science

Via Dazed Digital:

Nolan enlisted astrophysicist Kip Thorne to work with his special effects team in order to create the most realistic looking black hole on cinema. Thorne started by sending pages and pages of equations that Nolan's animators fed into their rendering software.

Thorne, who'd previously worked with Carl Sagan on the Jodie Foster-starring space classic Contact (1997), had only ever conceived of a black hole theoretically. Nobody had any idea what it would actually look like.

What the computers finally churned out after hours of rendering – all 800 terabytes of it – was astounding. Turns out that a black hole doesn't look too much like its name.

America is the land of inaccurate, outdated, and totally worthless measuring systems. While the U.S.A is one of three countries to scoff at the metric systes (along with our dudes Liberia and Myanmar), we also use a little thing called Fahrenheit when measuring temperature.

The U.S.A and its associated territories is one of five countries to use Fahrenheit (along with our dudes the Bahamas, Belizem, the Caymen Islands, and Palau), but why do we use this outdated system and where did it come from?

via YouTube

This handy video from the YouTube channel Veritasium answers at least one of those questions. Turns out it has origins a lot like Batman. When a young scientist’s parents die suddenly, he goes on the run and becomes obsessed with cool science gadgets. From there, he starts fighting crime, and by crime, I mean inconvenient and inaccurate temperature scales. Anyway, it makes sense in the video.

It’s entertaining, interesting, and as always will make you smarter than anyone in the room.

Via NASA:

By starlight this eerie visage shines in the dark, a crooked profile evoking its popular name, the Witch Head Nebula. In fact, this entrancing telescopic portrait gives the impression the witch has fixed her gaze on Orion's bright supergiant star Rigel. Spanning over 50 light-years, the dusty cosmic cloud strongly reflects nearby Rigel's blue light, giving it the characteristic color of a reflection nebula.

Spaceship 2 had a successful test flight! Woo! And, it's on schedule for its space flight later this year! Now that's human accomplishment at its finest.

The solar-electric propulsion thruster pictured above ditches burning chemical fuel for xenon ions accelerated by an electric field generated using solar panels. This provides a steady stream of ions that can slowly nudge a spacecraft to high speeds with minimal fuel, making it a good choice for long-range missions.

Spider silk of fantastical, superhero strength is finally speeding toward commercial reality — at least a synthetic version of it is. The material, which is five times stronger than steel, could be used in products from bulletproof vests to medical implants, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN).

Alex Scott, a senior editor at C&EN, notes that spider silk's impressive strength has been studied for years, and scientists have been trying to make a synthetic version of the super-strong protein in the lab.