Test Blog » Science

Two Online Videos

Sameer — Mon, 01 May 2006 02:15:41 +0000

(via John Tokash) This video is demo of what the QuickCam Orbit MP is capable of.

You can add one of dozens of augmentations ranging from hats to glasses to full blown avatars to your video chat experience. All of the effects utilize face tracking to keep in synch with your face’s eyes, eyebrows, lips, etc. Very impressive.
(via Dean Armstrong)

Awesome animation of aurorae seen from the International Space Station. This is a bit old (2003) but very interesting to read/see if you haven’t already.

Particle Accelerator day

Sameer — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 17:37:31 +0000

(Via Cosmic Variance) Yesterday, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, declared Particle Accelerator Day, in Illinois, in recognition of the state’s federal laboratories (Fermilab and Argonne) as world leaders in accelerator technology. I wonder what other wierd days have been declared in Illinios.

Since the UofC helps to manage Fermilab and Argonne, I was hoping that someone would organize a tour of the facilities and I would get a chance to visit before I graduate. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen. On the other hand, after missing many chances, I am finally going to go to visit the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin tonight. The weather is nice for viewing the night sky, and it should be fun.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Sameer — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:56:33 +0000

The Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) has some stunning images. One of them is this stunning panoramic view of the top of Mount Everest. Coming up tomorrow is a picture of the Martian Everest – a volcano called Olympus Mons. Wikipedia says that it is the tallest known mountain in the solar system (3 times the size of Everest) and if one were to stand on the highest point of its summit, the slope of the volcano would extend all the way to the horizon. If you want to track the APOD pictures, here is a screen scraped RSS feed.

Super Volcanoes

Sameer — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 05:18:12 +0000

I was reading about Supervolcanoes. This is just a term for really big volcanoes and was coined by the producers of the BBC program Horizon. And they mean so big that we do not recognise them as volcanos. When they erupt they do not form mountains of solid magma, but huge depressions where the land at the eruption site collapses. One of the largest super volcanoes in the world is in the US at the Yellowstone National Park. Geologists had observed that many of the rocks in the area were made of compacted ash, but they could find no extinct volcano or crater. It was only after NASA took some photos from the air of Yellowstone that the geologists were able to observe a massive caldera more than 2000 square kilometers wide. After analyzing the layers of ash, they determined that it had exploded 3 times in the last 2 million years. Each time was regularly spaced about 600,000 years apart. Just in case you are wondering, the last explosion was about 600,000 years ago. There are several other supervolcanoes in the world, notable among them Lake Toba in Sumatra and Kikai Caldera in Japan. What would happen if such a volcano exploded?

Disaster on a global scale. The supervolcano at Lake Toba exploded about 74,000 years ago and spewed out nearly 3,000 cubic kilometers of material, caused complete deforestation in South East Asia and triggered a volcanic winter that started an instant Ice Age. It also probably caused drastic population reduction worldwide. This explosive force would be about 10,000 times as violent as the Mt. St. Helens Eruption. If Yellowstone erupts it would probably cause death and destruction for hundreds of miles around it and also cover all of the United States with a layer of 2 meters of ash causing crops to vanish overnight. Who knows what the resulting volcanic winter will bring? but you can be sure that it will affect the whole world. It is really very humbling to realize how vulnerable mankind is to natural disasters.

You can read the transcript of the BBC programme over here.
Also interesting is the US Geological Survey publication on Yellowstone’s future. (PDF file)

Deep Impact

Sameer — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 05:09:34 +0000

Deep Impact is going to hit comet Temple – 1 in an hour or so. I was tempted to gaze up at the heavens using the telescope on top of Ryerson, however I was not convinced that I would see anything. So instead of using the telescope like Carl Sagan did back in the 50′s, I am watching a webcast of NASA TV and it looks exciting enough. My favourite quote about Deep Impact is from Elizabeth Warner, director of the University of Maryland Observatory, on Space.com

“The coolest thing for me,” she notes, “will be to observe the comet over several weeks and then hopefully (weather-permitting) see it on July 4 a bit brighter than on the previous nights and know that we made it brighter.”

I wonder if NASA chose July 4th because of the American Independence Day, or is that just a co-incidence?

Brown Recluse Spiders

Sameer — Mon, 09 May 2005 02:38:21 +0000

Cryptome got photos of a Brown Recluse Spider bite and mistook it for a biological attack like cutaneous anthrax. The spider is mainly found in the midwest United States. If you want to see graphic images of the bites then click here.