A River Reborn

Seattle Times: Elwha: Roaring back to life.

“Elwha River — The Elwha watershed is booming with new life, after the world’s largest dam removal.

The first concrete went flying in September 2011, and Elwha Dam was out the following March. Glines Canyon Dam upriver tumbled for good in September 2014. Today the river roars through the tight rock canyon once plugged by Elwha Dam, and surges past the bald, rocky hill where the powerhouse stood. The hum of the generators is replaced by the river singing in full voice, shrugging off a century of confinement like it never happened. Nature’s resurgence is visible everywhere.”

Link via MetaFilter and MeFi Projects.

I still dream of the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam…

TAL collaborating with the NYT

The New York Times: When the Hospital Fires the Bullet. “More and more hospital guards across the country carry weapons. For Alan Pean, seeking help for mental distress, that resulted in a gunshot to the chest.” By Elisabeth Rosenthal.

This American Life: 579: My Damn Mind. “The brain! It’s powerful! We have the story of how one man’s delusions lead him to a situation that’s just as strange as the worst thoughts his mind is cooking up. That story’s a collaboration with the New York Times. Our second story is about a man using the power of his own mind to deal with a problem.” (The download is free during the week after release.)

Music Video

Upside Down & Inside Out by OK Go has to be one of the coolest and most impressively made music videos this geek has ever seen. Check it out!

I heard of the band and their impressive videos before when a colleague recommended This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg machine). It’s blocked in Germany because of GEMA issues, but should be viewable elsewhere.

Ok Go – Needing/Getting (This American Life – The Invisible Made Visible). The corresponding This American Life show is Live at BAM, the radio version is Invisible Made Visible (episode 464).

Einstein was right again

Today a team of physicists announced that LIGO has detected gravitational waves according to the General theory of relativity.

Physical Review Letters: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger. By B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration). Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102 – Published 11 February 2016. (See also here at LIGO.)

New York Times: Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory.

“That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago (Listen to it here.). And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.”

The New Yorker: Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them.

“Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. […] The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth.”

PhD Comic: Gravitational Waves Explained.

Deutsche Welle:
Weltraum: Einstein hatte recht! “Dafür müsste es den Nobelpreis geben. US-Forscher vom LIGO-Observatorium haben verkündet, dass sie erstmals Gravitationswellen beobachet haben. Ein großer Moment für die Wissenschaft – und fürs Netz.”

Wissenschaft: Wissenschaftler beobachten erstmals Gravitationswellen. “Es ist ein Jahrhunderterfolg: Weltraumforscher haben nach eigenen Angaben die von Albert Einstein vor 100 Jahren vorhergesagten Gravitationswellen erstmals direkt nachgewiesen.”

Weltraum: 6 Dinge, die Sie über Gravitationswellen wissen müssen. “US-Forscher haben erstmals die Existenz von Gravitationswellen nachgewiesen. Eine Sensation – denn damit ist Einsteins Theorie nach 100 Jahren endlich bewiesen! Hier die wichtigsten Fakten zur Gravitation.”

SciLogs: Relativ einfach: Was sind eigentlich Gravitationswellen? (GW Teil 1), Gravitationswellendetektoren: wie sie funktionieren (GW Teil 2), Gravitationswellenquellen (GW Teil 3). Von Markus Pössel.

Und hier noch das Liveblog von der Pressekonferenz heute.

ScienceBlogs: Astrodicticum Simplex: Der direkte Nachweis von Gravitationswellen, Was können und wozu braucht man Gravitationswellen? Von Florian Freistetter.

Some links via MetaFilter and Schockwellenreiter.