Ch.11 power point

Kyle goble

Black holes have a bad rap. They’re known for sucking in everything around them, but matter can actually break away from their grasp, in the form of jets. Although astronomers have been aware of this for half a century, they didn’t know what exactly the jets were made of until last fall. After observing a black hole in the Milky Way estimated to be 10 times the mass of our sun, an international team of astrophysicists discovered that the jets are composed primarily of electrons and atomic nuclei, including those from heavy metals, such as iron and nickel. With heavier nuclei, the jets carry large amounts of mass and energy from the black hole into space. In some cases, they’re so powerful that they can create shock waves that collapse surrounding gas clouds—triggering the birth of new stars.

This spring, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor will become home to the first permanent waterwheel-powered trash interceptor. With energy from the Jones Falls River current and solar panels, the floating device sweeps litter up a conveyor belt and straight into a Dumpster for easy disposal.

The Parts

A) Booms direct trash onto the conveyor

B) Rake system breaks up the intertwined debris

C) Conveyor belt lifts the trash out of the water

D) Dumpster collects the waste for later disposal

E) Waterwheel turns the conveyor belt

F) Solar panel array provides supplemental power

Source: John Kellett of Clearwater Mills, LLC and Ziger/Snead Architects

This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.

The oldest cheese has been found, and if you happen to be eating cheese right now, I suggest you pause, because this next sentence is gross: The cheese, from 1615 BC, was discovered in clumps on the necks and chests of mummies.

USA Today reports that the cheese aficionados were a Bronze Age people who buried their own under wood boats wrapped tightly with cowhide, creating a vacuum-packed effect better than any Ziplock bag. The mummies were pulled out of Small River Cemetery Number 5 located in the expansive Taklamakan Desert of northwestern China. Dry desert air and salty soil preserved the cheese and kept it from decaying.

The cheese was made by combining milk with a starter mixture made up of bacteria and yeast. This process differs from the present-day routine of using rennet, a substance from the guts of calf, lamb, or kid, to make cheese.

Now the real question: Which crackers and wine do we get?

• Commercial use of drones is a legal gray area. Model airplanes, radio controlled and flown within sight of the pilots, are legal, and have been for decades. In recent years, advances in video streaming technology, as well as reduced costs for aviation components, have enabled drones that can do far more than the model airplanes of the 20th century. One change in particular is that drones can now be piloted through first-person video, meaning the drone is neither out of sight nor within sight of pilot. And because the drone is recording video, the mere act of flying a drone includes producing film, which, before this latest ruling, was legal if kept by the pilot but illegal if sold.

• It's instead a photo of Susan Marie Frontczak, snapped by Paul Schroder in 2001. Frontczak makes a living portraying the famous scientist on stage, and has done so for 13 years, in some 350 performances across 30 U.S. states and nine countries, she told Popular Science. The image (of Frontczak) can be found on "Marie Curie"-themed stamps in Mali, the Republic of Togo, Zambia, and the Republic of Guinea.

• Frontczak said she had mixed feelings about the stamps. "I find it a compliment that it was similar enough that they were convinced," Frontczak told Physics Buzz. "There's some essence [of her] that got captured." But she isn't necessarily happy about her likeness being used without permission.

• Seventy-four years ago, Russia accomplished what no country had before, or has since—it sent armed ground robots into battle. These remote-controlled Teletanks took the field during one of WWII’s earliest and most obscure clashes, as Soviet forces pushed into Eastern Finland for roughly three and a half months, from 1939 to 1940. The Finns, by all accounts, were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, with exponentially fewer aircraft and tanks. But the Winter War, as it was later called (it began in late November, and ended in mid-March), wasn’t a swift, one-sided victory. As the more experienced Finnish troops dug in their heels, Russian advancement was proving slow and costly. So the Red Army sent in the robots.

• Specifically, the Soviets deployed two battalions of Teletanks, most of them existing T-26 light tanks stuffed with hydraulics and wired for radio control. Operators could pilot the unmanned vehicle from more than a kilometer away, punching at rows of dedicated buttons (no thumbsticks or D-pads to be found) to steer the tank or fire on targets with a machine gun or flame thrower. And the Teletank had the barest minimum of autonomous functionality: if it wandered out of radio range, the tank would come to a stop after a half-minute, and sit, engine idling, until contact was reestablished.

•n 2007, a little-known German doctor applied to speak at a prestigious AIDS conference, claiming to have cured a single case of the disease. He described a 41-year-old man, dubbed the “Berlin patient,” who had had both AIDS and leukemia. The patient received a bone-marrow transplant from an HIV-resistant donor and no longer showed any sign of the virus.

• Perhaps the conference organizers didn’t know what to make of the case. They asked the doctor, Gero Huetter, to present the results on a poster instead of in a talk. So he did. The poster ended up hidden toward the back of a room.

• “I ran into the poster by mistake. No one was paying attention to it; there was no buzz,” says Stephen Deeks, professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Deeks was blown away by the poster’s claim and recalls thinking, “Why does no one seem to care about this remarkable case?” He moved on and didn’t discuss it with any of his colleagues.

• arth has a magnetic field, which begins at the core and stretches far out into space. Typically, this magnetic field is a useful shield for solar activity. However, if the Earth's magnetic field bumps up against the sun's magnetic field, all types of madness can ensue, including geomagnetic storms, or space weather that can affect the International Space Station.

• This meeting of the magnetic fields is known as magnetic reconnection. During this process, the sun's electrical currents can enter Earth's atmosphere, and in the process, some of our own magnetic field gets stripped away. A new study from MIT and NASA, published in the journalScience this week, explores how a plume of plasma adds extra reinforcements to keep us earthlings safe during solar activity.

• After a class on out-of-body experiences, a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa came forward to researchers to say that she could have these voluntarily, usually before sleep. "She appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this," wrote the scientists in a study describing the case, published in February in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

• Pretty crazy, right? One would think that if you could leave your own body and float above it, you'd be a little more... vocal about it. But since it was a common experience for her--one she "began performing as a child when bored with 'sleep time' at preschool... moving above her body" instead of napping--it may have appeared unremarkable. This is way more interesting than what I did, which was indeed napping.

• Try this to trigger one of the cutest reflexes around. Just blow into a baby’s face and watch him or her gulp air, close eyes, and stop whatever they’re doing. Parents have used this as a way to get their little ones to stop crying – but it’s also the path to swimming.

• The response is what’s known as the bradycardic reflex, which is part of the mammalian diving reflex. When the face of an infant is exposed to cold water, the heart slows down and blood is shifted away from the peripheral muscles to conserve oxygen for the brain and heart, and they typically hold their breath. The reflex is the same one that protects babies from getting milk in their lungs, says Goren Wennergren, a pediatrician and professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.