Nike's x-ray tights

Nike released these pretty cool x-ray leggings at the end of last year and I keep meaning to post about them. So here they are - Nike thinking outside the box.

 

The say in some admittedly effusive 'brand' speak:

 "The new Nike Women’s Exclusive Print tight is a performance based pant for the athlete unafraid to make a statement. On the outside, she might be the girl next door, but on the inside, her body has survived grueling workouts, often pushing through pain, broken bones, pulled muscles and harsh tears."

Still, despite over-egging the campaign behind the tights, they look pretty awesome.

The most beautiful sight in space is urine

From down here on our humble planet, the best sight for me is the Milky Way on a clear night in a remote location. Or a meteor shower. Or a Solar Eclipse. Or Uranus, Venus and Mars all visible with the naked eye on the same night. But for Russel Schweickart of Appolo 9...

"The most beautiful sight in orbit…is a urine dump at sunset"*

Um. Awkard. So, could you explain yourself please Russel?

Russel wasn't available for comment but I can regurgitate what others have said for you. Space shuttles don't have much space on board for the little extras, like bodily waste, so they regularly have to release them to lighten their load. When urine is released from the exit nozzle it freezes immediately and 'instantly flashes into 10 million little ice crystals which go out almost in a hemisphere…a spray of sparklers, almost' (say Scientific American anyway). And it gets better, once those little droplets are crystals, the sun then hits them and transforms them into water vapour to create a kind of mesmerizing cloud of human bodily fluids.

The urine dump that Russel was talking about was a particularly big one (about 68 kilos of urine and water) because the shuttle couldn't unload during it's 10-day stay at the international Space Station. Nice.

*Source: Time

Magic Zig-zagging water

A colleague sent me this link to an experiment on Alex Hardy's Blog where a 24Hz Sine Wave is put through a flow of running water adn it appears to run in a zig zig motion. I don't know if this beats non-newtonian fluid on a speaker* but it's pretty darn close.

 

The camera frame rate is adjusted to match the vibration of the wave (so, 24 FPS {frames per second})to get this effect. This is an optical illusion resulting from viewing the stream of water at the same FPS as the HZ of the sound. In person, it wouldn't look like this. It's a bit like the way the rims on a car appear to spin in reverse at certain speeds. At 23Hz the stream of water would look like it is moving backwards and 25Hz like it is moving forward in slow motion.

 *I just searched back for a blog post to link to on non-newtonian fluid on speakers and was amazed to find that I haven't posted about it yet. Error. Post coming soon!

Tiny, tiny baby mouse. How cute.

When I say baby, what I really mean is embryo. This 18.5-day-old double transgenic mouse embryo (transgenic simply meaning that it contains genes from another species) was taken by Gloria Kwon and it won 1st place in the annual Nikon Small World photomicrography competition back in 2007.

photo by Gloria Kwon, copyright of Nikon Small World

The image was taken at 17x magnification. The green that you see is the in-tact yolk sac with green fluorescence  The rest of the embryo, including the placenta, have red fluorescence.

The image was taken using widefield microscopy with various lighting conditions under brightfield as well as green and red fluorescent filters in darkfield which enable her to show up details of the embryo that would be difficult to see or document otherwise.

The original Spirograph

During a recent trip to the Science Museum I happily found myself distracted from the 8 foot by 8 foot calculator in the Mathematics exhibition, by this:

Harmonograph at the Science Museum, London

...and it reminded me of an early blog post of mine about the maths of the spirograph. I had assumed that the spirograph was designed for the sole purpose of entertaining under 5s on rainy days and testing children’s patience with numerous snapped pencil leads. But no, it seems there was a scientific use at the beginning of it’s ancestral line...

Introducing, the harmonograph (ps. before we go any further i am not saying that the Spirograph is defs a direct descendent of the harmonograph, this is purely ill-informed speculation). 

The harmonograph was invented in the 1870s to analyse vibrations and was used in the study of sound. However, predictably, by the 1900s it was already regarded as a scientific toy for creating pretty patterns!

copyright Conor Lawless

The harmonograph works by utilising the swinging motion of two pendulums - one mounted to a pen and one to a drawing table - which swing at right angles to each other with the pen tracing out the resulting combinations of movement onto paper.

Weights can be added or moved up and down the pendulums to vary the speed that they swing at, creating varied patterns.

The Science Museum has a number of curve-drawing machines on show, like Stanley’s and George Adam’s geometric pens which arguably were the first spirographs, but with fancier cogs.

George Adams' Geometric pen at Science Museum, London

Stanley's geometric pen at Science Museum, London

There was also a surprisingly elaborate contraption on display masking as a tool for ornamental turning used on lathes - the geometric chuck.

Geometric chuck at Science Museum, London

This example, at the Science Museum, is the only known example of a 4-stage chuck for use on paper...and boy does it do good things to paper.

The chuck works by drawing the epicycloidal motion of each tier (determined by different sizes of cog) onto the paper at the top of the chuck. The motion of each tier can be superimposed upon another, or other tiers can be fixed so that the motion of only one tier is drawn.

So there we have it, an introductory tour of curve-drawing machines with very little science or maths and a lot of “it makes pretty things”. That’s what I like. But...if you do want some maths - the old Spirograph post has a bit to whet your appetite or you can go all-out with this article - which has some amazing examples and a bit of science behind their construction.

The Science Museum Mathematics exhibition is on the Second floor and is a permanent fixture (for now).

Visualising earth's tides

NASA's Scientific VIsualisation Studio produced this video demonstrating how the earths tides ebb and flow around the world. It doesn't include narration or annotation because, they explain, 'The goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience'.



The visualisation shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007 - these firgures are plotted into a computer that takes in shed loads of data and outputs pretty things like this - I love when computers do that. The computational model is called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2 for short).

It can calculate ocean flow at all depths but this particular video shows only surface flows. NASA describe it as a 'high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans'.

The dark areas under the ocean rshow the the undersea bathymetry (basically the opposite of topography). The bathymetry and land topography are exaggerated to enhance the contrast - bathymetry by 20 times and topography by 40 times.

Details of the video:

Completed:	2011-04-08
Animators:	Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) (Lead)
	Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC)
Video Editor:	Victoria Weeks (HTSI)
Scientists:	Hong Zhang (UCLA)
	Dimitris Menemenlis (NASA/JPL CalTech)
Platforms/Sensors/Data Sets:	GTOPO30 Topography and Bathymetry
	Hipparcos/Tycho 2 Catalogue
	ECCO2 High Resolution Ocean and Sea Ice Model (06/2006 - 12/2007)
Series:	Flows

Chocolate skulls with walnut brains

Ruth and Sira García Trigueros are twin sister illustrators and graphic designers from the north of Spain. They are currently selling these handmade chocolate skulls with walnut or candy brains on etsy and they look delicious!

Ruth and Sira say that they "love the smell of damp earth, the mountains, the woods, walking around barefoot and eating directly from the saucepan. We listen to black metal. We are quiet. We smile a lot, sometimes people freak out. We play drums and bass in a band that doesn't exist". They seem cool.