tingilinde

precision aerobatics at a walking pace

air is, indeed, a fluid

greg's lunar display clock

This is wonderful!

 

 

the ignobels mentioned in nature

It turns out to be useful for some recipients.

snip

...

The only person with both a Nobel and Ig Nobel Prize is Andre Geim, a physicist at the University of Manchester, UK. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, but the Ig Nobel came a decade earlier for a very different kind of work: using a magnet to levitate a frog. One Friday night at Radboud University in the Netherlands, Geim poured water into a powerful 16-tesla magnet and found that it levitated. The floating drop shocked his colleagues because it seemed to violate ideas about magnetism.

Success with water led to a series of other experiments with levitating objects — and eventually with a small frog that survived its wild ride unharmed.

When Geim was offered the award, he was an early-career researcher and wary of accepting it on his own. So he reached out to Michael Berry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol, UK, and Geim’s co-author on a paper describing the levitating frog3. As a tenured academic, Berry provided the cover of being associated with a highly respected scientist.

Geim talks often about his frog experiment and the value of the curiosity-led science that led to his Ig Nobel Prize. It was on another Friday night, several years after the levitation experiments, that Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who is now at the National University of Singapore, stuck a piece of tape to graphite, leading to their discovery of graphene4 — and their shared Nobel prize.

...

 

 

 

not on my bingo dare

The Onion bought Infowars

 

how to raise a great dog

Alan Alda's chat with Brian Hare an dVanessa Woods of Duke University is excellent.  They're experts on the development of dog cognition.

 

sabotaging elephant showers

Mary the elephant figured out how to use a hose to take a shower.. Anchali figured out how to prank her.

snip

...

Bates says it’s not clear whether Anchali was vengeful toward Mary or was just teasing her in the way that some apes do while playing. But she says the findings show the importance of monitoring the behavior of captive animals over time. “I am convinced that elephants—and possibly lots of animals—do all sorts of interesting things that we often miss, or dismiss as one-offs or anecdotes.”

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amazing black footed ferret news!

It worked!

 

an amateur 21cm radio telescope

A friend and I threw together a simple 400 MHz radio telescope when we were juniors.  Very crude using things floating around in the lab with a cart recorder readout. We were able to detect the Sun and Jupiter. Now, with software defined radio and computers, you can do much better. Here's an impressive how-to about a 21cm radio telescope. 

 

 

on the principal of least action

A terrific historical discussion It should be clear if you made it through HS calculus and physics.

 

best science halloween pumpkin?

Jupiter in the infrared - by someone at JPL