Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:I knew the tiles on the space shuttles were special but I didn't realize they were quite like this:

Yes, I have a couple of the tiles. In class, I heat one up with a torch while a student holds it. Very cool (literally!)

Well, shoot. Wish I grew up in Guffey.

Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415

Beyond wrote:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415

What an Idea. And look what happened to the Infant mortality rate as a side effect.

Didn't know one could use horses to launch a sailplane. Makes sense, though, just never thought of doing it. I always dreamed of a bike that could fly and pedal around to wherever I wanted to when I was a kid. I guess that's slightly more feasible than wanting to be a dinosaur...nahhh
http://framework.latimes.com/2013/05/21 ... sailplane/

YEE HAA!! Giddy up up and away.

Czechs present bicycle that can fly.
http://www.wfsb.com/story/22570157/czec ... at-can-fly

A dozen pictures of aircraft breaking the sound barrier.

http://www.techgraffiti.com/news-sonic-boom?image=5

Those are vapor cones which do not necessarily represent the exact moment which mach 1 is achieved.

geckzilla wrote:Those are vapor cones which do not necessarily represent the exact moment which mach 1 is achieved.

Yes... but perhaps they did occur in these pictures, and that's why Michele Collet used them?

She doesn't even call them vapor cones. She refers to them as sonic booms.

geckzilla wrote:She doesn't even call them vapor cones. She refers to them as sonic booms.

Read the caption for APOD 19 August 2007, Sonic Boom. Second from last sentence. Also, not all of them look like cones.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070819.html
The APOD description is quite dubious, Beyond. You're going to have to do better than that.

geckzilla wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070819.html
The APOD description is quite dubious, Beyond. You're going to have to do better than that.

I don't have to do anything. I just liked the pictures. And the 2007 APOD also says that the picture was taken as the plane was breaking the sound barrier.

Allegedly.

Real life heroes save little girl falling from window in China:
Ann

Cat nurses abandoned pit bull puppy:
Ann

that's pretty cool I never knew that either

Fluffy Cows. http://www.wfsb.com/story/22716342/fluf ... -new-craze

Man made snakes can get into just about everything. http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics ... cpgn=otbn1
Click on one of the 8 blue squares to see other ones.

Top 10 uses for the world's strongest material, Graphene.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanotech ... cpgn=otbn1

New Chinese Law: Visit Your Parents.
http://www.wfsb.com/story/22740821/new- ... ur-parents

New Coney Island hot dog eating record. http://www.wfsb.com/story/22756831/ches ... ng-contest

Aquaporins. Proteins in your cell membranes which facilitate rapid diffusion of water molecules through the membranes they're embedded in.
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/aquaporins/

This is killing me, though. They supposedly let three billion water molecules through per second, which pretty much blows my mind into the same quasi-functional state it goes into when I try to read about quantum mechanics. Even though I believe it as a fact without seeing it happen I don't totally believe it because it seems impossible. I decided to try to calculate (note: I suck at this. I don't trust that the following is totally correct.) how fast the water molecules would have to be traveling in order to achieve that volume. Supposing the protein channel is 3 nm long, each molecule would have to move .9 m/s which is a far cry from the astronomically high velocity I was imagining. Hmm.

Well, to something the size of a water molecule, it may just be an astronomical speed, IF it could understand astronomical.
I suck worse than you at scientific calculations. But .9m/s is about 3-inches per second. For something as small as a water molecule to travel about 3-inches a second, would seem to me, comparatively speaking, to be an astronomical speed. But i could be all wet about it.

EDIT: A water molecule is 0.278nm in length.