X-Ray

This is a story with a happy ending, or at least a happy middle, because it isn’t over yet. Right after it began I found myself floating face down in the water, drifting very slowly with the current, trying to stand but hardly able to move my legs. Trying to swim, but unable to move my arms. One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four. I waited for my dad, standing a few feet away, to notice something was wrong. But as a younger person I had often played dead in the water, daring someone to be alarmed. Finally I turned my head to the side, my lips above the surface for a split-…
"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell." -Edna St. Vincent Millay It was just a little while ago that we were all speculating wildly -- and optimistically -- about Comet ISON, as it plunged towards the Sun from its origins in the very, very distant Solar System. As its perihelion date (the moment of closest approach to the Sun) drew near, you may have noticed something interesting about photos of the comet: it's tail appeared to get longer and longer! Image credit &…
"According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity." -Stephen Hawking You may have encountered objects that are the same size as one another, but have very different masses. Image credit: Basic Science Supplies / © Accelerate Media. This is because they're made out of different elements. The higher you go in the periodic table, the larger and more massive your individual atoms are, and so…
"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core will eventually burn up, and when this happens, the core itself will begin to contract. When temperatures are finally high enough, the end product of hydrogen fusion -- Helium-4 -- will begin to fuse in the contracted core, and the Sun will expand into a Red Giant. Image credit: Northwestern…
The world of X-ray photography is a very interesting place and surprises are often found in every image. X-rays are similar to Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) in the sense that the collected images are only black and white. To take these image I use a scientific X-ray machine at a local company. The source is much finer than a medical device and the exposure has to be taken on film since the large digital detectors have not yet come down in price. Here an antique alarm clock is X-rayed. The film is then scanned into a high resolution digital file that has to be meticulously hand…
This has been all over my inbox since the press release came out yesterday; it's been on slashdot (thanks Brian), it's been at space.com, and there's a mediocre writeup on Universe Today. What's the big news? Black Holes don't destroy information after all! What is this whole information thing, anyway? Take a look at all the normal stuff in the Universe: photons, protons, neutrons, and electrons, for example. They have lots of different properties each. They move around one another, they get bound and unbound from one another, they exert forces on one another, etc. They're aware of one…