Fringy, science-stuff, maybe fact or fiction?

Tesla

Ignore the company that made this video, but the facts contained are true.

 

Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia.^[9] His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10), 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read.^[10] His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier.

Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica).^[11]:3 His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years.^[12]

Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz.^[13][14] However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures.^[15] Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year.^[16][17] According to a college roommate, he did not graduate.^[18]

In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term.^[19]

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory.^[20] Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood.^[20]

The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960).

Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories and new age occultism. Contemporary researchers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century"^[7] and "the patron saint of modern electricity."^[8]

Tesla is honoured in both Croatia and Serbia, as well as his adopted home, the United States.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:51 | link | comments

Subject: If you have a dog...read this and please send it on.
> Written by:
> Laurinda Morris, DVM
> Danville Veterinary Clinic
> Danville , Ohio
>
> This week I had the first case in history of raisin toxicity ever seen at
> MedVet. My patient was a 56-pound, 5 yr old male neutered lab mix that
> ate
> half
> a canister of raisins sometime between 7:30 AM and 4:30 PM on Tuesday. He
> started with vomiting, diarrhea and shaking about 1 AM on Wednesday but
> the
> owner didn't call my emergency service until 7 AM.
>
> I had heard somewhere about raisins AND grapes causing acute Renal
> failure
> but hadn't seen any formal paper on the subject. We had her bring the
> dog
> in
> immediately. In the meantime, I called the ER service at MedVet, and the
> doctor there was like me - had heard something about it, but.... Anyway,
> we
> contac
> ted the ASPCA National Animal Poison Control Center and they said to give
> IV
> fluids at 1 ½ times maintenance and watch the kidney values for the next
> 48-72 hours.
>
> The dog's BUN (blood urea nitrogen level) was already at 32 (normal less
> than 27) and creatinine over 5 (1.9 is the high end of normal). Both are
> monitors of kidney
> function in the bloodstream. We placed an IV catheter and started the
> fluids. Rechecked the renal values at 5 PM and the BUN was over 40 and
> creatinine
> over 7 with no urine production after a liter of fluids. At the point I
> felt
> the dog was in acute renal failure and sent him on to MedVet for a
> urinary
> catheter to monitor urine output overnight as well as overnight care.
>
> He started vomiting again overnight at MedVet and his renal values have
> continued to increase daily. He produced urine when given lasix as a
> diuretic. He
> was on 3 different anti-vomiting medications and they still couldn't
> control
> his vomiting. Today his urine output decreased again, his BUN was over
> 120,
> his creatinine was at 10, his phosphorus was very elevated and his blood
> pressure, which had been staying around 150, skyrocketed to 220.. He
> continued to
> vomit and the owners elected to
> euthanize.
>
> This is a very sad case - great dog, great owners who had no idea raisins
> could be a toxin. Please alert everyone you know who has a dog of this
> very
> serious risk. Poison control said as few as 7 raisins or grapes could be
> toxic.
> Many people I know give their dogs grapes or raisins as treats including
> our
> ex-handler's. Any exposure should give rise to immediate concern.
>
> Laurinda Morris, DVM
> Danville Veterinary Clinic
> Danville , Ohio
>
> Even if you don't have a dog, you might have friends who do. This is
> worth
> passing on to them.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 05:19 | link | comments

Dust and the Helix Nebula

 

Dust makes this cosmic eye look red. This eerie Spitzer Space Telescope image shows infrared radiation from the well-studied Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), which is a mere 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. The two light-year diameter shroud of dust and gas around a central white dwarf has long been considered an excellent example of a planetary nebula, representing the final stages in the evolution of a sun-like star.

Spitzer data show the nebula's central star is itself immersed in a surprisingly bright infrared glow. Models suggest the glow is produced by a dust debris disk. Even though the nebular material was ejected from the star many thousands of years ago, the close-in dust could be generated by collisions in a reservoir of objects analogous to our own solar system's Kuiper Belt or cometary Oort cloud. Formed in the distant planetary system, the comet-like bodies have otherwise survived even the dramatic late stages of the star's evolution.

Image credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Kate Su (Steward Obs, U. Arizona) et al.


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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 00:55 | link | comments (1)

Extremely strange but cool jumping spider mating behaviour

A male jumping spider (Salticidae) is trying very very hard to excite a female jumping spider. He taps, he scrapes, he turns and twists...he stops!...quite funky!
Make sure you turn up the volume on your speakers...the sounds are half the act!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 23:44 | link | comments (1)

"Pro-Green" campaigning democrats can kiss my ass!

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 01:16 | link | comments (1)

Sculpting a Galaxy

This glowing region reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds -- streams of charged particles ejected by the Trapezium stars -- collide with material in the Orion Nebula.

This crisp image is part of a tapestry of star formation that varies from jets fired by stars still embedded in their dust and gas cocoons to disks of material encircling young stars that could be the building blocks of future solar systems, taken from a mosaic containing a billion pixels by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The resulting image uncovered thousands of stars never seen before in visible light. Some are merely one-hundredth the brightness of previously viewed Orion stars.

Among the stars Hubble spotted for the first time in visible light in Orion were young brown dwarfs and a small population of possible binary brown dwarfs (two brown dwarfs orbiting each other). Brown dwarfs are so-called "failed stars." These cool objects are too small to be ordinary stars, because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our sun does. Comparing the characteristics of newborn stars and brown dwarfs in their natal environment provides unique information about how they form.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team


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The Triangulum Galaxy

 

The spiral galaxy M33 also is called the Triangulum Galaxy for the constellation in which it resides. About four times smaller (in radius) than our Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), it is much larger than the many of the local dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The galaxy's proximity to M31 causes it to be thought by some to be a satellite galaxy of this more massive galaxy.

In the above picture, visible light is shown in red and ultraviolet light superposed in blue. Stars in M33 are the most distant ever to be studied spectroscopically.

Image credit: NASA, UIT


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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 10:34 | link | comments (1)

My Tears Too:

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 20:01 | link | comments

Today in History:

Jul 19 1952

During a series of UFO sightings in Washington, D.C. occurring over July 13-29, unidentified objects are picked up on D.C.'s National Airport radar system. Sightings in the region are so extensive the Air Force is prompted to hold a press conference. Conveniently, these are all "radar mirages" resulting from "temperature inversions."

Jul 19 1957

Michael Landon stars in his first film, I Was a Teenage Werewolf. He must have been so proud.

Jul 19 1966

Frank Sinatra marries Mia Farrow in Las Vegas. Ava Gardner's famous comment on the union: "Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a little boy!"

Jul 19 1692

Five Salem witches are hanged for the crime of witchcraft, based primarily on the accusations of little girls who were bewitched. Eventually, the village executes a total of 20 witches.

Jul 19 1991

Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson rapes Desiree Washington, one of the Miss Black America contestants, after a pageant rehearsal. The illicit nookie lands Tyson in prison for three years.

Jul 19 1993

President Clinton unveils the universally-unpopular "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule. One person summarizes the policy: "the military now permits gays to remain in the military, provided they don't act like fairies."

 

 

From rotten.com

 

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 19:52 | link | comments (1)

Waterspout of about 20 metres across caught on cam

A waterspout of about 20 metres across could be seen along the eastern side of the small island of Texel (Netherlands)on July the 9th.
Water spouts are funnel-shaped formations caused by rapidly rotating air movements that are sometimes visible under storm clouds at sea.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 06:42 | link | comments

This is exactly, to the letter, what I've been doing in my lab this semester. Of course the unkown molecules given to me are a bit more complicated, and I actually run the machinery to obtain the spectra, never the less, this shows pretty much the thought process behing molecular (structure) detemination. I have to go a bit deeper because sometimes I get a mixture of isomeric molecules. Then I have to calculate the integration of the various peaks, the spin-spin coupling constants between the protons of interest. By the was IR in the video mean Infra Red spectroscopy, NMR is proton nuclear magnetice resonance spectroscopy and C-13 is carbon-13 (Carbon's naturally occuring isotope).

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:38 | link | comments

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:21 | link | comments

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:59 | link | comments (1)

Stellar Babies

Infant stars glow gloriously in this infrared image of the Serpens Constellation's star-forming region, located approximately 8484 light-years away.

Glowing pink baby stars are embedded in the cosmic cloud of gas and dust that collapsed to create them. Dusty disks of cosmic debris that may eventually form planets surround the stars in this image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona


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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:06 | link | comments (2)

This is what I've been doing the last few weeks (Yes, that's why I haven't posted regurlarly.) I'm putting this up so I can remember this part of my chemical career.

Nuclear magnetic resonance

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon based upon the quantum mechanical magnetic properties of an atom's nucleus. NMR also commonly refers to a family of scientific methods that exploit nuclear magnetic resonance to study molecules.

All nuclei that contain odd numbers of protons or neutrons have an intrinsic magnetic moment and angular momentum. The most commonly measured nuclei are hydrogen-1 (the most receptive isotope at natural abundance) and carbon-13, although nuclei from isotopes of many other elements can also be observed.

NMR studies magnetic nuclei by aligning them with a very powerful external magnetic field and perturbing this alignment using an electromagnetic field. The resulting response to the external perturbing electromagnetic field is the phenomenon that is exploited in NMR spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging.

 

Discovery

Nuclear magnetic resonance was first described and measured in molecular beams by Isidor Rabi in 1938.^[1] Eight years later, in 1946, Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell refined the technique for use on liquids and solids, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1952.

Purcell had worked on the development and application of RADAR during World War II at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory. His work during that project on the production and detection of radiofrequency energy, and on the absorption of such energy by matter, preceded his discovery of NMR.

They noticed that magnetic nuclei, like ¹H and ³¹P, could absorb RF energy when placed in a magnetic field of a strength specific to the identity of the nuclei. When this absorption occurs, the nucleus is described as being in resonance. Interestingly, for analytical scientists, different atoms within a molecule resonate at different frequencies at a given field strength. The observation of the resonance frequencies of a molecule allows a user to discover structural information about the molecule.

The development of nuclear magnetic resonance as a technique of analytical chemistry and biochemistry parallels the development of electromagnetic technology and its introduction into civilian use.

 

Nuclear spin and magnets

The elementary particles, neutrons and protons, composing an atomic nucleus, have the intrinsic quantum mechanical property of spin. The overall spin of the nucleus is determined by the spin quantum number I. If the number of both the protons and neutrons in a given isotope are even then I = 0, i.e. there is no overall spin; just as electrons pair up in atomic orbitals, so even numbers of protons and neutrons (which are also spin ½ particles and hence fermions) pair up giving zero overall spin. In other cases, however, the overall spin is non-zero. For example ²⁷Al has an overall spin I = 5/2.

A non-zero spin is associated with a non-zero magnetic moment, μ, via

where the proportionality constant, γ, is the magnetogyric ratio. It is this magnetic moment that is exploited in NMR.

Electron spin resonance is a related technique which exploits the spin of electrons instead of nuclei. The basic principles are otherwise similar.

Resonance

Resonant absorption will occur when electromagnetic radiation of the correct frequency to match this energy difference is applied. The energy of a photon is E = hν, where ν is its frequency. Hence absorption will occur when

These frequencies typically correspond to the radio frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It is this resonant absorption that is detected in NMR.

 Nuclear shielding

It might appear from the above that all nuclei of the same nuclide (and hence the same γ) would resonate at the same frequency. This is not the case. The most important perturbation of the NMR frequency for applications of NMR is the 'shielding' effect of the surrounding electrons. In general, this electronic shielding reduces the magnetic field at the nucleus (which is what determines the NMR frequency). As a result the energy gap is reduced, and the frequency required to achieve resonance is also reduced. This shift of the NMR frequency due to the chemical environment is called the chemical shift, and it explains why NMR is a direct probe of chemical structure.

Unless the local symmetry is particularly high, the shielding effect depends on the orientation of the molecule with respect to the external field. In solid-state NMR, magic angle spinning is required to average out this orientation dependence. This is unnecessary in conventional NMR of molecules in solution since rapid molecular tumbling averages out the anisotropic component of the chemical shift.

NMR spectroscopy

NMR spectroscopy is one of the principal techniques used to obtain physical, chemical, electronic and structural information about molecules. It is a powerful technique that can provide detailed information on the topology, dynamics and three-dimensional structure of molecules in solution and the solid state. Also, nuclear magnetic resonance is one of the techniques that has been used to build elementary quantum computers.

Chemistry

By studying the peaks of nuclear magnetic resonance spectra, skilled chemists can determine the structure of many compounds. It can be a very selective technique, distinguishing among many atoms within a molecule or collection of molecules of the same type but which differ only in terms of their local chemical environment.

By studying T₂* information a chemist can determine the identity of a compound by comparing the observed nuclear precession frequencies to known frequencies. Further structural data can be elucidated by observing spin-spin coupling, a process by which the precession frequency of a nucleus can be influenced by the magnetization transfer from nearby nuclei.

T₂ information can give information about dynamics and molecular motion.

Because the nuclear magnetic resonance timescale is rather slow, compared to other spectroscopic methods, changing the temperature of a T₂* experiment can also give information about fast reactions, such as the Cope rearrangement or about structural dynamics, such as ring-flipping in cyclohexane.

A relatively recent example of nuclear magnetic resonance being used in the determination of a structure is that of buckminsterfullerene. This now famous form of carbon has 60 carbon atoms forming a sphere. The carbon atoms are all in identical environments and so should see the same internal H field. Unfortunately, buckminsterfullerene contains no hydrogen and so ¹³C nuclear magnetic resonance has to be used. ¹³C spectra are more difficult to obtain because carbon-13 is not the common isotope of carbon (unlike hydrogen, where ¹H is the common isotope). However, in 1990 the spectrum was obtained by R. Taylor and co-workers at the University of Sussex and was found to contain a single peak, confirming the unusual structure of C_60.

 

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:31 | link | comments (2)

Bubble Nebula

 

This Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an expanding shell of glowing gas surrounding a hot, massive star in our Milky Way Galaxy, the shell of which is being shaped by strong stellar winds of material and radiation produced by the bright star at the left, which is 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun.

These fierce winds are sculpting the surrounding material -- composed of gas and dust -- into the curved shape that astronomers have dubbed it the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The nebula is 10 light-years across, more than twice the distance from Earth to the nearest star. Only part of the bubble is visible in this image. The glowing gas in the lower right-hand corner is a dense region of material that is getting blasted by radiation from the nebula's massive star. The radiation is eating into the gas, creating finger-like features. This interaction also heats up the gas, causing it to glow.

Image credit: NASA


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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:27 | link | comments

What's left of Django's genes:

 

 

 

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 19:52 | link | comments

Lyre Bird - Imitating Sounds - David Attenborough

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:42 | link | comments

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 15:20 | link | comments

Me too!

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 19:18 | link | comments

Possibly the most important issue facing our western culture.

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 00:49 | link | comments