If scientists can develop a way to keep squashed bugs from sticking to airliner wings, it could annually save an estimated 0.5% or $240 million is fuel costs.
BRA SCIENCE!
You know when a band is on stage and the guitarist plays the opening riff to “You Shook Me All Night Long” and the crowd chuckles and goes “woo”, then the guitarist repeats the riff, but for a laugh the drummer starts backing him up, and the crowd is more interested in this than most of their other songs they’ve played that night, and the bassist doesn’t know the song but is game to play it by ear, especially since the crowd is now starting to sing the lyrics, and now there’s no escaping the event horizon of the song and hopefully someone knows how to play the solo?
Anyway, that’s what this Wired article about the latest hyperloop development feels like. There’s a bunch of volunteers building a test track because if it works, that would be awesome and their stock options will be great. It’s all for a laugh, just a back-of-the-envelope sketch, but now some other companies are putting feelers out to seeing if this is feasible. And if it’s feasible, could it actually be practical. And if it’s practical, is it economical. And so on.
I’m not putting any skin in the game but I like following this story.
Haha, that was great!
I’ll post this here, as it is science related and this thread is checked by a few smart cookies. I need an answer to this, it is driving me nutty.
This is Thomas, you may recognise him:
Everybody’s favourite Useful Engine. Nothing crazy going on here (yet) - a child’s toy with magnetic ends so as to connect many together for a chugging good time. My 2 year old son is entralled with trains at the moment, so I am spending a little bit of time with old Thomas, Percy and co. So something is driving me nuts almost everyday and I can’t wrap my head around it or figure out what is happening.
Please, help explain this to me:
This breaks my 35 year old (admittedly rudimentary high-school level) knowledge of magnets. I’m not happy, in fact, I’m a little distressed. It’s like an itch in the back of my brain I can’t get rid of - and I have tried googling it. Figured they must use some fancy magnet or something, but I can’t seem to find anything that might explain it.
Now for reference, if I compare this behaviour to my son’s Chuggingtons (Brewster and Koko, if you’re interested), everything behaves as I would expect - one side attracts, the other repels - until I add Thomas to the mix, where he exhibits the same oddity even when mixed with another toy line. Thomas is apparently attracted to both N and S!
I figure there must be some funky manufacturing going on with Thomas’ magnet construction/layout, but I can’t grok it.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
Hmm, my son also has various Thomas trains, including a few of that type. I will check it out, since that doesn’t make a ton of sense. The only other type of thing I’ve seen that type of behavior is some magnetized materials, such as used for refrigerator magnets. Those don’t have the same kind of poles regular magnets do. Very interesting.
Ah, turns out fridge magnets are a Halbach Array.
Both ends of both train brands are attracted to a fridge magnet I just grabbed (though it is a shitty fridge magnet, so the attraction is weak).
Not sure that solves my question, but I may have just figured something out. If I run Thomas down the fridge magnet I can hear a clicking noise coming from the train’s chassis as the toy interacts with the overlapping fridge magnet fields on the face.
I am wondering if the magnets on either end of Thomas are just a cover for a smaller mechanism inside involving a bar magnet which is mounted on a pivot:
As two of these approach, the pivot allows opposing poles to move to a position where the N and S poles align (with the close matching poles also repelling their far similar partners - snapping and locking the mechanism into place). Also allows connection to any other normal magnet as one pole is free to rotate to best position.
Hmm, interesting thought but my initial feel is those are too small to allow that kind of mechanism. But perhaps not.
I think you got it right sharaleo with the halbach thing, looking at the shape of the Thomas magnet (vs the other train) they do look ‘manufactured’ more so than the typical convex metal magnet you usually see in these types of toy.
Or Thomas is possessed and you may need to quietly get rid of him (replacing him with a normal version)! ;)
It appears this is more or less the case:
Patent here:
It’s so awesome that you managed to find that!
Where does information go when it falls into a black hole?
Steven Hawking says it may be encoded into a 2D hologram onto the event horizon, and never actually enter the black hole at all… Or it might get ejected into a parallel universe through a WHITE HOLE.
Sucking Carbon from the Air to Build Stuff
A new method for taking carbon dioxide directly from the air and converting it to oxygen and nanoscale fibers made of carbon could lead to an inexpensive way to make a valuable building material—and may even serve as a weapon against climate change.
There was some good chat about that in the Climate thread:
Looks promising, hopefully it scales commercially!
Contacted via telephone Tuesday evening, Strominger said he felt confident that the information loss paradox was not irreconcilable. But he didn’t think everything was settled just yet.
He had heard Hawking say there would be a paper by the end of September. It had been the first he’d learned of it, he laughed, though he said the group did have a draft.
Whatever the team publishes, Strominger added, it’s unlikely to be the final word.
“There’s still much more work to be done to show that when something falls into a black hole that it leaves a record of exactly what it was. That is the part we still need to work out,” he said. "Stephen is very optimistic that it’s all going to work perfectly. But physics is a hard mistress. You have to get all the calculations to work perfectly and everything has to line up.
“Stephen is a smart guy,” Strominger continued. “Maybe he’s seeing all the way to the end. I’m certainly not.”
A really useful robot:
The Pluto System As Seen By New Horizons Spacecraft:
‘New human-like species discovered in S Africa’:
A new method for taking carbon dioxide directly from the air and converting it to oxygen and nanoscale fibers made of carbon could lead to an inexpensive way to make a valuable building material—and may even serve as a weapon against climate change.
Isn’t this what trees do??? :)