Science Tuesday

[filkertom]

io9 keeps us informed on Higgs-Boson, toast landing butter-side-down, and the journal of Isaac Newton.

Any cool science we should see?

This entry was originally posted at http://filkertom.dreamwidth.org/435483.html. You may comment there or here, although LJ tends to have a livelier conversation at this time.

Comments

[redaxe]

You mean, aside from the ultra-super-hyper-slow motion (or high shutter speed, however you want to look at it) photography/videography at MIT? (Here's a description in case the MIT link is borked by overload.)

[palenoue]

Everybody's been talking about Higgs-Boson for years, but nobody's made a song for it. Nor have they made it into the lead character of an intelligent action-crime drama. I mean, doesn't the name "Higgs-Boson" sound like a guy who solves complex crimes with sharp observations, clever logic and encyclopedic knowledge while fighting off thugs, ninjas and frustrated physicists before heading off into the sunset with all of the cute lab assistants?

[filkertom]

Higgs. Boson. They're cops!

And, of course, there's Bosun Higgs from Girl Genius....

[sdelmonte]

From io9's sister site Gizmodo: Spruce Goose 2.0! From Paul Allen and Burt Ruttan, with help from Elon Musk. That pedigree alone means business.

[acelightning]

I'm sure you know about the buttered-toast/cat perpetual motion machine. Toast always lands butter-side-down, and cats always land on their feet. So all you have to do is attach a piece of toast, butter-side-up, to a cat's back, and drop it, starting from a position in which neither the cat's feet nor the buttered surface of the toast is uppermost. The two forces will cancel each other out, and the cat/toast unit will float at a short distance above the floor, rotating around its long axis, at least until the cat manages to remove the toast and lick the butter off. Obviously, the rotary motion can be used to power any type of perpetual motion machine.