Je vais probablement ecouter les autres conferences suggerees par Sean Carroll, mais pour l’instant je n’ai ecoute que la premiere qui est vraiment interessante.

“Scientists at the University of Cambridge believe they have achieved the first accurate estimate of how much faster Earth’s core is rotating compared to the rest of the planet. The rate—about one degree every million years—is much slower than previously thought and arises from the complex dynamic between Earth’s inner and outer core, which generates Earth’s geomagnetic field. Without our magnetic field, Earth’s surface would not be protected from charged particles spewing from the Sun, and life would not be able to exist.”

Un degre par million d’annees!

Tres bien comme montage et jeu de camera!

Float Documentary Trailer from Phil Kibbe on Vimeo.

Boiling Water Freezes Instantly – Watch more Funny Videos

J’ai vecu pres de 40 ans au Quebec et je ne savais pas ca???? Comment est-ce possible???

The new research confirms the existence of a solid inner core and liquid outer layer, similar to Earth’s. Unlike Earth, the moon also has a partly melted, mushy layer over that.

Seismic Detection of the Lunar Core

Abstract:
Despite recent insight regarding the history and current state of the Moon from satellite sensing and analyses of limited Apollo-era seismic data, deficiencies remain in our understanding of the deep lunar interior. We reanalyzed Apollo lunar seismograms using array processing methods to search for the presence of reflected and converted seismic energy from the core. Our results suggest the presence of a solid inner and fluid outer core, overlain by a partially molten boundary layer. The relative sizes of the inner and outer core suggest that the core is ~60% liquid by volume. Based on phase diagrams of iron alloys and the presence of partial melt, the core likely contains less than 6 weight % of lighter alloying components, which is consistent with a volatile-depleted interior.

Five years have passed. Using the telemetry data, the two scientists created an extremely elaborate “finite element” 3-D computer model of each Pioneer spacecraft, in which the thermal properties of 100,000 positions on their surfaces are independently tracked for the duration of the 30-year mission.

But according to Toth, “You can take it to the bank that whatever remains of the anomaly after accounting for that thermal acceleration, it will at most be much less than the canonical value of 8.74 x 10-10 m/s2, and then, mind you, all those wonderful numerical coincidences people talk about are destroyed.”

A water droplet make impact on water, when viewing at 10,000 frames per second, you can see the droplet deposit half of itself into the pool it hits, then bounce up, then repeat until it’s gone.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

First of all, that’s five standard deviations off of the expected value. On a practical level, that means that of all the variability in every single measurement made of the size of the proton in the history of time, this new measurement is so damned far off that the guys doing the experiment didn’t even notice it the first two times (2003 and 2007) they measured it.

Anyhow, something is amiss. Most likely, this is not the sign that everything we know is wrong, or that the powerful equations of quantum mechanics are all wrong (as evidenced by the 20th century). Rather, this is probably a sign of some new interaction between muons and protons we haven’t seen before. That means new particles, and new physics. Wahoo!

Note: I can’t link you directly to the report from Nature, because you can’t access the information because we live in a stupid, fucked up world.

Hehe. J’avoue.

P.S. Assez incroyable que les gifs animes soient encore utilises en 2010

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. This is an HD transfer from the 16mm original. Even more excellent footage is available on our DVDs at our website at http://www.spacecraftfilms.com

The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time. Narration is provided by Mark Gray (me), Executive Producer for Spacecraft Films.

The point is pretty simple: back when you thought energy was conserved, there was a reason why you thought that, namely time-translation invariance. A fancy way of saying “the background on which particles and forces evolve, as well as the dynamical rules governing their motions, are fixed, not changing with time.” But in general relativity that’s simply no longer true. Einstein tells us that space and time are dynamical, and in particular that they can evolve with time. When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.