Hewitt-Drew-it! 80. More on Phase Changes

Phase changes are explained and expressed in equation form.

 

NASA | Mars Atmosphere Loss: Neutral Processes

When you take a look at Mars, you probably wouldn't think that it looks like a nice place to live. It's dry, it's dusty, and there's practically no atmosphere. But some scientists think that Mars may have once looked like a much nicer place to live, with a thicker atmosphere, cloudy skies, and possibly even liquid water flowing over the surface. So how did Mars transform from a warm, wet world to a cold, barren desert? NASA's MAVEN spacecraft will give us a clearer idea of how Mars lost its atmosphere (and thus its water), and scientists think that several processes have had an impact. Scientists think that the collision of neutral hydrogen molecules may have helped to drive the Martian atmosphere into space over billions of years.

 

ScienceCasts: What Happened to Mars? A Planetary Mystery

Mars was once on track to become a thriving Earth-like planet, yet today it is an apparently lifeless wasteland. A NASA spacecraft named MAVEN will soon journey to Mars to find out what went wrong on the Red Planet.

 

Hewitt-Drew-it! 78. Crunching Can & Dipping Bird

Examples of evaporation and condensation.

 

All of the energy in the universe is... - George Zaidan and Charles Morton

The energy in the universe never increases or decreases -- but it does move around a lot. Energy can be potential (like a stretched-out rubber band waiting to snap) or kinetic (like the molecules that vibrate within any substance). And though we can't exactly see it, every time we cook dinner or shiver on a cold night, we know it's there. George Zaidan and Charles Morton get excited about energy.

 Lesson by George Zaidan and Charles Morton, animation by Pew36 Animation Studios.

 

NASA | Firefly Mission to Study Lightning

Somewhere on Earth, there's always a lightning flash. The globe experiences lightning some 50 times a second, yet the details of what initiates this common occurrence and what effects it has on the atmosphere - lightning may be linked to incredibly powerful and energetic bursts called terrestrial gamma ray flashes, or TGFs -- remains a mystery.

In mid-November, a football-sized mission called Firefly, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, will launch into space to study lightning and these gamma ray flashes from above.

The NSF CubeSat program represents a low cost access to space approach to performing high-quality, highly targeted science on a smaller budget than is typical of more comprehensive satellite projects, which have price tags starting at $100 million. The CubeSat Firefly, by focusing its science goals, will carry out its mission in a much smaller package and at a considerably lower cost.

 

SparkFun According to Pete # 36: Transistor Biasing Configurations

Pete discusses two of the three major Transistor Biasing configurations, specifically common base and emitter follower.

 According to Pete is a video segment starring SparkFun Director of Engineering Pete Dokter. In this video series, Pete addresses common engineering questions, discusses current projects, and explores the wide world of embedded electronics!

 

Using gamma radiation in a unique way

Measuring the level of liquid inside a metal vessel or pipe is a huge process challenge for the petrochemical industry. Tracerco's LevelFinderPlus uses a gamma radiation source and segmented detector to accurately determine the liquid level in a vessel and the amount of other material that may have built up within the container. Andrew Hurst explains how the company's physicists addressed the challenge.

 Tracerco has received an IOP Innovation Award 2013 from the Institute of Physics for developing the measurement system.

 

Big Questions: The Ultimate Building Blocks of Matter

The Standard Model of particle physics treats quarks and leptons as having no size at all. Quarks are found inside protons and neutrons and the most familiar lepton is the electron. While the best measurements to date support that idea, there is circumstantial evidence that suggests that perhaps the these tiny particles might be composed of even smaller building blocks. This video explains this circumstantial evidence and introduces some very basic ideas of what those building blocks might be.

 

Wind lidars: using laser beams to detect wind speeds

The accurate measurement of wind speeds is critical for effective siting of wind farms. The ZephIR lidar calculates wind speed and direction by projecting a laser into the air and detecting the Doppler-shifted backscatter from tiny particles and dust in the atmosphere. The process is explained here by their team of scientists.

 

Dark Matter

KIPAC visualization expert Ralf Kaehler and his colleague astrophysicist Tom Abel joined forces with Carter Emmart, the history museum's director of astrovisualization, and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a museum curator and professor at Columbia University. They turned numerical simulations calculated by Abel and then-KIPAC astrophysicist Oliver Hahn into striking scenes.

 

Hewitt-Drew-it! 77. Evaporation & Condensation

Why evaporation cools, and condensation warms.

 

Physics Nobel Prize 2013 - Sixty Symbols

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to François Englert and Peter Higgs - but who missed out and what will happen with future prizes?

 Discussed by Professor Ed Copeland and Professor Mike Merrifield from the University of Nottingham.

 

Gravitational Lensing

KIPAC visualization expert Ralf Kaehler and his colleague astrophysicist Tom Abel joined forces with Carter Emmart, the history museum's director of astrovisualization, and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a museum curator and professor at Columbia University. They turned numerical simulations calculated by Abel and then-KIPAC astrophysicist Oliver Hahn into striking scenes.

 

The stars

In this educational video, produced on the terrace and in the Arago dome of the Observatory of Paris, Pierre Kervella, astrophysicist at the observatory present this operation of stars.

 

NASA | Five Days of Flares and CMEs

This movie shows 23 of the 26 M- and X-class flares on the sun between 1800 UT Oct. 23 and 1500 UT Oct. 28, 2013, as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It also shows the coronal mass ejections -- great clouds of solar material bursting off the sun into space -- during that time as captured by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

 

Supercomputing and the search for supernovae

Berkeley Lab's Peter Nugent discusses "Supercomputing and the search for supernovae" in this Oct. 28, 2013 talk, which is part of a Science at the Theater event entitled Eight Big Ideas.

 

The Higgs and all that. How the universe works and why we should care

Berkeley Lab's Ian Hinchliffe discusses "The Higgs and all that. How the universe works and why we should care" in this Oct. 28, 2013 talk, which is part of a Science at the Theater event entitled Eight Big Ideas.

 

Hewitt-Drew-it! 76. Radiant Energy

The role of temperature in emission of radiant energy.

 

Is a quantum wavefunction a real thing?

In less than 100 seconds, Daniel Mortlock ponders whether the quantum wavefunction could be more than a mathematical function.

 

Imaging atoms in 3-D

Berkeley Lab's Peter Ercius discusses "Imaging atoms in 3-D" in this Oct. 28, 2013 talk, which is part of a Science at the Theater event entitled Eight Big Ideas.

 

NASA | A Laser Scientist Answers 5 Questions About LVIS

With winter closing in, a new NASA airborne campaign launched October 31, 2013 in Greenland. For the first time, the Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor, or LVIS, is flying about NASA's new C-130 aircraft to measure the island's ice following a summer's melt. This data will complement measurements the LVIS instrument has taken in previous springtime campaigns as a part of Operation IceBridge, a six-year multi-instrument survey over both Arctic and Antarctic ice.


 

Coming to a hospital near you: mass spectrometry imaging

Berkeley Lab's Ben Bowen discusses "Coming to a hospital near you: mass spectrometry imaging" in this Oct. 28, 2013 talk, which is part of a Science at the Theater event entitled Eight Big Ideas.

 

Generating electricity from viruses

Berkeley Lab's Seung-Wuk Lee discusses "Generating electricity from viruses" in this Oct. 28, 2013 talk, which is part of a Science at the Theater event entitled Eight Big Ideas.

 

Hewitt-Drew-it! 74. Thermal Expansion of Water

Densest water at 4°C explained, with classroom video of ice formation.

 

ScienceCasts: The Sounds of Interstellar Space

As Voyager 1 recedes from the solar system, researchers are listening for "interstellar music" (a.k.a. plasma waves) to learn more about conditions outside the heliosphere.

 

What is quantum gravity?

In less than 100 seconds, Leron Borsten explains that general relativity and quantum mechanics are very successful in their own domains, but the jury is still out on how to unify these two great theories of physics.

 

Peltier Module Cooling - The Peltier Effect

Using the Peltier effect to cool with a Peltier module, even turning water to ice. I also test the efficiency of Peltier cooling 250ml of water. The Peltier effect is also known as the thermoelectric effect.

 

Floating

Drops of hot water dropped on to the surface of cold water, floating under a slight breeze of air, distributing themselves, shown with a thermal camera.

 

Fluid Juggling

Fluid jets can suspend light balls in the air in a display of hydro gymnastics. This video is one of several entries to the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics annual Gallery of Fluid Motion.

 Video Credit: Roberto Zenit and Enrique Soto (National Autonomous University of Mexico
 

Modern Physics: Special Relativity (Stanford), Lecture 8

Lecture 8 of Leonard Susskind's Modern Physics course concentrating on Special Relativity. Recorded June 9, 2008 at Stanford University.

 

Standing Waves and Resonance

Standing Waves can resonate in a pipe. The resonance occurs in an open-closed pipe when an odd integer number of quarter wavelengths fit exactly in the length of the cavity of the pipe. This animation illustrates what happens when a plunger is used to "scan" the effective length of a pipe driven by a tuning fork. Three different cases are shown for a set of increasing frequencies.
 

Standing Waves and Harmonics

The harmonic frequencies of a system depend upon the geometry of that system. This animation shows the first five harmonics for both a pipe closed at both ends as well as a pipe open at one end. The animation ends with a wave which is actually comprised of a combination of those first five harmonics for each system.

 

Magnetic Levitation

Diamagnetism and magnetic levitation.

Hewitt-Drew-it! 73. Thermal Expansion of solids

Expansion of solids, bimetallic strip, and ring around the Earth.

 

Gaia space observatory

Gaia is a space observatory to be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on 20 November 2013. The mission aims to compile a 3D space catalogue of approximately 1 billion astronomical objects.

 

Planck's view of the Universe

This animation highlights some of the many discoveries made by ESA's Planck space telescope over its 4.5 year observing career, from new discoveries in our home Milky Way Galaxy stretching back to the first few moments after the Big Bang 13.82 billion years ago.

 

Sackler Public Astronomy Lecture - David Spergel - Cosmology After Planck

The Planck Telescope has made an accurate full-sky measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature, the leftover heat from the Big Bang. These measurements probe both the physics of the very early universe and the basic properties of the universe today. The Planck measurements confirm the earlier results from the WMAP telescope and rigorously test our standard cosmological model and provide an accurate determination of basic cosmological parameters (the shape of the universe, its age, and its composition). When combined with other astronomical measurements, the measurements constrain the properties of the dark energy and the nature of dark matter. The observations also directly probe the physics of first moments of the Big Bang: the current data are consistent with the idea that the early universe underwent a period of rapid expansion called inflation.

 Many key cosmological questions remain unanswered: What happened during the first moments of the big bang? What is the dark energy? What were the properties of the first stars? In this free public lecture, Dr. Spergel will discuss the role of ongoing and future CMB observations and describe how the combination of large-scale structure, supernova and CMB data can be used to address these key cosmological questions.

 

What is cosmic inflation?

In less than 100 seconds, Andrew Jaffe explains why cosmologists believe that the universe underwent a period of vast and raid growth when it was just fractions of a second old.

 

Mach 3 Bubble Shockwaves

Supercomputer simulations reveal the intricate density and vorticity patterns resulting from a Mach 3 shockwave hitting a helium bubble.

 Video Credit: Babak Hejazialhosseini, Diego Rossinelli and Petros Koumoutsakos from the Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland