Falling Sky

Mandelbulbous!

Things That Should Not Be - Elf Power

Four years ago I posted this story about the Octacube, an attempt at producing a four-dimensional object in three dimensions. Now it's got some similarly freaky company in the form of a 3D CG rendering of the Mandelbrot set - the Mandelbulb. 

   

It may look like a piece of virtuoso knitting, but the makers of an image they call the Mandelbulb claim it is most accurate three-dimensional representation to date of the most famous fractal equation: the Mandelbrot set.

 

Fractal figures are generated by an "iterative" procedure: you apply an equation to a number, apply the same equation to the result and repeat that process over and over again. When the results are translated into a geometric shape, they can produce striking "self-similar" images, forms that contain the same shapes at different scales; for instance, some look uncannily like a snowflake. The tricky part is finding an equation that produces an interesting image.

 

The most famous fractal equation is the 2D Mandelbrot set, named after the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot of Yale University, who coined the name "fractals" for the resulting shapes in 1975.

via www.newscientist.com

Check out the Mandelbulb website for more of these truly boggling renderings of this incredibly intricate digital form - amazing stuff.

Sun Shines In The Rusty Morning

via www.boston.com

Intersecting swirling trails left by the earlier passage of dust devils across sand dunes, as they lifted lighter reddish-pink dust and exposed the darker material below. Also visible are darker slope streaks along dune edges, formed by a process which is still under investigation.(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Pixies: Bird Dream Of The Olympus Mons

Even by The Big Picture's consistently high standards, this is a real treat. 35 photographs taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since 2006 of the Martian landscape, 187 miles above the surface. They're quite remarkable and worth taking time to look at, landscapes that are both reminiscent of satellite photographs of Earth yet unmistakably alien, unmarked by the mucky paw of humans (well, #9 aside). And is that red weed I see?

(No, of course not - it's part of the Martian South Polar Cap.)

The Little Things In Life

Got 18 minutes handy to expand your noggin?  Course you have.  This is a presentation from TED (which I really should be keeping my eye on more) by Bonnie Bassler of the department of molecular biology at Princeton University.  She discusses how bacteria cells communicate with each other and the implications such knowledge has for treating infections and improving health.  It's remarkable stuff, conveyed effectively by the enthusiastic Bassler (interviewed here).

Doff of the hat to Onegoodmove for spotting this.  And while we're marvelling at what's going on at a microscopic level, ohh and ahh at these lovely images taken through an electron microscope of seeds and pollen conserved at the Kew Millennium Seed Bank Project.  Spotted by Sully.

A grain of red campion (Silene dioica) pollen.  Photograph: Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley

AKA Lenten, Crow, Crust, Sugar, Sap and Chaste

The things you learn. From Spaceweather:

Tonight's full Moon has a special name--the Worm Moon. It signals the coming of northern spring, a thawing of the soil, and the first stirrings of earthworms in long-dormant gardens. Step outside tonight and behold the wakening landscape. "Worm moonlight" is prettier than it sounds.

From Farmers' Almanac:

As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.

Happy worm moon! Tell your family, impress your friends!

Time lapse image from NASA APOD by Antonio Cidadao

Explosion In The Sky

First image received from the DC-8 aircraft which observed the re-entry of Jules Verne ATV over the Pacific Ocean. Credits: ESA

ESA PR 41-2008. Europe’s first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) Jules Verne successfully completed its six-month ISS logistics mission today with its controlled destructive re-entry over a completely uninhabited area of the South Pacific.

Following a final deorbit burn at 14:58 CEST which slowed its velocity by 70 m/s, the ATV entered the upper atmosphere at an altitude of 120 km at 15:31 CEST. It broke up at an altitude of 75 km with the remaining fragments falling into the Pacific some 12 minutes later.

Tomorrow, The Future

I've been mildly obsessed with the CERN Large Hadron Collider over the last few years, so it's quite a thrill to know that tomorrow, at 08:30 BST, after decades of planning and construction and very large wodge of cash, the mightiest particle acceleration experiment this side of creation goes into operation with First Beam. Naturally there's stuff about it all over the place, but ignore the sensationalist newspaper coverage with it's faux-apocalyptic tags and aim for the people who know what they're talking about.

The BBC has done nicely with this accessible guide to the LHC, and they're devoting a fair few programmes on Radio 4 as part of Big Bang Day (might want to give the Torchwood a miss though).

New Scientist has naturally gone to town with oodles of articles about the LHC, going all the way back to 1991, though without an NS subscription many of the articles won't be accessible. Boo. It'll be worth keeping an eye on the print edition in a few weeks time once there's been enough time for things to have got going.

Scientific American might be on the other side of the Atlantic from where all this colliding will be going on, but there's a whole wodge of good features on the LHC there - and, unlike New Sci, they're not restricted to subscribers, so dig in. Even if you don't give a hoot about the physics aspect, check out this piece on how the computing system behind LHC, the Grid, could come to influence the future of the internet.

If you find the engineering aspect of LHC and how such a behemoth could have been constructed, check out this piece from The Engineer, written a few months back by Stu Nathan (he visited CERN back in April, taking snaps on the way, and my envy remains undiminished to this day).

And for a more visual, sequential-arty-approach, Jorge Cham's PHD Comics is this week putting up a five-part comic on a tour around CERN, starting here. The subject matter is still mind-boggling, but at least it all looks pretty.

Ten hours 'til first beam. Sometimes, I love living in the future.

Cool!

Cern lab goes 'colder than space'

A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.

The Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The LHC has thousands of magnets which will be maintained in this frigid condition using liquid helium.

[...] Roberto Saban, the LHC's head of hardware commissioning, said that in order to obtain high magnetic fields without consuming too much power, the magnets were required to be "superconducting".

This is the property, exhibited by some materials at very low temperatures, to channel electrical current with zero resistance and very little power loss.

Helium exhibits spectacular properties at 2.2 Kelvin - becoming "superfluid". This allows it to conduct heat very rapidly, making it an extremely efficient refrigerant.

[...] When the LHC is switched on it will operate at an energy of five trillion electron-volts. It will then be shut down for the winter, so that the magnets can be "trained" to handle a beam run at seven trillion electron-volts.

Shriek! Green Ray!

While docked and onboard the International Space Station, a STS-123 Endeavour crew member captures the glowing green beauty of the Aurora Borealis March 21, 2008. (NASA/Reuters)

When Particles Collide

Anyone else getting really psyched up for May this year, when somebody presses the ON switch on this beautiful behemoth? Below is the core of one of the six LDHC experiments, the ATLAS detector, highlighted in today's APOD. The more you read, the more awesome it becomes - click on the picture below for a bogglingly big version in astounding detail.

ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the LHC. It will investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter. - CERN ATLAS page.

Photo: Maximilien Brice, CERN

The last pieces of the puzzle
Like the last pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, the final components of the titanic Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN are slotting into place. At ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb the remaining large pieces of equipment are being carefully lowered into the caverns in preparation for the start up later this year of the most powerful particle accelerator ever, the LHC.
At CERN, 100 metres underground in the countryside outside Geneva, the LHC and its four big experiments are stuffed full of some of the most complex scientific apparatus in the world. On the surface the assembly hangers are beginning to look eerily empty, but below a vision of mind-boggling complexity is now almost fully formed.
[...] The next few weeks will be an emotional time at CERN. The product of some 15 years of work is coming to fruition and tensions are riding high as the equipment is tested. Soon, the first protons will be smashed together and the secrets of our universe will begin to unravel.

Three months to go! Cannae wait!

The Destroyer of Galaxies

NASA Announces Discovery of Assault by a Black Hole

A powerful jet from a supermassive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy, according to new data from NASA observatories. This never-before witnessed galactic violence may have a profound effect on planets in the jet's path and trigger a burst of star birth in its destructive wake.

This real-life scene, worthy of the most outlandish science fiction, is playing out in a faraway binary galaxy system known as 3C321. Two galaxies are in orbit around one another. A supermassive black hole at the core of the system's larger galaxy is spewing a jet in the direction of its smaller companion.

"We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy," says Dan Evans, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leader of the study. "This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling."

Jets from super massive black holes produce large amounts of radiation, especially high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal in large quantities. The combined effects of this radiation and particles traveling at almost the speed of light could severely damage the atmospheres of planets lying in the path of the jet. For example, protective layers of ozone in the upper atmosphere of planets could be destroyed.

The effect of the jet on the companion galaxy is likely to be substantial, because the galaxies in 3C321 are extremely close at a distance of only about 20,000 light years apart. They lie approximately the same distance as Earth is from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.