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.
For the first time ever, hardware designed on the ground has been emailed to space to meet the needs of an astronaut. From a computer in California, Mike Chen of Made In Space and colleagues just 3D-printed a ratcheting socket wrench on the International Space Station. “We had overheard ISS Commander Barry Wilmore (who goes by “Butch”) mention over the radio that he needed one,” Chen writes in Medium this week. So they designed one and sent it up.
“The socket wrench we just manufactured is the first object we designed on the ground and sent digitally to space, on the fly,” he adds. It’s a lot faster to send data wirelessly on demand than to wait for a physical object to arrive via rockets, which can take months or even years.
The team started by designing the tool on a computer, then converting it into a 3D-printer-ready format. That’s then sent to NASA, which transmits the wrench to the space station. Once the code is received by the 3D printer, the wrench is manufactured: Plastic filament is heated and extruded layer by layer. The ISS tweeted this photo earlier this week, and you can see more pictures of the very cool wrench-printing process here.
Located on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Made In Space built the first 3D printer for microgravity, and it was launched to the ISS in September. Within a month, the astronauts 3D-printed their first object: a replacement faceplate for the printer’s casing (pictured below).
“We chose this part to print first because, after all, if we are going to have 3-D printers make spare and replacement parts for critical items in space, we have to be able to make spare parts for the printers,” NASA’s Niki Werkheiser said in a news release back in November. “If a printer is critical for explorers, it must be capable of replicating its own parts, so that it can keep working during longer journeys to places like Mars or an asteroid. Ultimately, one day, a printer may even be able to print another printer.”
Since then, another 20 objects have also printed -- though these were designed before the printer left Earth and the files were delivered on a cargo supply flight. These first prints will be brought back down in 2015 for examination. Researchers will be comparing them to identical objects manufactured on the ground to study the effects of microgravity on the 3D-printing process. [Reply]
Despite a worldwide obsession with diets and fitness regimes, many health professionals cannot correctly answer the question of where body fat goes when people lose weight, a UNSW Australia study shows.
The most common misconception among doctors, dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat.
"There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.
"The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter.
In their paper, published in the British Medical Journal today, the authors show that losing 10 kilograms of fat requires 29 kilograms of oxygen to be inhaled and that this metabolic process produces 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water.
Mr Meerman became interested in the biochemistry of weight loss through personal experience.
"I lost 15 kilograms in 2013 and simply wanted to know where those kilograms were going. After a self-directed, crash course in biochemistry, I stumbled onto this amazing result," he says.
"With a worldwide obesity crisis occurring, we should all know the answer to the simple question of where the fat goes. The fact that almost nobody could answer it took me by surprise, but it was only when I showed Andrew my calculations that we both realised how poorly this topic is being taught."
The authors met when Mr Meerman interviewed Professor Brown in a story about the science of weight loss for the Catalyst science program on ABC TV in March this year.
"Ruben's novel approach to the biochemistry of weight loss was to trace every atom in the fat being lost and, as far as I am aware, his results are completely new to the field," says Professor Brown.
"He has also exposed a completely unexpected black hole in the understanding of weight loss amongst the general public and health professionals alike." If you follow the atoms in 10 kilograms of fat as they are 'lost', 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide through the lungs. The remaining 1.6 kilograms becomes water, which may be excreted in urine, faeces, sweat, breath, tears and other bodily fluids, the authors report.
"None of this is obvious to people because the carbon dioxide gas we exhale is invisible," says Mr Meerman.
More than 50 per cent of the 150 doctors, dieticians and personal trainers who were surveyed thought the fat was converted to energy or heat.
"This violates the Law of Conservation of Mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the energy in/energy out mantra surrounding weight loss," says Mr Meerman.
Some respondents thought the metabolites of fat were excreted in faeces or converted to muscle.
"The misconceptions we have encountered reveal surprising unfamiliarity about basic aspects of how the human body works," the authors say.
One of the most frequently asked questions the authors have encountered is whether simply breathing more can cause weight loss. The answer is no. Breathing more than required by a person's metabolic rate leads to hyperventilation, which can result in dizziness, palpitations and loss of consciousness.
The second most frequently asked question is whether weight loss can cause global warming.
"This reveals troubling misconceptions about global warming which is caused by unlocking the ancient carbon atoms trapped underground in fossilised organisms. The carbon atoms human beings exhale are returning to the atmosphere after just a few months or years trapped in food that was made by a plant," says Mr Meerman, who also presents the science of climate change in high schools around Australia.
Mr Meerman and Professor Brown recommend that these basic concepts be included in secondary school curricula and university biochemistry courses to correct widespread misconceptions about weight loss among lay people and health professionals.
Doctors who got this wrong probably aren't fit to practice medicine. This is sophomore level biochemistry/biology/nutrition. Yeah they may have forgotten some stuff along the way, but clearly they have lost the scientific basis of the medicine they are supposed to be practicing. [Reply]
No one is about to claim that quantum physics is now easy to understand, but maybe it's not quite as devilishly complicated as we thought. New research suggests that two of the quantum world's most mysterious features--the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality--are simply two sides of a single coin.
"The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you consider them as questions about what information you can gain about a system," Dr. Stephanie Wehner, an associate professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and one of the scientists behind the research, said in a written statement. "Our result highlights the power of thinking about physics from the perspective of information."
Wave-particle duality is the idea that elementary particles can exhibit wave-like behavior--for example, as seen in the classic double-slit experiment. The uncertainty principle holds that it's impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.
The proposed unification of the two features may bring new advances in cryptography, Dr. Patrick Coles, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing in Canada and one of Wehner's collaborators, told The Huffington Post in an email. For example, he said, it could point the way to provide "perfectly secure" online credit card transactions.
In addition, the advance promises to make it easier for physics students to make sense of a field that is notoriously difficult to understand. Instead of having to learn two separate phenomena, Coles said, "they can just learn the uncertainty principle and then deduce the competition between wave and particle behavior as a consequence of the uncertainty principle."
But perhaps most significant is that the unification may change the way scientists see the physical world--as happened when 19th Century scientists discovered that electricity and magnetism aren't distinct forces but just different manifestations of a single force we now call electromagnetism.
"Although our work is not at that level of impact, our work does affect how physicists view the structure of quantum theory," Coles said in the email. "Most physicists believe that quantum theory applies to every object around us, including ourselves. Even though it is weird to think of the particles inside us sometimes behaving like waves, that is the strange truth."
Coles said the key to the new research was to use mathematics to translate the language of wave and particle behavior into the language of uncertainty. He offered the following analogy:
"When we came across the literature on wave-particle duality, it was like trying to read hieroglyphics. The big breakthrough that we made was to discover a Rosetta Stone, or construct a Rosetta Stone, that allowed us to translate these hieroglyphics into our native tongue... it was especially fun because no one had ever translated these hieroglyphics before."
What do other physicists make of the research?
Dr. Robert W. Spekkens, a physicist on the faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, called it "a very nice result" and "significant," adding that "the more we understand the connections between different quantum phenomena, the better our chances of making sense of the foundations of quantum theory." [Reply]
I just love these Hubble telescope pics http://www.iflscience.com/space/hubb...llars-creation
Almost 20 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope took a breathtaking image that would soon become one of the most famous pictures in astronomy. That image was of the iconic Pillars of Creation; towering, ghost-like clouds of gas and dust, bathed in the blazing light from a cluster of newborn stars within the Eagle Nebula, or Messier 16. Now, in honor of the instrument’s 25th year in orbit, astronomers have revisited this sublime celestial landscape and captured its evocative features in an unimaginable level of detail.
