit as seen from Earth’s center, with Universal Times @ skyandtelescope.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Transit of Venus: June 5–6, 2012 @ skyandtelescope.com
  • 2004 and 2012 Transits of Venus @ nasa.gov

The sky, well a meteorite, fell in Norway right into a cabin

  • The low down
  • Norwegian family arrived at their holiday cabin in Oslo recently for the first time all winter, to discover that a meteorite had apparently fallen through their roof
  • Significance
  • No one is sure when the meteorite actually crashed through the cabin’s roof, because the cabin had been closed during the winter.
  • Although it is thought is may have fallen during a wave of meteor sightings over Norway on March 1
  • The 1.3 pound [585 gram] meteorite was found split in two
  • Cross-section’s of the meteorite show that it contains bits of many different particles that are compressed together
  • Identified as a rare type of breccia meteorite, which is a conglomerate of smaller fragments of minerals
  • These type of meteorites indicates that another, larger meteorite smashed rock on another planet before being propelled into outer space
  • * Of Note*
  • Meteorites rarely fall in populated areas
  • According to Views and News from Norway, only 14 meteorites have been found in the Scandinavian country since 1848
  • Photos and Video of the meteorite in local news site
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Meteorite smashed through Oslo roof @ newsinenglish.no
  • Norwegian Family Finds Meteorite Crashed Through Their Roof
  • Fikk meteorittstein gjennom taket i kolonihagen @ vg.no

Directing lightning with lasers

  • The low down
  • New research has shown that brief bursts of intense laser light can redirect lightning
  • Significance
  • Researchers in France have successfully directed coaxed laboratory-generated lightning into striking the same place, not just twice, but over and over
  • The researchers pulses of laser light, femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) long to create a virtual lightning rod out of a column of ionized gas
  • It has also been confirmed with other experiments that a femtosecond laser could produce an ultra-short filaments of ionized gas that act like electrical guide
  • Further studies revealed that these filaments could function over long distances, potentially greater than 164ft [50 m]
  • The research team sent a laser beam skimming past a spherical electrode to an oppositely charged planar electrode
  • The laser then stripped away the outer electrons from the atoms along its path
  • The resulting plasma filament channeled an electrical discharge from the planar electrode to the spherical one
  • The researchers then added a longer, pointed electrode to their experiment
  • With no laser the discharge obeyed normal rules and always struck the taller, pointed electrode
  • Then researchers used the later the discharge was redirected, following the filaments and striking the spherical electrode instead, even when they turned it on after the initial path of the discharge began to form
  • Multimedia
  • An illustration of how lightning occurs when two streamers meet. @ Wikipedia
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Laser lightning rod: Guiding bursts of electricity with a flash of light @ physorg.com

*— TWO-BYTE NEWS — *

Encyclopaedia Britannica, in print no more

  • The low down
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica has been in print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768.
  • Significance
  • It was announced on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 that after 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print, instead focusing on its online encyclopedia
  • The President of Encyclopaedia Britannica said “This has to do with the fact that now Britannica sells its digital products to a large number of people.”
  • The final hardcover encyclopedia set is available for sale at Britannica’s website for $1,395.
  • * Of Note*
  • The top year for the printed encyclopedia was 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold
  • just six years later in 1996, that number fell to 40,000
  • The company started exploring digital publishing in the 1970s.
  • The first CD-ROM edition was published in 1989 and a version went online in 1994.
  • They made the contents of the website available for one week
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : Totally Digital: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Now
  • Social Media
  • Encyclo. Britannica@Britannica
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Last entry for Encyclopaedia Britannica book form

Skydiving at the orbital extreme

*— Updates — *

Neutrinos loop back around again

The Sun will not sit quietly

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • March 26, 1859: 153 years ago : Vulcan Discovered? : In 1859, Lescarbault, a French medical doctor and amateur astronomer reported sighting a new planet in an orbit inside that of Mercury which he named Vulcan. He had seen a round black spot on the Sun with a transit time across the solar disk 4 hours 30 minutes. He sent this information and his calculations on the planet’s movements to Jean LeVerrier, France’s most famous astronomer. Le Verrier had already noticed that Mercury had deviated from its orbit. A gravitational pull from Vulcan would fit in nicely with what he was looking for. However, it was not consistently seen again and it is now believed to have been a “rogue asteroid” making a one-time pass close to the sun. [Or this is the non-prime universe and it was destroyed, que Bryan crying out in anguish]
  • March 25, 1970: 42 years ago : Concorde Flew : In 1970, the prototype British-built airplane Concorde 002 made its first supersonic flight (700 mph; 1,127 kph). A few months earlier, the French prototype, Concorde 001, had broken the sound barrier on 1 Oct 1969. Mach 2 was achieved by Concorde 001 on 4 Nov 1970, and by Concorde 002, a few days later on 12 Nov 1970. The combined number of supersonic flights by the two aircraft reached 100 by January of the following year, 1971.

Looking up this week

The post Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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