What does it take to create a tiny, man-made star that will trigger a thermonuclear reaction inside of a laboratory?
How about a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the entire United States into one-billionth of a second.
Not impressive enough for you?
Then how about this: The resulting explosion should produce 10 times the amount of energy used to create it, or more than 10,000 times the electric generating power of the United States!
The structure that will house this experiment, which is located in the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, covers an area roughly the size of three football fields, and the infrared laser that will cause the explosion will travel through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers in order to create a beam that will be 10 billion (yes, with a b) times more powerful than a standard household light bulb.
Let’s just hope they’ve got some bright minds working on this project, because otherwise we could bite off more than we can chew with our own man-made star.
I was trying to explain to someone how incredible I think the fact that we landed the Phoenix rover on the surface of Mars is, and was unfortunately coming up short for words.
However, I think this picture does it pretty good justice:
Not much to see, eh?
Well, think about this: What you’re seeing is a photo of the Phoenix rover as it descends to the surface of Mars under its own parachute. The photo was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera as it circles a planet that is tens to hundreds of millions of miles away. As it circles that planet, it’s tracking and photographing a man made object that is gracefully touching down onto the surface of that planet under the guide of its own parachute. Both objects are acting remotely and robotically, and then sending their data back to earth at the speed of light (and it still takes 15 minutes to get here). In short: We created a remote controlled vehicle, shot it millions of miles into the sky, landed it on a precise location on another planet, and then programmed it to run its own scientific experiments and then report back to us with the results.
(What I like most about the Phoenix Twitter is that it’s probably one of the smartest people in the world (a NASA scientist) that has to dumb down what he’s saying and then put it into the third person so that the rest of us can understand what’s going on. Somewhere there’s a guy sitting in a room that’s hating life and wondering when he can leave his Twitter post and get back to playing with the world’s coolest remote control car.)
Urban Monarch and Modern Drunkard put together two great guides about how to score free drinks when you go out. Put down the credit card, and slowly step away.
Artist Felix Beck created a non-visual graffiti project called Soundbombs, “innocuous-looking 6-inch plastic shells that broadcast short clips (lines from Shakespeare, flatulence, or anything else you record) to unwitting passersby”. He doesn’t sell them, but instead takes applications, and prospective users must tell him where they will use it and how much they’re willing to pay. Get loud.
Sodium Laurel Sulfate, and ingredient in toothpaste, blocks sweet sensors on your tongue, which explains why orange juice tastes so bad after you brush.
Stuart Haygarth created the Tide Chandelier out of man made debris that washed up along a stretch of the Kent coastline. “The sphere is an analogy for the moon which effects the tides which in turn wash up the debris”.
