APOD: The Scale of the Universe Interactive (2012 Mar 12)

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[b][color=#0000FF]3D printing of a microscopic race car. Image credit: TU Vienna[/color][/b]

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Watch This 3D Printer Make a Microscopic Car
by Fraser Cain on March 13, 2012

<<3D printers let you manufacture any 3-dimensional object out of plastic. You just download the design, fire up the old 3D printer, fill the hopper with plastic, and it’ll slowly print out the object. It sounds cool, and hackers are having a great time playing around with them, but it still doesn’t compare to the scale, quality and cost of traditional manufacturing. It’s still a toy for hackers… right?

As you know, technology has a way of creeping up and then dramatically changing everything. And once you watch this mind-bending video of an ultra-high-resolution 3D printer creating a tiny race car, I think you’ll agree with me that 3D printing technology is improving in leaps and bounds.

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology recently demonstrated a new kind of 3D printer that can create objects orders of magnitude faster than previous devices, at much finer scales; just a few hundred nanometers wide.

Their printer uses a liquid resin which is hardened at exactly the right spots by a focused laser beam (rule 1, everything cool is done with lasers). The lasers can be redirected by mirrors and can harden a line of this liquid resin just a few hundred nanometers wide, giving it a very high resolution.

But it’s also fast. In the past, 3D printers were clocked at millimetres per second. Well, this TU Vienna printer can harden a 5-meter line of resin in 1 second.

There were two discoveries that pushed this advance forward:

1) They improved the control mechanism of the mirrors so they’re in continuous motion, accelerating and decelerating at the precise times to get the high resolution printing.

2) They used photoactive molecules to harden the resin. When the laser light hits the resin, it induces a chain reaction that turns it from a liquid to a solid; only at the point of highest intensity.

What would you use a 3D printer like this for? If it’s this fast and accurate, the mind boggles with the possiblities. The researchers proposed medical applications, like building scaffolding for living cells to attach, allowing you to grow organs in the lab.>>

[Chris Peterson]

Wow...totally disappointing you need Flash to watch this.

While I certainly have issues with some of the places Flash is used without need, I'm curious... if you were preparing an interactive application (and this is an interactive application, not a simple animation), and you wanted to make it accessible to the largest possible audience, what tool would you use to produce it, and what tool would you use to run it?

[Guest]

The giant universe is impressive, but at the moment I'm more shocked by the "Giant Earthworm" ...

Wiki says "length up to 1 m", but in the picture here he has ~3 m! Anyway, a horrible imagination!
I didn't know that such monsters exists.

[ThePiper]

The giant universe is impressive, but at the moment I'm more shocked by the [b]"Giant Earthworm"[/b] ...

Wiki says "length up to 1 m", but in the picture here he has ~3 m! Anyway, a horrible imagination!
I didn't know that such monsters exists.

[neufer]

The giant universe is impressive, but at the moment I'm more shocked by the "Giant Earthworm" ...

Wiki says "length up to 1 m", but in the picture here he has ~3 m! Anyway, a horrible imagination!
I didn't know that such monsters exists.

<<The largest of the segmented worms (commonly called earthworms) is the African giant earthworm (Microchaetus rappi). Although it averages about 1.36 m in length, this huge worm can reach a length of as much as 6.7 m and can be as thick as a sausage in diameter. Only the giant Gippsland earthworm, Megascolides australis, and a few giant polychaetes reach nearly comparable sizes, reaching 4 m and 3.6 m, respectively.>>

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<The giant Gippsland earthworm, Megascolides australis, is one of Australia's 1,000 native earthworm species. These Giant earthworms average 1 meter long and 2 cm in diameter and can reach 3 m in length. They have a dark purple head and a blue-grey body.

They live in the subsoil of blue, grey or red clay soils along stream banks and some south or west facing hills of their remaining habitat which is in Gippsland in Victoria, Australia.

These worms live in deep burrow systems and require water in their environment to respire. These worms rarely leave their moist burrows. They have relatively long life spans for invertebrates and can take 5 years to reach maturity. They breed in the warmer months and produce large egg cocoons which are laid in their burrows. When these worms hatch in 12 months they are already 20 cm long.

They can sometimes be heard in their habitat making gurgling sounds as they move underground.

Located near the town of Bass is the Giant Earthworm Museum. This building allows tourists to crawl through a magnified replica of a worm burrow and a simulated worm's stomach.>>

[ThePiper]

Thanks, neufer

Wow! Good to know that they doesn't eat humans...

[Noah1831]

I just cracked up when i saw Minecraft on there

[yellowbag]

this is got to be the coolest most completely intricate piece of work i've ever seen on this site! i loved it!

[discoseizures]

Hello, I really found this beautiful. I would like to share this by pinning the site to www.pinterest.com, but cannot because there is not a recogNizable image on the homescreen. Any way to add one?

[bystander]

Hello, I really found this beautiful. I would like to share this by pinning the site to http://www.pinterest.com, but cannot because there is not a recogNizable image on the homescreen. Any way to add one?

Since it is a flash app, you can try pinning it as a video. Or you could try Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on facebook. There is a screen print posted there.

[Guest]

I have the same name as the second largest virus I am glad the creators liked it

[bystander]

Your name is Mimivirus? How very strange!

[neufer]

I have the same name as the second largest virus I am glad the creators liked it

Your name is Mimivirus? How very strange!

• Mimi Veris

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<<Mimivirus is a viral genus containing a single identified species named Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus (APMV), or is a group of phylogenetically related large viruses (designated usually MimiN). Until October 2011, when a larger virus Megavirus chilensis was described, it had the largest capsid diameter of all known viruses.

Mimivirus is short for "mimicking microbe": APMV was discovered serendipitously in 1992 within the amoeba Acanthamoeba polyphaga, after which it is named, during research into Legionellosis. The virus was observed in a gram stain and mistakenly thought to be a gram-positive bacterium. As a consequence it was named Bradfordcoccus, after the district the amoeba was sourced from in Bradford, England. In 2003, researchers at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France published a paper in Science identifying the micro-organism as a virus.

Mimivirus possesses many characteristics which place it at the boundary of living and non-living. It is as large as several bacterial species, such as Rickettsia conorii and Tropheryma whipplei, possesses a genome of comparable size to several bacteria, including those above, and codes for products previously not thought to be encoded by viruses. In addition, mimivirus possesses genes coding for nucleotide and amino acid synthesis, which even some small obligate intracellular bacteria lack. This means that unlike these bacteria, mimivirus is not dependent on the host cell genome for coding the metabolic pathways for these products. They do however, lack genes for ribosomal proteins, making mimivirus dependent on a host cell for protein translation and energy metabolism. These factors combined have thrown scientists into debate over whether mimivirus is a distinct form of life, comparable on a domain scale to Eukarya, Archaea and Bacteria.

Nevertheless, mimivirus does not exhibit the following characteristics, all of which are part of many conventional definitions of life: homeostasis, response to stimuli, growth in the normal sense of the term (instead replicating via self-assembly of individual components) or undergoing cellular division.

Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms, mimivirus has added to the debate over the origins of life. Some genes unique to mimivirus, including those coding for the capsid, have been conserved in a variety of viruses which infect organisms from all domains - Eukarya, Archaea and Bacteria. This has been used to suggest that mimivirus is related to a type of DNA virus that emerged before cellular organisms and played a key role in the development of all life on Earth. An alternative hypothesis is that there were three distinct types of DNA viruses that were involved in generating the three known domains of life.>>

• Mimic (1997).

• Dr. Gates: "Evolution has a way of keeping things alive."

<<In Manhattan, cockroaches are spreading a deadly disease that is claiming hundreds of the city's children. Entomologist Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) uses genetic engineering to create what she and her colleague (and husband) Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam) call the Judas Breed, a large insect (looking like a cross between a termite and a praying mantis) that releases an enzyme that kills off the disease-carrying roaches by speeding up their metabolism. The Judas Breed work spectacularly and the crisis is abated. Since the Judas Breed have also been designed to only produce one male able to breed, and they keep it in their care, the hybrid species should die out in a matter of months.

Three years later, people begin to go missing in the subways and tunnels under the city. Susan, Peter, and their staff learn that they severely underestimated the Judas Breed's ability to adapt to its conditions. The Judas Breed has found a way to reproduce and has evolved in order to better hunt a new food source. To everyone's horror, they discover that the Judas' new food source is humans, and now the insects have grown to be as big as people and can mimic the appearance and behavior of humans with uncanny accuracy. Susan and Peter have learned that huge swarms of the Judas Breed are living beneath the city in the subway system, and with the help of Leonard (Charles S. Dutton), a transit system police officer, they search out the insects, whose quick evolution (one fertile male and hordes of females) also made them humanoid, before they can take over the city and from there the world.

An In-joke appears when the character played by F. Murray Abraham is in his laboratory listening to the music of Salieri,the composer he played the part of in the film 'Amadeus'.>>

[TNT]

This is a very interesting and awesome APOD. I had to update my flash player to be able to see it, but it was worth it! I thought it was funny that they included Minecraft World in there. I have never heard of the Great Attractor, the Eridanus Supervoid, or the Sloan Great Wall before. Does anyone know what these are? And shouldn't an electron be smaller than a proton and a neutron?

[bystander]

APOD: 2000 Jan 04 - Great Attractor
APOD: 2011 Mar 21 - Eridanus Supervoid (aka The CMB Cold Spot)
APOD: 2007 Nov 07 - Sloan Great Wall

[jellyfishh]

Spotted a smiley face!

[Moonlady]

Take your time to read Size of US House "Badly designed hallway"

This is the best scale of the universe ever!

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[bystander]

Number Sleuth: Magnifying the Universe


Copyright 2012. Magnifying the Universe by Number Sleuth.

[Martin]

Interesting.

[Joe Gandalf]

This is a great APOD, but I find myself wondering what is wrong with my math:

The speed of light (in vacuuo) is (approximately) 300 million metres per second. The median frequency of a commercial FM transmission is 100 million cycles per second. That works out to a wavelength of 3 metres.

Your article lists the wavelength as 1 metre.

I am unable to fact check the rest of the POD.

[Chris Peterson]

This is a great APOD, but I find myself wondering what is wrong with my math:

The speed of light (in vacuuo) is (approximately) 300 million metres per second. The median frequency of a commercial FM transmission is 100 million cycles per second. That works out to a wavelength of 3 metres.

Your article lists the wavelength as 1 metre.

Nothing wrong with your math. But when broadly comparing the scale of things, largely in a powers-of-ten fashion, 1 meter = 3 meters <g>.

[Agonver]

NEVER THOUGHT A SUNFLOWER SEED OF THREE KILOMETERS !!!

THERE IS AN ERROR IN THE SIZE OF THE SUNFLOWER SEED!!!!

[Chris Peterson]

NEVER THOUGHT A SUNFLOWER SEED OF THREE KILOMETERS !!!

THERE IS AN ERROR IN THE SIZE OF THE SUNFLOWER SEED!!!!

It's pretty clear that the minus sign got dropped, and it should read 7x10^-3 meters.

[nirvana]

amazing thing is that we can see how a thing was 12 billion years ago but have no clue how they look now or what they are.....surely they not have vanished,, they must be some where in some other form.....so of universe is much bigger than what we can ever see.....each passing moment we are getting away from each other,,,,,,,its so lovely which i could whole universe