Okay, to be more accurate, Cassini produced a noodle. Well, actually, it’s a noddle-shaped movie. Sort of…
This video pans across a continuous long and narrow mosaic of 137 images of Saturn captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft when it dove between the giant gaseous planet and its rings on April 26th, 2017. Please click on the image to watch the video. As for why NASA scientists are calling this a “noodle,” read on… (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Scie ...read more
Toss a few droplets of water in a hot pan and they seem to come alive, skittering to and fro as if trying to escape. Try the same thing with balls of hydrogel, and they actually could break free. The spheres bounce animatedly about a hot pan, emitting a piercing, shrieking noise as they do so.
Both tricks are due to something called the Leidenfrost effect, which describes the instantaneous vaporization that occurs when water touches a hot surface. If enough steam is produced, it can be enough t ...read more
A Tang ad using a Gemini image. via General Foods/Kraft.
Tang, the orange flavoured breakfast drink, is so synonymous with NASA that people seem to think the space agency invented it. Even Homer Simpson somehow called up NASA to demand why he couldn’t get “no Tang ’round here!” But contrary to popular belief NASA didn’t invent Tang. That honour goes to William Mitchell, the guy who also invented Pop Rocks and Cool Whip.
The short version of the story is that Charle ...read more
As Japan’s Himawari satellite watched, Typhoon Noru and Tropical Storm Kulap did a do-si-do in the northwest Pacific — and then Noru pretty much slurped up Kulap. (Infrared imagery: Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. Animated gif: Tom Yulsman)
It has been expected for awhile, and now it has finally happened: Two tropical systems in the Northeast Pacific spun around each other in a kind of cyclonic do-si-do — and then the bigger one ate most of&nbs ...read more
Does this American alligator seem relaxed or riled up to you? A new study suggests humans can tell, by soundbite alone, an animal’s state of emotional arousal across all terrestrial vertebrate species. (Credit US Fish & Wildlife Service)
Chilled out or worked up? Most of us can pick up pretty quickly on another human’s state of emotional arousal. But Charles Darwin hypothesized that understanding emotional expression across species went way, way back, all the way to the earliest ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Paint a room in light colors to make it look bigger. Wear black to look slimmer. These are well known facts about how color influences our perception—but it’s not all black and white.
New research from Boston College is showing that color saturation — how pure a color is — affects how we perceive an objects’ size. The more saturated a color is, the bigger something looks, the researchers say, with attendant implications for marketing an ...read more
An artist’s conception of the AeroMobil flying car. (Credit: AeroMobil)
Flying cars are up against a wall — literally. Turning aircraft into street-safe machines requires manufacturers to prove their safety standards in crash tests. So at least one expensive prototype needs to get smashed to smithereens, while its dummy passengers survive. This is no small financial hurdle, and for a decade the industry has been just a few years away from getting models street-certified.
Flying Car ...read more
While you’re writing down yet another password on the notepad hidden in your desk drawer, a squirrel is retrieving nuts it buried months earlier. It’s no secret these animals have good memories. But they don’t only remember where they stuck stuff: squirrels can remember how to solve a puzzle almost two years after they last saw it. And they can use that knowledge to tackle a problem they haven’t seen before.
In a lab at the University of Exeter, Pizza Ka Y ...read more
The rice grain-sized microchip from Biohax. (Credit: Biohax)
A Wisconsin company will be the first in the United States to implant microchips beneath the skin of its employees.
Three Squared Market (32M), a break-room kiosk company, has offered to give its workers subdermal RFID tags, tiny rice-grain-sized pellets that can hold information like credit card numbers and passwords. With their “handy” chips, they’ll be able to unlock doors, log in to computers, and, of course, bu ...read more
