Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Hydrae

Not what I said at all. This is an important discovery and long term will probably mean a lot of advances. But my point was that given the long odds of the event that allowed them to see this it may be a while before we are able to find another one. Eventually we will get to the point where we will be able to measure and experiment with gravitational waves but probably not in the lifetime of anyone posting here currently.

I haven't put nearly the time into this I ought to, but by cursory observation our problem to now hasn't been identifying phenomena. It's been isolating the phenomena from ambient noise and verify it is what we think it is.

Think taking a concert recording and trying to isolate a single voice in the crowd. Well now we've identified and isolated a voice and it appears that it is saying what we expected it to say. Now we apply these methods to the whole back catalog of concert recordings.

[GloryDayz]

This is some very cool stuff. Very....

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by Hydrae

Not what I said at all. This is an important discovery and long term will probably mean a lot of advances. But my point was that given the long odds of the event that allowed them to see this it may be a while before we are able to find another one. Eventually we will get to the point where we will be able to measure and experiment with gravitational waves but probably not in the lifetime of anyone posting here currently.

Yes, it's not really feasible at this point to measure and experiment with gravitational waves. However, it does scientifically confirm a part of Einsteins theory of relativity.

This could cause us to better understand the theory or more importantly help us understand what Einstein got wrong or something that needs to be expanded on that he didn't in his theory. If space is not constant, that's a whole new field of possibilities.

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by GloryDayz

This is some very cool stuff. Very....

[Fish]

[Fish]

Just think of the porn streaming possibilities.....

Researchers Achieve Fastest Ever Data Transmission at Blistering 1.125 Tbps

A team of researchers has achieved the fastest ever transmission rate for digital information between a single transmitter and receiver, sending data optically at a frankly ridiculous 1.125 terabits per second.

The result, achieved by scientists at University College London, uses a series of signal processing techniques to achieve the speed. But first, the lead researcher, Dr Robert Maher, puts the rate into context in a press release:

For comparison this is almost 50,000 times greater than the average speed of a UK broadband connection of 24 megabits per second... To give an example, the data rate we have achieved would allow the entire HD Game of Thrones series to be downloaded within one second.

The set-up uses fifteen different channels to send the data, each of which contain an optical signal of different wavelength. Each channel is separately modulated, then they’re all combined into a single signal—what the researchers refer to as a “super channel.” At the other end, a receiver with incredibly high bandwidth makes sense of it all. Perhaps it’s best for Maher to explain this bit, as he does in the press release:

Using high-bandwidth super-receivers enables us to receive an entire super-channel in one go... However, using a single receiver varies the levels of performance of each optical sub-channel so we had to finely optimise both the modulation format and code rate for each optical channel individually to maximise the net information data rate. This ultimately resulted in us achieving the greatest information rate ever recorded using a single receiver.

[Fish]

Astronomers report results of first search for visible light associated with gravitational waves

Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts the emission of gravitational waves by massive celestial bodies moving though space-time. For the past century gravitational waves have eluded a direct detection, but now the LIGO Virgo Collaboration has announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, emitted by a merging pair of black holes. Catastrophic mergers of binary systems can also produce brilliant and explosive fireworks of light, so a team of astronomers, including at Harvard, sought evidence of such an visible afterglow. Although none was spotted, this work represents the first detailed search for a visible counterpart of a gravitational wave event. It also will serve as a model for similar event follow-up in the future.

"Our team has been anxiously waiting for the first detection of gravitational waves so that we can rapidly point the Dark Energy Camera at this location and search for the associated visible light," says Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the Principal Investigator of the follow-up team. "It's one of the most powerful instruments in the world for this purpose."

The joint detection of gravitational waves and light isn't easy, requiring large and wide-fields telescopes to rapidly scan the sky location of a gravitational wave source. The team used the 3 square-degree Dark Energy Camera (DECam) imager mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The search program is a collaboration between astronomers from multiple institutions in the United States, the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

The team rapidly observed the sky location of the first gravitational wave source discovered by LIGO within a day of its announced discovery on 2015 September 16.

"Planning and executing these observations immediately became our top priority. It was hectic, but also thrilling to be able to follow up on such a significant result," stated Marcelle Soares-Santos of Fermilab, a member of DES and lead author of the paper describing the search and results.

They faced a significant hurdle since the search area was so large: 700 square degrees of sky, or about 2,800 times the size of the full moon. The team observed large swaths of this region several times over a period of three weeks but did not detect any unusual bursts of visible light. They used this information to place a limit on the brightness that can serve as a benchmark for future attempts.

"This first attempt to detect visible light associated with gravitational waves was very challenging," states Berger, "but it paves the way to a whole new field of astrophysics."

The team plans to continue searches for visible light from future gravitational wave sources.

[Fish]

Amazing and a little scary....

A New Technique Makes GPS Accurate to an Inch

GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

In turn, that allows GPS systems in a mobile device to calculate position with an accuracy of just an inch. The research is published in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

The team hopes that the new GPS units could be used where accuracy is far more important that it was in the past. Autonomous vehicles is an obvious application, where knowing exactly where the vehicle is on the road is absolutely crucial—but it could be included in your phone, too.

[notorious]

Holy shit.


Britain's average speed is 24mb/s? Man are we getting hosed over here.

[Baby Lee]

Probably old news to others, but I'd never seen this. Though I do remember the ash falling in our yard > 1500 miles away a week or whatever later.

[listopencil]

For all of humanity’s achievements, one of the most important is how we communicate and pass down knowledge. From clay tablets to hard drives, long-term data storage ensures the flow of information from generation to generation. Now, a new data format could preserve that information for a virtually unlimited amount of time by encoding it into glass discs about the size of a coin.

The idea for this method, known as “five-dimensional storage,” has floated around for a few years since scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton first demonstrated it in a 2013 paper. Back then, they were only able to code a single 300 kilobyte text file into a glass disc. Three years later, the same scientists say that they believe they have refined the technique to the point where they can code about 360 terabytes of data onto a single disc. What's more, at room temperature the discs have a nearly unlimited lifespan. At high temperatures, 374 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact, the disc's creators estimate the lifespan to be 13.8 billion years—about as long as the universe has existed, Doug Bolton writes for The Independent. "We can encode anything," Aabid Patel, a postgraduate student who worked on the project tells James Vincent for The Verge. "We’re not limited to anything—just give us the file and we can print it [onto a disc]."

Here’s how it works: using a femtosecond laser, the scientists engrave the data into the glass disc’s structure. By firing intense laser pulses a quadrillionth of a second long, the information is carved into a series of miniscule dots. When the disc is read later, a laser interprets the information based off of the three-dimensional position of the dot in the disc, as well as its size and orientation—hence the name five-dimensional storage. In some ways, it’s similar to how data is encoded onto CDs, except in this case the information is stored directly in the disc’s structure instead of on its surface, Vincent writes. That’s why five-dimensional data discs can store information much more densely than on CDs. Glass is also much stronger and more chemically stable than the polycarbonate plastic most CDs and DVDs are made of, which is why the scientists believe they could potentially last for such a long time. “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations,” researcher Peter Kazansky said in a statement. “This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”

As a demonstration, Kazansky and his colleagues have encoded several major works onto glass discs, including the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, the King James Bible and Isaac Newton’s Opticks, Jamie Condliffe reports for Gizmodo. But while the researchers are optimistic about the possibilities for five-dimensional storage, the average person won’t be replacing their hard drives for glass discs any time soon. Not only is it hard to get consumers to switch over to a new data format, but femtosecond lasers are expensive and delicate tools that probably won’t become common outside of the lab for a while. On the other hand, developing a device to read the discs wouldn’t be too hard, which might make the discs more useful for institutions like libraries and museums, David Nield writes for ScienceAlert. "Who knows what's going to happen thousands of years down the line, no one can predict that," Patel tells Vincent. "But what we can guarantee is that we have the ability to store the culture, language, and essence of the human race in a simple piece of glass. For future civilizations—or whatever else is out there."



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...ihiRYW0Iq43.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[GloryDayz]

Originally Posted by listopencil

For all of humanity’s achievements, one of the most important is how we communicate and pass down knowledge. From clay tablets to hard drives, long-term data storage ensures the flow of information from generation to generation. Now, a new data format could preserve that information for a virtually unlimited amount of time by encoding it into glass discs about the size of a coin.

The idea for this method, known as “five-dimensional storage,” has floated around for a few years since scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton first demonstrated it in a 2013 paper. Back then, they were only able to code a single 300 kilobyte text file into a glass disc. Three years later, the same scientists say that they believe they have refined the technique to the point where they can code about 360 terabytes of data onto a single disc. What's more, at room temperature the discs have a nearly unlimited lifespan. At high temperatures, 374 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact, the disc's creators estimate the lifespan to be 13.8 billion years—about as long as the universe has existed, Doug Bolton writes for The Independent. "We can encode anything," Aabid Patel, a postgraduate student who worked on the project tells James Vincent for The Verge. "We’re not limited to anything—just give us the file and we can print it [onto a disc]."

Here’s how it works: using a femtosecond laser, the scientists engrave the data into the glass disc’s structure. By firing intense laser pulses a quadrillionth of a second long, the information is carved into a series of miniscule dots. When the disc is read later, a laser interprets the information based off of the three-dimensional position of the dot in the disc, as well as its size and orientation—hence the name five-dimensional storage. In some ways, it’s similar to how data is encoded onto CDs, except in this case the information is stored directly in the disc’s structure instead of on its surface, Vincent writes. That’s why five-dimensional data discs can store information much more densely than on CDs. Glass is also much stronger and more chemically stable than the polycarbonate plastic most CDs and DVDs are made of, which is why the scientists believe they could potentially last for such a long time. “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations,” researcher Peter Kazansky said in a statement. “This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”

As a demonstration, Kazansky and his colleagues have encoded several major works onto glass discs, including the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, the King James Bible and Isaac Newton’s Opticks, Jamie Condliffe reports for Gizmodo. But while the researchers are optimistic about the possibilities for five-dimensional storage, the average person won’t be replacing their hard drives for glass discs any time soon. Not only is it hard to get consumers to switch over to a new data format, but femtosecond lasers are expensive and delicate tools that probably won’t become common outside of the lab for a while. On the other hand, developing a device to read the discs wouldn’t be too hard, which might make the discs more useful for institutions like libraries and museums, David Nield writes for ScienceAlert. "Who knows what's going to happen thousands of years down the line, no one can predict that," Patel tells Vincent. "But what we can guarantee is that we have the ability to store the culture, language, and essence of the human race in a simple piece of glass. For future civilizations—or whatever else is out there."



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...ihiRYW0Iq43.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

FYP

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

Probably old news to others, but I'd never seen this. Though I do remember the ash falling in our yard > 1500 miles away a week or whatever later.

Dana Hunter did a series that spanned something like 3 years worth of articles on Scientific American; lots of interesting information there.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...unt-st-helens/

Just go to the bottom of the article and click 'next'. Like I said, it's essentially novel length when you combine all the articles she wrote over the years.

[BigRedChief]

Death of a Star. Hubble telescope.

[ThaVirus]

Is Dave Lane still around? I haven't been to DC in a while and haven't seen him in the Lounge.