Category Archives: Physics

Zwar noch keine Kernfusion…

… aber ein erfolgreich gezündetes Wasserstoff-Plasma. Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung berichtet heute im Ressort Wissen:

Fusionsanlage Wendelstein 7-X: Sonnenfeuer mit Wasserstoffplasma entzündet. Von Manfred Lindinger.

“In Greifswald ist es gelungen, ein Plasma aus Wasserstoff in der Fusionsanlage Wendelstein 7-X zu zünden. Damit hat der eigentliche wissenschaftliche Betrieb begonnen.”

Photos from Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover camera

A few days ago Emily Lakdawalla posted some images from the moon on her weblog at the Planetary Society: Fun with a new data set: Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover camera data.

“Here, for the first time in a format easily accessible to the public, are hundreds and hundreds of science-quality images from the Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover.”

Links to the original data and the mirror at the Planetary Society are at the top of the article.

Link via MetaFilter.

… like riding a bike

It’s common knowledge that there are some things that you cannot unlearn once you’ve learnt them, like riding a bike. Right?

Destin Sandlin, creator of the educational video series Smarter Every Day, learnt how to ride a bike that goes left when steered right and vice versa. It took him eight months until it “clicked” – but then he found that he couldn’t ride normal bikes any more!

I’d love to try riding his Backwards Brain Bicycle. When I first tried to ride a recumbent bike I had a similar experience because on a normal bike, you steer mostly by shifting your body weight and only turn the handlebars a little bit to help. On a recumbent, you can’t really shift your weight much, so you have to steer by making lots of tiny movements with the handlebars. (This is especially hard if your recumbent has under-seat steering, though I’ve heard that pivot steering is even harder). It took me a few tries until I managed stopped my brain from trying to shift my weight, but once it clicked, riding the recumbent was not too difficult. Since the directions are not reversed, I can still ride an upright bike like before.

Nine planets after all?

NPR: Scientists Find Hints Of A Giant, Hidden Planet In Our Solar System.

[Michael E. Brown, t]he astronomer whose work helped kick Pluto out of the pantheon of planets says he has good reason to believe there’s an undiscovered planet bigger than Earth lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system.”

The Washington Post: New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar system.

“[T]he authors, astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, have not observed the planet directly.

Instead, they have inferred its existence from the motion of recently discovered dwarf planets and other small objects in the outer solar system. Those smaller bodies have orbits that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a hidden planet”.

See the original paper here:

The Astronomical Journal: Evidence for a Distnad Giant Planet in the Solar Symste. By Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown.

Abstract: “Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper Belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this alignment, to date, a theoretical model that can successfully account for the observations remains elusive. In this work we show that the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cluster not only in argument of perihelion, but also in physical space. We demonstrate that the perihelion positions and orbital planes of the objects are tightly confined and that such a clustering has only a probability of 0.007% to be due to chance, thus requiring a dynamical origin. We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass [around ten times the mass of Earth …].”

Space.com: The Man Who Killed Pluto: Q & A with Astronomer Mike Brown.

Some links via MetaFilter: Many Very Educated Men Just Screwed Up Nature. Possibly?.