If Saturn Was Close To Earth

Please subscribe, like, comment, and donate! Next (and last) episode April 15, 2017. Stay tuned for Bloopers from this episode on April 8, 2017. Starring: Candice Lola Directed by Rebecca Berger Produced by Rebecca Berger and Candice Lola Written by Candice Lola Editing, Color, Sound Design by Rebecca Berger Animation by Rachael K McDonald Links: Music: http://ift.tt/1JICaNj and http://ift.tt/2lquxdO http://ift.tt/2lINlQJ http://ift.tt/2lqtjzr http://ift.tt/2lIL08B http://ift.tt/2lqvuCQ (Donations are always welcome!) http://ift.tt/2lITyw7 http://ift.tt/2lqvQJO

Magnetic hard drives go atomic

Physicists demonstrate the first single-atom magnetic storage.

Chop a magnet in two, and it becomes two smaller magnets. Slice again to make four. But the smaller magnets get, the more unstable they become; their magnetic fields tend to flip polarity from one moment to the next. Now, however, physicists have managed to create a stable magnet from a single atom.

The team, who published their work in Nature on 8 March1, used their single-atom magnets to make an atomic hard drive. The rewritable device, made from 2 such magnets, is able to store just 2 bits of data, but scaled-up systems could increase hard-drive storage density by 1,000 times, says Fabian Natterer, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, and author of the paper.

“It’s a landmark achievement,” says Sander Otte, a physicist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Finally, magnetic stability has been demonstrated undeniably in a single atom.”

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Cloud Chambers: Visualizing Radiation 

The cloud chamber, also known as the Wilson chamber, is a particle detector used for detecting ionizing radiation.

In its most basic form, a cloud chamber is a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapor of water or alcohol. When a charged particle (for example, an alpha or beta particle) interacts with the mixture, the fluid is ionized. The resulting ions act as condensation nuclei, around which a mist will form (because the mixture is on the point of condensation). 

The high energies of alpha and beta particles mean that a trail is left, due to many ions being produced along the path of the charged particle. These tracks have distinctive shapes, for example, an alpha particle’s track is broad and shows more evidence of deflection by collisions, while an electron’s is thinner and straight. -(x)

More science and gifs on my blog: rudescience Gif made from: This video by The Royal Institution References: (x), (x). 

8 panel mosaic of the Full Moon about an hour after the partial eclipse ended Visit http://spaceviewsandbeyond.blogspot.com/2017/02/8-panel-mosaic-of-full-moon-about-hour.html for more space pics

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The Science Has Spoken: Pluto Will Never Be A Planet Again

“What’s perhaps most remarkable is that we can make a simple, mathematical relationship between a world’s mass and its orbital distance that can be scaled and applied to any star. If you’re above these lines, you’re a planet; if you’re below it, you’re not. Note that even the most massive dwarf planets would have to be closer to the Sun than Mercury is to reach planetary status. Note by how fantastically much each of our eight planets meets these criteria… and by how much all others miss it. And note that if you replaced the Earth with the Moon, it would barely make it as a planet.”

It was a harsh lesson in astronomy for all of us in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union released their official definition of a planet. While the innermost eight planets made the cut, Pluto did not. But given the discovery of large numbers of worlds in the Kuiper belt and beyond our Solar System, it became clear that we needed something even more than what the IAU gave us. We needed a way to look at any orbiting worlds around any star and determine whether they met a set of objective criteria for reaching planetary status. Recently, Alan Stern spoke up and introduced a geophysical definition of a planet, which would admit more than 100 members in our Solar System alone. But how does this stand up to what astronomers need to know?

As it turns out, not very well. But the IAU definition needs improving, too, and modern science is more than up to the challenge. See who does and doesn’t make the cut into true planetary status, and whether Planet Nine – if real – will make it, too!

Did you hear about the wooden statue that crashed a train

It was a bad conductor

Happy Valentine’s day! 

From Pluto, with love!

http://www.space.com/35262-pluto-heart-photos-nasa-gallery.html

Iapetus, moon of Saturn captured by the Cassini spacecraft in 2007

Image credit: NASA / JPL

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