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Latest Posts by fionaahutton - Page 2
I'm not waiting around for this. 😆
The world's longest-running lab experiment
The Pitch Drop Experiment
The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar that is the world's thickest known fluid and was once used for waterproofing boats.
Thomas Parnell, UQ's first Professor of Physics, created the experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties.
At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a hammer. But, in fact, at room temperature the substance - which is 100 billion times more viscous than water - is actually fluid.
In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. He allowed the pitch to cool and settle for three years, and then in 1930 he cut the funnel's stem.
Since then, the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel - so slowly that it took eight years for the first drop to fall, and more than 40 years for another five to follow.
Now, 87 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops have fallen - the last drop fell in April 2014 and we expect the next one to fall sometime in the 2020s.
The experiment was set up as a demonstration and is not kept under special environmental conditions - it's kept in a display cabinet - so the rate of flow of the pitch varies with seasonal changes in temperature.
The late Professor John Mainstone became the experiment's second custodian in 1961. He looked after the experiment for 52 years but, like his predecessor Professor Parnell, he passed away before seeing a drop fall.
In the 86 years that the pitch has been dripping, various glitches have prevented anyone from seeing a drop fall.
- University of Queensland, Australia
A Fire Rainbow over West Virginia : What’s happening to this cloud? Ice crystals in a distant cirrus cloud are acting like little floating prisms. Known informally as a fire rainbow for its flame-like appearance, a circumhorizon arc appears parallel to the horizon. For a circumhorizontal arc to be visible, the Sun must be at least 58 degrees high in a sky where cirrus clouds present below – in this case cirrus fibrates. The numerous, flat, hexagonal ice-crystals that compose the cirrus cloud must be aligned horizontally to properly refract sunlight in a collectively similar manner. Therefore, circumhorizontal arcs are somewhat unusual to see. The featured fire rainbow was photographed earlier this month near North Fork Mountain in West Virginia, USA. via NASA
This had me laughing
NGC 281
We FAILED as husbands... - Wife PC Build-Off Girls can build PCs.
Beautiful 🏵️💐🌹🥀
Darth Dawkins vs Godless Girl Calling Each Other Fat
moth monster girlfriends
Warsaw, Indiana
March, 2020
Oren Darling
Customizing my Mystery Machine
Secret thoughts #8
Awesome
Countdown to Apollo 11 : Command Module pilot Michael Collins practices in the CM simulator on June 19, 1969, at Kennedy. (via NASA)
It would be quite the sight.
Assassin's Creed
So this is the origins of
"Kilroy was here" ☺️
Kilroy Was Here!
He’s engraved in stone in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC – back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is an intrinsic part of American history and legend.
Anyone born between 1913 to about 1950, is very familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known….but everybody seemed to get into it. It was the fad of its time!
At the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC
So who was Kilroy?
In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy….now a larger-than-life legend of just-ended World War II….offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.
Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had credible and verifiable evidence of his identity.
“Kilroy” was a 46-year old shipyard worker during World War II (1941-1945) who worked as a quality assurance checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts (a major shipbuilder for the United States Navy for a century until the 1980s).
His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. (Rivets held ships together before the advent of modern welding techniques.) Riveters were on piece work wages….so they got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk (similar to crayon), so the rivets wouldn’t be counted more than once.
A warship hull with rivets
When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would surreptitiously erase the mark. Later, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters!
One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about unusually high wages being “earned” by riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on.
The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ”KILROY WAS HERE!“ in king-sized letters next to the check….and eventually added the sketch of the guy with the long nose peering over the fence….and that became part of the Kilroy message.
Kilroy’s original shipyard inspection “trademark” during World War II
Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.
Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With World War II on in full swing, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.
His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over the European and the Pacific war zones.
Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.
To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
As the World War II wore on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable. (It is said to now be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon by the American astronauts who walked there between 1969 and 1972.
In 1945, as World War II was ending, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Allied leaders Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. It’s first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car….which he attached to the Kilroy home and used to provide living quarters for six of the family’s nine children….thereby solving what had become an acute housing crisis for the Kilroys.
The new addition to the Kilroy family home.
* * * *
And the tradition continues into the 21st century…
In 2011 outside the now-late-Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway house in Abbottabad, Pakistan….after the al-Qaida-terrorist was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs.
* * * *
A personal note….
My Dad’s trademark signature on cards, letters and notes to my sisters and I for the first 50 or so years of our lives (until we lost him to cancer) was to add the image of “Kilroy” at the end. We kids never ceased to get a thrill out of this….even as we evolved into adulthood.
To this day, the “Kilroy” image brings back a vivid image of my awesome Dad into my head….and my heart!
Dad: this one’s for you!
(via HD Wallpapers of Melissa Benoist – The New York Post Outtakes)
Best looking plane ever
Reunion
106 inch telescope on board aircraft
We Found the Universe’s First Type of Molecule
For decades, astronomers searched the cosmos for what is thought to be the first kind of molecule to have formed after the Big Bang. Now, it has finally been found. The molecule is called helium hydride. It’s made of a combination of hydrogen and helium. Astronomers think the molecule appeared more than 13 billion years ago and was the beginning step in the evolution of the universe. Only a few kinds of atoms existed when the universe was very young. Over time, the universe transformed from a primordial soup of simple molecules to the complex place it is today — filled with a seemingly infinite number of planets, stars and galaxies. Using SOFIA, the world’s largest airborne observatory, scientists observed newly formed helium hydride in a planetary nebula 3,000 light-years away. It was the first ever detection of the molecule in the modern universe. Learn more about the discovery:
Helium hydride is created when hydrogen and helium combine.
Since the 1970s, scientists thought planetary nebula NGC 7027—a giant cloud of gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus—had the right environment for helium hydride to exist.
But space telescopes could not pick out its chemical signal from a medley of molecules.
Enter SOFIA, the world’s largest flying observatory!
By pointing the aircraft’s 106-inch telescope at the planetary nebula and using a tool that works like a radio receiver to tune in to the “frequency” of helium hydride, similar to tuning a radio to a favorite station…
…the molecule’s chemical signal came through loud and clear, bringing a decades-long search to a happy end.
The discovery serves as proof that helium hydride can, in fact, exist in space. This confirms a key part of our basic understanding of the chemistry of the early universe, and how it evolved into today’s complexity. SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft that allows astronomers to study the solar system and beyond in ways that are not possible with ground-based telescopes. Find out more about the mission at www.nasa.gov/SOFIA
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
War is hell
After being captured on the beaches of Dunkirk and spending 5 years in captivity, Sergeant Edward Hill of the British Army is released from Dulag-Luft prisoner of war camp, March 29, 1945.
via reddit
The actual world’s biggest solar farm-in-the-shape-of-a-panda
There are quite a few news stories being written regarding the world’s largest solar farm that is, incidentally, in the shape of a panda. Based in Datong, China, many have shared the above image of the 100MW farm from Panda Green Energy (come on, go with it) which, despite the appeal, is just an artist’s rendition. Snopes managed to acquire a drone shot of the actual farm, below.
Next, the Materials World blog will tell you Father Christmas isn’t real, take the Tooth Fairy to task, and proving the non-existence of God (QED) before vanishing in a puff of logic.
Unbelievable footage.
VIDEO FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET
This is truly incredible.
Details:
Remember Rosetta? That comet-chasing European Space Agency (ESA) probe that deployed (and accidentally bounced) its lander Philae on the surface of Comet 67P? This GIF is made up of images Rosetta beamed back to Earth, which have been freely available online for a while. But it took Twitter user landru79 processing and assembling them into this short, looped clip to reveal the drama they contained.