Archive for the ‘Weird Space’ Category

Weird Sounds Recorded in the Sky by Grad Student

Wednesday, May 6th, 2015

On August 9th of 2014 graduate student Daniel Bowman sent infrasound microphones into the 19 miles into the sky above Earth just out of reach of planes but well below actually being in space.

For 9 hours and for over 400 miles the microphones recorded sounds in a layer of our sky that science hadn’t bothered with in almost 50 years.

They may start bothering it again…

Bowman’s microphones picked up sounds recorded below the range of human hearing. To make those sounds audible to our ears, they’re sped up…

When they’re sped up the results get a little freaky.

Scientists studying the sounds have yet to determine where they came from…a local wind-farm, crashing waves, wind turbulence and even the balloon’s cable.

While they all debate those things…

Maybe…just maybe it’s something else…

[LiveScience]

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NASA to blow up the Moon

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Mr. Show had it first…

Real story.

Posted in Astronomy, Science, Space, Video, Weird Space | Comments Off on NASA to blow up the Moon

Making Star Trek Possible: Warp speed without the warp drive

Friday, May 8th, 2009

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Enterprise

Probably the most fascinating idea that Star Trek popularized was the idea of a warp drive. This was a concept from golden age sci-fi that went mainstream via Trek as space-age audiences became sophisticated enough to realize that NASA’s fastest rockets wouldn’t take you very far in a human lifetime. Even going the speed of light wouldn’t work for a show that tried to visit more than one star system in it’s 3 season run (due to time dilation your characters could visit those places, but their friends back on earth would be long dead). What was needed was a (plot) device that allowed you to visit distant planets in the time it takes to drive to the next state.

Since Star Trek, warp drive has become a part of public consciousness. It’s a theoretical form of technology that some feel is as inevitable as AI and teleportation.

There’s one big catch; while AI (or something that acts like it) seems to be a problem solved at some point on a graph projecting the development of intelligent systems and teleportation seems to be more of an energy problem, there’s not a viable theory for how a warp drive could work (exotic matter, worm holes, Alcubierre drives etc.) that doesn’t violate the laws of physics (as we know them) or result in some equation balancing phenomenon like a “quantum scream” (an obscure term used in an equally obscure paper on the subject).
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Posted in Astronomy, Feature stories, Higher Dimensions, movies, NASA, Physics, Science, Star Trek, TV, Weird Physics, Weird Space | 7 Comments »