The Open University has teamed up with “geek chic” comedian David Mitchell to release a series of 12 short animated YouTube videos about the Physics of the Cosmos: “60-Second Adventures in Astronomy”. A real treat. And it’s educational! If you have only 60 seconds, you can now learn everything we know about matter, energy, life, the Universe and everything…
The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a theory about the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear interactions, developed throughout the mid-to-late 20th century, as a worldwide collaborative effort. Upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks, the theory is finalised in the mid-1970s. Ever since that time, further evidence of its validity have been provided by successive discoveries of the other predicted particles, such as the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000) and even more recently, the Higgs boson (2012) to complete the whole set.
Today, Friday 15th February 2013. Russia’s Ural mountains. A fireball streaks through the clear morning sky. Loud bangs follow. A meteor crashes in Russia about 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) east of Moscow. As the shockwave blows out windows and rocks buildings, it injures at least 950 people, the BBC News reports. Most of those hurt from the Chelyabinsk region where the meteor fell, suffered cuts and bruises.
Rainbows are one of Nature’s most gorgeous optical spectacles to behold, brightening up clouded skies with an ephemeral palette of colours when the light falls just right…
The Earth has an electric field. On average, this field points vertically downwards and it has a magnitude of about 100 N C-1 (Newtons per Coulomb). It exists because the Earth’s surface carries a negative charge of – 5 x 105 C, while the upper atmosphere carries a compensating positive charge. An average of 400,000 thunderstorms a day sustain a relatively constant electric field.
Black holes are known to exist at the centres of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. The masses of those black holes are correlated to many of the properties of their host galaxies, which strongly suggests that galaxies and black holes evolve together. Measuring their masses and comparing them in a variety of different galaxies is crucial to the understanding of the interactions between the two components.
14th October 2012. During his ultimate high-altitude parachute jump, Felix Baumgartner spends approximately 4 minutes and 22 seconds in freefall, at the maximum speed of 1,342 kilometres per hour.
Light. Most of us take it for granted during the day. And at night, we have learned to domesticate it. Light, the natural agent that stimulates our sense of sight and makes things around us visible.
