computer simulations

Amusement parks are so bland. This summer, take a brainier vacation— visit a particle accelerator, sail the Pacific aboard a marine research vessel, or watch simulations of epic natural disasters.

By definition, one can't see a black hole itself, only its effect on the light of intervening stars. And without some serious equipment, even that's a tall order. Luckily for all us amateur astronomers, Thomas Müller and Daniel Weiskopf of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, have created a simulation that uses actual star data to calculate exactly what seeing the Schwarzschild black hole would look like.

Roadside bombings are, unfortunately, a part of daily life for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and almost every day the military captures surveillance footage of improvised explosive devices being set and detonated. Rather than letting the footage languish, a joint team of counter-IED experts is quickly flipping the footage into video game-like simulations that make training drills as versatile and flexible as the troops themselves.

Four years ago, a team of researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland switched on Blue Brain, a computer designed to mimic a functioning slice of a rat's brain. At first, the virtual neurons fired only when prodded by a simulated electrical current. But recently, that has changed.

Apparently, the simulated neurons have begun spontaneously coordinating, and organizing themselves into a more complex pattern that resembles a wave. According to the scientists, this is the beginning of the self-organizing neurological patterns that eventually, in more complex mammal brains, become personality.

The world certainly isn't simple, and trying to express real-world dynamics in the form of an equation has long been a challenge. Realistic computer-simulated sound has been particularly tough to get right, and some of the hardest dynamics to recreate have been the movements and sound of water.

Scientists at Cornell have now announced a system that can look at a 3-D motion rendering of water--waves, drops, anything--and algorithmically create the dribbles, gurgles and plops it would be sounding, were it in fact real.

What's cooler than a black hole? Two of them, rotating around and then crashing into one another. And what could be more entertaining than that cataclysmic cosmic dance? Why, one more, of course.

A team of scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology has simulated the merger of three black holes.

Californians living in fear of the "Big One"—and Californians living in denial about it—should check out these new computer simulations of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Seismologists from the U.S. Geological Survey unveiled these very cool, highly detailed computer simulations that show the seismic waves propagating outward from the epicenter, which lies offshore from San Francisco, and all across the Bay Area. Download the movies here and be sure to watch one of the closeup simulations, say, of downtown San Francisco. According to the USGS Web site, the colors and shading indicate the maximum shaking intensity at each location and the current shaking at the time, noted in seconds on each movie frame. Scary. —Eric Adams