chris hadfield is the greatest space commander of all time.
International Space Station Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield returns to Earth, and eventually Canada, on Monday. So, what better way to end the mission than doing a personalized rendition of David Bowie’s classic “A Space Oddity,” in the first music video from space.
Hadfield, from the Canadian Space Agency, has been one chatty dude up there in the International Space Station, tweeting constantly during the Expedition 35 mission, which included a precedent-setting emergency spacewalk this weekend to repair an ammonia coolant leak.
Hadfield has a huge following on Twitter: Some 773,118 Earthlings were following him as of Sunday afternoon. Among the gems today were “Canada rocks,” with a picture of the Canadian Rockies. He even expressed hope that the Boston Bruins would play “a memorable game against the Leafs,” a Canadian team.
In the video, Hadfield is seen floating through the station, playing acoustic guitar, and peering out into space through one of the station’s ports.
The first Canadian commander of the station, Hadfield handed over command to Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov.
Hadfield was raised on a corn farm in southern Ontario, according to his NASA biography. At age 15, he won a glider pilot scholarship, and a year later he won a powered pilot scholarship. He also taught skiing and ski racing part- and full-time for 10 years, according to NASA. The rest of the bio is the usual astronaut overachievement: testing ridiculously fast aircraft, doing major research and building his resume as the coolest Canadian ever.
The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft will un-dock from the station at 7:08 p.m. Eastern time Monday, officially ending Expedition 35 and carrying Hadfield, Tom Marshburn and Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko back to Earth. They are scheduled for a 10:31 p.m. landing in southern Kazakhstan, wrapping up 146 days in space, according to NASA.
Among the highlights of the mission were tests of the Canadian Dextre robot as part of NASA’s robotic refueling mission, which the agency hopes will one day enable astronauts to retrieve, refuel and repair satellites in orbit around Earth. - from the l.a. times, Ground control to Major Tom: ISS commander sings David Bowie
Like a small metal moon, the ISS has orbited Earth for almost 13 years, which can make it easy to forget how cool it is. Cmdr. Chris Hadfield has been reminding us.
“Arid fingers of sand-blasted rock look like they’re barely holding on against the hot Saharan wind,” Hadfield tweeted with one photo of Africa’s largest desert.
“Seven billion hearts, but I can see only one,” he added, on Valentine’s Day Feb. 14, tweeting a photo of an island formation resembling a heart.
Although lower orbit is a good distance for beautiful color photography, it’s a long way from home when tragedy strikes. Hadfield had been in space almost four months when the Boston Marathon was bombed, and the nation’s gaze settled on New England. So did Hadfield’s.
“Tonight’s Finale: A somber spring night in Boston,” Hadfield tweeted, with a photo of Boston — not up-close on the finish line, but of the whole city alight like a nebula and sprawling out into the dark.
Hadfield’s time aboard the ISS is ending: On Sunday, he handed off command to Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vladimirovich Vinogradov as he prepared to hitch a lift home Monday on the Soyuz spacecraft.
But first, he gave his earthbound followers a glitzy viral goodbye: a stirringly literal cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” about a space explorer drifting out of orbit. The song is a fitting, plaintive goodbye to the ISS and to Hadfield’s time aboard. Hadfield’s voice isn’t bad either.
The video is shot like one of those J.J. Abrams scenes in “Star Trek,” with lens flares gleaming across Hadfield as he jams on an acoustic guitar while drifting inside the station.
“I’m floating in a most peculiar way,” Hadfield sings, adjusting the lyrics to his own situation.
Sony Movie Channel Pays Tribute To The Legendary Filmmaker Ray Harryhausen In A Special Afternoon Marathon, Saturday, May 11
sony will feature a dcumentary about harryhausen, followed by three of his sinbad movies
RAY HARRYHAUSEN: SPECIAL EFFECTS TITAN was filmed over a 10-year period and
features interviews and tributes from an illustrious list of acclaimed
filmmakers who were inspired by his work. Directed by Gilles Penso, the
documentary includes interviews with longtime admirers and Harryhausen fans
that have been involved in some of the film industry's biggest blockbuster
hits.
The name Ray Harryhausen may not be familiar to everyone but to those who do know it, his name stands as a landmark in the history of a genre and cinematic art, the art of dimensional stop-motion animation. Ray made his name by developing fantastic stories and creatures based on legends and mythology and creating a unique genre of fantasy films during the 1950s, 60s and 70s that took the movie making world, and the public, by storm.
Ray Harryhausen stands as a beacon to today’s fantasy filmmakers as the creator who inspired them and made the impossible possible.
There are a number of websites that either devote themselves to Ray’s work or at the very least mention his name prominently, but it is hoped that this official website will provide everyone who requires a true account of his life and work a first and final stop for all that is Ray Harryhausen.
The site provides details of news and events as well as exclusive and previously unavailable information and images that will complement the five books written by Ray and Tony Dalton. – from the official ray harryhausen website
Harryhausen laid the groundwork for many special effects techniques today and clearly influenced, among other films, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). His admirers include Steven Spielberg, whose special effects dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) are in stark contrast to Harryhausen working alone with a small process screen, a vintage Mitchell camera, a pair of sliding matte glasses, partial miniature sets and glass paintings.
He published his autobiography, An Animated Life, in 2004. In retirement he had also returned to sculpting, and lectured and toured the world with exhibitions, culminating with one at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and at the London Film Museum in 2010 to celebrate his 90th birthday, together with a special event at the National Film Theatre hosted by John Landis. In 2012 the documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan was released.
Once, when asked if he had a favourite among his creatures, Harryhausen replied: “It would be Medusa. But don’t tell the others.”
He married Diana Livingstone in 1962. She survives him, along with a daughter, Vanessa.
In 1933, the 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at the cinema and was hooked – not only by Kong, who was clearly not just a man in a gorilla suit, but also by the dinosaurs. He came out of the theatre “stunned and haunted. They looked absolutely lifelike … I wanted to know how it was done.” It was done by using stop-motion animation: jointed models filmed one frame at a time to simulate movement. Harryhausen, who has died aged 92, was to become the prime exponent of the technique and its combination with live action. He created the special effects for fantasy films such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958); Jason and the Argonauts (1963), with its famous army of skeletons; and Clash of the Titans (1981).
we all have our favorite harryhausen creations. mine is Bubo, the enchanted, mechanical owl from the original Clash of the Titans.
He was born in Los Angeles to Frederick and Martha Harryhausen, Americans of German ancestry. As a young boy he had an interest in prehistoric animals and created clay models. He began to experiment with a borrowed camera, working around the fact that it did not have a stop-frame mechanism, and he showed his experiments to Willis O’Brien, who had done the visual effects for King Kong. O’Brien’s verdict – that Harryhausen’s models did not have any character and that he should study anatomy – was a turning point in Harryhausen’s approach to his craft.
He attended Los Angeles City College and continued his experiments with a new stop-frame 16mm camera. When, in 1940, George Pal, the puppeteer film-maker, fled to Hollywood from Europe, Harryhausen showed him his work and was subsequently hired to work on Pal’s Puppetoon series for Paramount alongside O’Brien. Its unjointed wooden figures did not really suit either Harryhausen or O’Brien.
Harryhausen made room to begin his dream project: Evolution of the World, a history of the planet. Surviving footage and sketches show a debt to Gustave Doré and to King Kong, but the time it would take to complete, combined with the release of Fantasia (1940) – in which the Rite of Spring sequence covered much of the same ground – stopped the project. In 1942 Harryhausen enlisted in the army, was assigned to the Signal Corps and got himself drafted into Frank Capra’s unit to work on propaganda films. He also contributed to the Army-Navy Screen Magazine as an assistant photographer.
Unemployed after demobilisation in 1946, he began a series of animated two-minute fairy tales using out of date 16mm Kodak stock that he had found. Tied together with a Mother Goose prologue and epilogue, the resulting short film was successfully sold to schools and libraries. – from the guardian u.k., Ray Harryhausen obituary
His first big break came in 1947, when O’Brien hired him to work on Mighty Joe Young, a sort of King Kong-lite adventure about a 12-foot gorilla. Although Harryhausen was officially credited as O’Brien’s assistant animator, it’s generally acknowledged that O’Brien had by then grown weary of the business and passed off most of the actual hands-on work to Harryhausen. Mighty Joe Young shows how far Harryhausen had already come in learning how to invest his models with individual personalities. Released in 1949, the film won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects.
The success of Mighty Joe Young and a resurgence in the popularity of giant monster movies resulted in the busiest period of Harryhausen’s career. His first solo assignment wasto create the title character for The Monster From Beneath The Sea—a film that soon became The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, after Ray Bradbury responded to an offer to clean up its screenplay by pointing out that it was awfully similar to a story by that name he’d already published in The Saturday Evening Post. Having mastered the craft of making his models appear lifelike onscreen, Harryhausen now focused on developing a combination of split-screen, rear projection, and careful attention to lighting that would enable them to better blend in with live action. In a few years, the producer Charles H. Schneer would coin the snappy term “Dynamation” to describe Harryhausen’s technique.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
After Beast, Harryhausen began his long professional partnership with Schneer on It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), starring a gigantic—and, for budgetary reasons, six-tentacled—octopus that menaces the Golden Gate Bridge. They collaborated again on the dinosaur picture The Animal World (1956), which gave Harryhausen one more chance to work with Willis O’Brien; Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), highlighted by the iconic images of UFOs strafing Washington, D. C. and crashing into the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building; and 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957).
In 1958, Harryhausen and Schneer took a break from menacing aliens and big marauding critters to achieve a fantasy benchmark with their first color film, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad. The film, which also marked the first of several collaborations between Harryhausen and the composer Bernard Herrmann, features a sword battle between the hero and a skeleton that may be Harryhausen’s best-known and most influential melding of live action and animation. Characteristically, Harryhausen tried to top himself with a sequence in 1963’s Jason And The Argonauts that featured a whole army of battling, self-regenerating skeletons.
Harryhausen and Schneer also worked together on The Three Worlds Of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (1961), First Men In The Moon (1964), and The Valley Of Gwangi (1969). (Around the same time, Harryhausen also did the effects for the 1966 One Million Years B.C.—a film perhaps best remembered not for Harryhausen’s work, but rather a popular dorm-room poster showcasing Raquel Welch’s décolletage.) The returns on these later movies proved disappointing, so in 1974, they returned to swords-and-seafarers fantasy with The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad.
Golden Voyage did quite well, but while Harryhausen and Schneer may have thought it was the beginning of a comeback, in some ways it was their last gasp. The follow-up, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger (1977), was released three months after Star Wars—a movie that both reflected and influenced changing tastes in big-screen spectacle. It was also true that, after so many years in the business, Harryhausen’s effects were beginning to seem repetitive, a problem exacerbated in the fondly remembered yet creaky Clash Of The Titans. After the restrained box-office response to Titans, plans for a sequel were canceled, and Harryhausen was unable to get financing for another Sinbad movie. He formally announced his retirement in 1984. - from the a/v club, A look at the life and career of the late Ray Harryhausen
People are very enthusiastic! They’re amazed by the sculptures and the effort that goes into them. We have almost finished ‘Slow Slugs’ made out of 40,000 plastic bags that move in the wind. It will be unveiled for three days from September 7th onwards in Angers, France. The slugs will be ascending this steep staircase that leads up to a huge Catholic church, essentially signifying their slow crawl towards death. It’s about mortality, natural decay and the slow pollution of plastic in commercialized societies, so it’s only fitting that it is so brief (3 days). Most people think it’s crazy to work for two months on something that will only exist for three days, but it’s all part of the concept. I always tell my interns that inevitably the time and effort they place in projects is forgotten as it is the end-result that always remains with them.
So what would happen if no one was allowed to take pictures of your work? Is hard evidence a BIG deal in temporary art? Isn’t the memory of it enough?
That’s a really good question! Give me some time and maybe I will come up with a work that people are not allowed to take pictures of! I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been thinking about making a mole sculpture with a blacked-out interior that people would have to get down on their hands and knees to crawl into, without really knowing where they are going, but that’s as close as I’ve ever come to that concept! It would be interesting to make something so big and impressive that you’re not allowed to take pictures of. But then again museums do that all the time! At the end of the day I like the audience to circulate my work through the internet and social media, so if no one was around to see it, then I would probably take pictures myself!
I see a cry for reckoning, and unification. Brothers and sisters time is short we must show how much we are on the same page. no matter color or differences, all should respect the lands that created them and keep true to themselves and being the children of our world make a better future for the next generation. We are anonymous, We do not forgive, We do not forget, EXPECT US!!!
this is like something out of a douglas adams novel, but it seems like the economic model used by banksters to justify austerity measures is mathematically flawed. and the entire world will suffer greatly. thanks to an error in microsoft excel.
An economics paper claiming that high levels of national debt led to low or negative economic growth could turn out to be deeply flawed as a result of, among other things, an incorrect formula in an Excel spreadsheet. Microsoft’s PowerPoint has been considered evil thanks to the proliferation of poorly presented data and dull slides that are created with it. Might Excel also deserve such hyperbolic censure?
The paper, Growth in a Time of Debt, was written by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and published in 2010. Since publication, it has been cited abundantly by the world’s press politicians, including one-time vice president nominee Paul Ryan (R-WI). The link it draws between high levels of debt and negative average economic growth has been used by right-leaning politicians to justify austerity budgets: slashing government expenditure and reducing budget deficits in a bid to curtail the growth of debt.
This link was always controversial, with many economists proposing that the correlation between high debt and low growth was just as likely to have a causal link in the other direction to that proposed by Reinhart and Rogoff: it’s not that high debt causes low growth, but rather that low growth leads to high debt.
However, the underlying numbers and the existence of the correlation was broadly accepted, due in part to Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper not including the source data they used to draw their inferences.
A new paper, however, suggests that the data itself is in error. Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, tried to reproduce the Reinhart and Rogoff result with their own data, but they couldn’t. So they asked for the original spreadsheets that Reinhart and Rogoff used to better understand what they were doing. Their results, published as “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” suggest that the pro-austerity paper was flawed. A comprehensive assessment of the new paper can be found at the Rortybomb economics blog. – from ars technica, Microsoft Excel: The ruiner of global economies?
also see this article, from new york magazine: Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement
Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
When Herndon and his professors published their study, the reaction was nearly immediate. After Konczal’s blog post went viral, Reinhart and Rogoff — who got a fawning New York Times profile when their book was released — were forced to admit their embarrassing error (although they still defended the basic findings of their survey). And today, another UMass Amherst professor, Arindrajit Dube, followed up on Herndon’s paper with additional proof that there were serious theoretical and causal problems (as opposed to just sloppy Excel work) in the Reinhart-Rogoff study. Observers have been raising serious questions about what Herndon’s work means for the future of austerity politics, and Reinhart and Rogoff’s respectability as scholars. – from new york magazine
The revelation comes in three pages of academic analysis tucked away in the body’s annual report being released in Tokyo today where the IMF and the World Bank are holding their annual congress.
The report says the IMF believed that for every €100 of austerity through higher taxes and spending cuts, the effect on economic growth and unemployment would be the equivalent of €50.
But in reality the effect has been between double and three times that — stripping the economy of €90 to €150 for every €100 taken out in budgets agreed with the troika.
Tom McDonnell of the independent think-tank Tasc said the report called into question the Government’s budgetary strategy.
“It suggests recent budgets have actually been more damaging to the Irish economy than the Government was estimating. It would also help explain why growth has been lower over the last few years than the Government had expected — and why the vaunted ‘return to growth’ has failed to substantively materialise.”
The findings show Ireland had the second highest austerity measures in the developed world in 2010 — Greece had the highest.
Crabs are bulking up on carbon pollution that pours out of power plants, factories and vehicles and settles in the oceans, turning the tough crustaceans into even more fearsome predators.
That presents a major problem for the Chesapeake Bay, where crabs eat oysters. In a life-isn’t-fair twist, the same carbon that crabs absorb to grow bigger stymies the development of oysters.
“Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster,” Justin Baker Ries, a marine geologist at the University of North Carolina’s Aquarium Research Center, said in an recent interview.
Over the next 75 to 100 years, ocean acidification could supersize blue crabs, which may then eat more oysters and other organisms and possibly throw the food chain of the nation’s largest estuary out of whack.
That would undermine an effort to rebuild the stocks of both creatures. Virginia and Maryland are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into rebuilding the populations of blue crabs and oysters to some semblance of their historical numbers.
The problem extends beyond crabs and the Chesapeake Bay. Lobsters and shrimp also are bulking up on carbon dioxide along the Atlantic coast. Like oysters, coral that helps protect small organisms from big predators is being adversely affected by higher acidity in the waters.
In this June 1 photo Skipper Landon Shand, left, and crewmember Lorne Pace show off a 23 lb. male lobster they caught on their final run of the closing day of Southwestern Nova Scotia’s lobster season in Yarmouth, N.S. Brian Medel-Halifax Chronicle-Herald/The Canadian Press/AP
Crabs put away carbon like nobody’s business. The more they eat, the faster they molt, a growth spurt during which their shells go soft. Carbon helps speed the process so that they emerge bigger and perhaps stronger, less vulnerable to predators and more formidable predators themselves.
At UNC, marine geologists are analyzing video of the slaughter that took place when they put mud crabs and oysters in tanks they intentionally polluted with carbon over three months for a 2011 study.
It was like watching lions tear apart lambs. The crabs scurried from their side of the tanks, banged on the shells of the traumatized oysters, pried them open with a claw in a way similar to what humans do with a knife at restaurants and gobbled them down.
For crab lovers, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Carbon-absorbing crabs put all their energy into upgrading shells, not flesh — like a mansion without much furniture. So diners might be disappointed years from now when they crack open huge crabs and find little meat.
The research showing the effects of carbon on marine organisms was published in the journal Geology in 2009. The study, led by Ries and co-authored with Anne L. Cohen and Daniel C. McCorkle, and found that crabs, lobsters and shrimp grew bigger more rapidly as carbon pollution increased. Chesapeake blue crabs grew nearly four times faster in high-carbon tanks than in low-carbon tanks.
But under the same conditions, oysters, scallops and other organisms struggle to grow, making them more vulnerable to carnivores. Oysters in high-carbon tanks grew at only one-quarter the speed they did in low-carbon conditions, according to the study.
“It’s taking them longer to go from oyster spat to oyster adult,” said Luke Dodd, a doctoral candidate at UNC who put the crabs in a tank with oysters. “When you’re a baby, there’s tons of predators that want to eat you up.”
But when they put mud crabs and oysters together in the tanks polluted with carbon, Dodd, Michael F. Piehler of UNC and Jonathan Grabowski of Northeastern University observed something they didn’t expect, a response that gave oysters a prayer.
Under conditions with lower levels of carbon, two mud crabs polished off 20 oysters in six hours. But in the aquariums with higher levels of carbon, the mud crabs seemed confused.
They went over to the oysters, but they didn’t eat as many — sometimes fewer than half of what other crabs ate under normal conditions. Dodd scratched his head. “Acidification may be confusing the crab,” he said. The situation, he concluded, “is more complicated than you’d be led to believe.”
Ries said crabs might be getting loopy from all that carbon in their systems, depriving them of oxygen and putting them in a fog.
Both researchers said that acidification happens so slowly that crabs may eventually grow more accustomed to it. “You can’t discount evolution taking over,” Dodd said.
Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in chemist Richard Kaner’s lab at UCLA, wondered what would happen if he placed a sheet of graphite oxide—an abundant carbon compound—under a laser. And not just any laser, but a really inexpensive one, something that millions of people around the world already have—a DVD burner containing a technology called LightScribe, which is used for etching labels and designs on your mixtapes. As El-Kady, Kaner, and their colleagues described in a paper published last year in Science, the simple trick produced very high-quality sheets of graphene, very quickly, and at low cost.
El-Kady’s DVD-burning experiment has been characterized as a scientific “accident,” but that description obscures the more interesting story behind it. “Nothing in science is actually an accident—it only looks like that way when you look back,” Kaner says. For many years, students in Kaner’s lab had been experimenting with subjecting various polymers to lasers, including those found in LightScribe drives. El-Kady’s idea of subjecting graphite oxide to the LightScribe was just a lucky continuation of that work. He saw some other students in the lab playing with the laser, so he decided to take a crack at it too. “The appeal of this technique is that anybody could do this—it’s really simple,” says Kaner. “You take a piece of plastic, buy some graphite oxide, stick it in your CD drive and turn it into graphene.” Even more exciting, the technique “makes the most efficient carbon-based supercapacitors that have been made to date.”
How efficient? Kaner points out that the theoretical upper limit for the efficiency of graphene-based capacitors is 550 Farads per gram (a measure of energy storage). Other academic researchers have created supercaps that can store as much as 150 F/g, and Kaner suspects that commercial companies may have done even better. But Kaner and El-Kady’s DVD-laser-produced graphene supercaps go far beyond anything else that has been reported so far. In their Science paper, they reported hitting capacitance rates of up to 276 F/g, close to double what had been previously reported. In another paper published last month in Nature Communications, Kaner and El-Kady described a way to use their DVD burner technique to produce micro-supercapacitors, which can be used to power sensors and other small electronic devices. Those supercapacitors are even more efficient. “With those, we essentially got up to 400 Farads per gram,” Kaner says.
Energy futurists see great potential for such cheap, easy-to-produce, energy-dense supercapacitors. In many applications, these devices could either replace or work alongside batteries to make for more energy-efficient devices. In vehicles, efficient supercaps could be used to save up the kinetic energy your car otherwise loses while braking—i.e., what’s known as “regenerative braking”—and then deliver that power in a burst when you need to accelerate. Several Chinese companies have produced supercap-powered buses. Because supercapacitors charge and discharge rapidly, the buses can be replenished at every bus stop. The quick charge allows the bus to go for a few miles—enough to get to the next stop, where it sips more power.
Kaner says this vision could be more broadly applied to other kinds of vehicles. “The ultimate vision I could see is that even if you had to charge your supercapicator-powered car every 20 miles, you could have a lane on the freeway that was a charging lane,” Kaner says. “As long as you drove in that for a sufficient time, your car gets charged.” Kaner stresses that we’re likely a long way from such a future. Among other obstacles, researchers like him would have to find a way to make graphene even more efficient and producible at large scale. That’s exactly what he’s looking to do next; Kaner and his team have signed a deal with a supercapacitor company to work on ways to commercialize their production technique.
The rapid development of miniaturized electronic devices has increased the demand for compact on-chip energy storage. Microscale supercapacitors have great potential to complement or replace batteries and electrolytic capacitors in a variety of applications. However, conventional micro-fabrication techniques have proven to be cumbersome in building cost-effective micro-devices, thus limiting their widespread application. Here we demonstrate a scalable fabrication of graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas by direct laser writing on graphite oxide films using a standard LightScribe DVD burner. More than 100 micro-supercapacitors can be produced on a single disc in 30 min or less. The devices are built on flexible substrates for flexible electronics and on-chip uses that can be integrated with MEMS or CMOS in a single chip. Remarkably, miniaturizing the devices to the microscale results in enhanced charge-storage capacity and rate capability. These micro-supercapacitors demonstrate a power density of ~200 W cm−3, which is among the highest values achieved for any supercapacitor. - from nature.com
and if you really like technical stuff, see cornell university’s paper -
Self-Charged Graphene Battery Harvests Electricity from Thermal Energy of the Environment
The energy of ionic thermal motion presents universally, which is as high as 4 kJ\bullet kg-1\bullet K-1 in aqueous solution, where thermal velocity of ions is in the order of hundreds of meters per second at room temperature1,2. Moreover, the thermal velocity of ions can be maintained by the external environment, which means it is unlimited. However, little study has been reported on converting the ionic thermal energy into electricity. Here we present a graphene device with asymmetric electrodes configuration to capture such ionic thermal energy and convert it into electricity. An output voltage around 0.35 V was generated when the device was dipped into saturated CuCl2 solution, in which this value lasted over twenty days. A positive correlation between the open-circuit voltage and the temperature, as well as the cation concentration, was observed. Furthermore, we demonstrated that this finding is of practical value by lighting a commercial light-emitting diode up with six of such graphene devices connected in series. This finding provides a new way to understand the behavior of graphene at molecular scale and represents a huge breakthrough for the research of self-powered technology. Moreover, the finding will benefit quite a few applications, such as artificial organs, clean renewable energy and portable electronics.
sorry this is so late – i’ve already let two comets pass this year without comment.
Comet Pojmanski, officially designated C/2006 A1 and discovered only in January. click on image to see more about this one.
there will be numerous opportunities to view comets in the night – and even during the daytime. and, next year, mars could take a direct hit, as a comet is set to pass within 31,000 miles ! that’s a close call, and as it approaches mars, we will be treated to a spectacular view of how heavenly bodies interact, when the comet’s and mar’s energy fields come in contact. there will be no doubt about the electric nature of the universe after that!
enjoy the show!
Comet at its best right now
Comet Pan-STARRS will be at its brightest on Sunday (March 10) when it makes its closest approach to the sun. At that time the comet will be about 28 million miles (45 million km) from the sun — a bit closer to the star than Mercury, which will be about 37 million miles (60 million km) from the sun. [Comet Pan-STARRS in Night Sky Explained (Infographic)]
The comet will still be low in the western sky on Sunday, and may be lost in the sun’s glare. It will fade in brightness over the next few days, but at the same time will be higher in the sky at sunset. SPACE.com will provide up-to-date information on sighting opportunities for the comet.
Two comet-watching dates to prepare for now will be next Tuesday and Wednesday (March 12 and 13). On those evenings, the thin crescent moon will be close to the comet in the sky.
Depending on the size and direction of the comet’s tail, the moon may actually be silhouetted against the tail on March 13.
On April 3, Comet Pan-STARRS will pass within a few degrees of the Andromeda Galaxy, making for a great photo opportunity for stargazers with telescopes. The comet and the galaxy will both shine at about 5th-magnitude on that date.
Yuri Beletsky, a Magellan Instrument Support Scientist at Las Campanas observatory located in Atacama Desert in Chile, used a Canon 5D Mark II camera with an exposure time of ~ 30 seconds on Feb. 28, 2013 to capture this image of Comets Pan-STARRS and Lemmon.
The path of Comet C/2011 L4 (Pan-STARRS) over the next month.
Astronomers are excited about a sungrazing comet discovered late in 2012. For a short time, it might become as bright as a full moon. That’ll be around the time of its perihelion – or closest approach to the sun – on November 28, 2013. This comet is called C/2012 S1 (ISON) by astronomers. All of us around the globe should be able to see it. Look below for a month-by-month Comet ISON viewing schedule.
Comet ISON will come within 800,000 miles (1.2 million km) of our sun’s surface on November 28. That’s over 100 times closer to the sun than Earth. This close pass to the sun might cause Comet ISON to break to pieces. If it doesn’t break up, Comet ISON should become very bright. It might bright enough to see in daylight, near the sun, briefly. If it survives, it should go on to have a dazzling showing in December 2013.
Comet ISON will be visible in both the morning and evening sky in December 2013. This view is looking west on the evening of the December 18, 2013.
Comet ISON month-by-month in late 2013.
August and September 2013. The comet should become visible in August and September 2013 to observers at dark locations using small telescopes or possibly even binoculars.
October 2013. Comet ISON should become visible to the unaided eye, but only barely in the early part of the month. The comet will be sweeping in front of the constellation Leo then. It’ll pass first near Leo’s brightest star Regulus, then near the planet Mars. Maybe these brighter objects will help you find it that month. Meanwhile, the comet itself will be getting brighter during October.
November 2013. Comet ISON will continue to brighten throughout the month as it nears its late November perihelion (closest point to our sun). Plus ISON will pass very close to the bright star Spica and the planet Saturn, both in the constellation Virgo. Its perihelion (closest point to our sun) on November 28 will be an exciting time. The comet will come within 800,000 miles (1.2 million km) of our sun’s surface. If all goes well, and the comet doesn’t break up (as comets sometimes do), the terrific heating Comet ISON will undergo when it’s closest to our parent star might turn the comet into a brilliant object. Some are predicting that ISON will become as bright as a full moon! That would make Comet ISON a daylight object, briefly. Remember, though, at perihelion, Comet ISON will appear close to the sun on the sky’s dome (only 4.4° north of the sun on November 28). Although the comet will be bright, you’ll need to look carefully to see it in the sun’s glare. Some expert help around this time might be called for, and we’ll announce comet-viewing parties as we hear about them.
December 2013. This may be the best month to see Comet ISON, assuming it has survived its close pass near the sun intact. The comet will be visible both in the evening sky after sunset and in the morning sky before sunrise. As ISON’s distance from the sun increases, it’ll grow dimmer. But, for a time, it should be as bright as our sky’s brightest planet, Venus, and it should have a long comet tail. People all over Earth will be able to see it, but it’ll be best seen from the Northern Hemisphere as 2013 draws to a close.
January 2014. Will ISON still be visible to the eye? Hopefully. And on January 8, 2014, the comet will lie only 2° from Polaris — the North Star.
According to preliminary orbital prediction models, comet C/2013 A1 will buzz Mars on Oct. 19, 2014. The icy interloper is thought to originate from the Oort Cloud — a hypothetical region surrounding the solar system containing countless billions of cometary nuclei that were outcast from the primordial solar system billions of years ago.
According to calculations by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), close approach data suggests the comet is most likely to make a close pass of 0.0007 AU (that’s approximately 63,000 miles from the Martian surface). However, there’s one huge caveat.
Due to uncertainties in the observations — the comet has only been observed for 74 days (so far), so it’s difficult for astronomers to forecast the comet’s precise location in 20 months time — comet C/2013 A1 may fly past at a very safe distance of 0.008 AU (650,000 miles). But to the other extreme, its orbital pass could put Mars directly in its path. At time of Mars close approach (or impact), the comet will be barreling along at a breakneck speed of 35 miles per second (126,000 miles per hour).
Also, we don’t yet know how big comet C/2013 A1 is, but comets typically aren’t small. If it did hit, the impact could be a huge, global event. But the comet’s likely location in 2014 is also highly uncertain, so this is by no means a “sure thing” for Mars impact
Introduced to life under the sea in high school through snorkeling, Yoji Ookata obtained his scuba license at the age of 21. At the same time, he went out and bought a brand new NIKONOS, a 35mm film camera specifically designed for underwater photography. He devoted all his spare time – aside from his day job – to perfecting his art of underwater photography. Then, at age 39, he finally made the transition. He quit his office job and became a freelance underwater photographer.
But even for a man who spent the last 50 years immersed in the underwater world of sea life, the ocean proved infinitely mysterious. While diving in the semi-tropical region of Amami Oshima, roughly 80 ft below sea level, Ookata spotted something he had never seen. And as it turned out, no one else had seen it before either.
On the seabed a geometric, circular structure measuring roughly 6.5 ft in diameter had been precisely carved from sand. It consisted of multiple ridges, symmetrically jutting out from the center, and appeared to be the work of an underwater artist, carefully working with tools. For its resemblance to crop circles, Ookata dubbed his new finding a “mystery circle,” and enlisted some colleagues at NHK to help him investigate. In a television episode that aired last week titled “The Discovery of a Century: Deep Sea Mystery Circle,” the television crew revealed their findings and the unknown artist was unmasked.
Underwater cameras showed that the artist was a small puffer fish who, using only his flapping fin, tirelessly worked day and night to carve the circular ridges. The unlikely artist – best known in Japan as a delicacy, albeit a potentially poisonous one – even takes small shells, cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as if decorating his piece. Further observation revealed that this “mysterious circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty. Attracted by the grooves and ridges, female puffer fish would find their way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish where they would mate and lay eggs in the center of the circle. In fact, the scientists observed that the more ridges the circle contained, the more likely it was that the female would mate with the male. The little sea shells weren’t just in vain either. The observers believe that they serve as vital nutrients to the eggs as they hatch, and to the newborns.
What was fascinating was that the fish’s sculpture played another role. Through experiments back at their lab, the scientists showed that the grooves and ridges of the sculpture helped neutralize currents, protecting the eggs from being tossed around and potentially exposing them to predators.
It was a true story of love, craftsmanship and the desire to pass on descendants.
