• Entertainment & Gaming

    Woe is the Web: April Fools' Day on the Internet

    By Posted on 4.2.2008 3 Comments

    Woe is the Internet on April 1. For it is on this day where sites large and small rack their brains for the perfect Fools' Day prank, briefly vindicating those that continue to hold the belief that the Web serves as nothing more than a sloppy ocean of untruths and nonsense.

    4.2.2008 at 09:44am - Comment by Michael Moyer

    Astronomy Picture of the Day had a good one: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080401.html In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future as "Dextre the Magnificent."

  • The Environment

    The Environmental Cost of Salting Roads

    By Posted on 3.25.2008 2 Comments

    Municipalities are always weighing cost against environmental concerns and quite often, cost wins out at great expense to the environment. Residents of New York City will remember the summer of 2002 when the Bloomberg administration ceased recycling glass and plastic, citing budgetary concerns. It was cheaper for the city to dump tons of reusable refuse into landfills than to continue its recycling program. After a year of no plastic recycling and two years of no glass, the city determined the savings were negligible and resumed recycling both.

    3.26.2008 at 11:03am - Comment by Michael Moyer

    I'm curious as to what the alternatives to salt are. I was driving in Lake Tahoe, CA this winter during a storm. Up in that sensitive environment they only use plows, and chains are required. Is that the only other option?

  • Science

    The Physics of Nascar

    By Posted on 2.22.2008 3 Comments

    Given that 75 million people are fans of the racing circuit, physicist Diandra Leslie-Pelecky probably doesnt have to worry too much about finding an audience for her book on the intricacies of stock-car racing, The Physics of Nascar. But this is hardly just a story for race fans. Its a crash course in chemistry, physics and more. In the first few chapters, she gets down to the molecular levelat some points literallyin describing the stock car chassis, diagrams how welding works, and even takes a few paragraphs to explain why the white paint on a car appears white to our eyes. But its when she moves out of the shop and onto the track that the book really takes off, as she breaks down engines, brakes, tires, drag and lift; the dynamics of racing itself.

    2.22.2008 at 11:35am - Comment by Michael Moyer

    I saw somewhere that she talks about aerodynamics using the common incorrect explanation of lift, not the simple, precise, correct explanation—that lift happens when an object (in this case, a stock car) pushes the air flowing over it downwards, thus producing an equal and opposite push upwards. Is that so? How could a physicist mess up an explanation of lift? Time to sick the aerodynamicists from NASA on her.

  • The Environment

    The Explosive Nuclear Question

    By Posted on 2.16.2008 15 Comments

    It's going to be at least another two decades before any commercial models are built, but researchers are at work designing the Generation IV nuclear reactors. Unlike the generation II and III models now in use that use water to cool and control the fission (preventing runaway reactions, subsequent meltdowns and the environmental apocalypse that would result), the leading contender for cooling material for the Gen IV reactors is molten sodium. Not sodium chloride (plain, unreactive table salt), but sodium metal.

    2.19.2008 at 04:17pm - Comment by Michael Moyer

    Sorry everyone, I should have included more info with the post, but sent it off as I was dashing to another talk. Here is the Generation IV International Forum home page: http://www.gen-4.org And specifically, more information about the sodium-cooled system: http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/sfr.htm



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