Long Night of Sciences
Last Friday was the Long Night of Sciences (this is the literal translation of the name). What it's about:
On Researchers' Night, Dresden's universities, science institutions, and science-linked companies will open their doors, their labs, auditoriums, and archives for the general public. Visitors can experience technology, science and innovation, arts and culture in multifaceted presentations, experiments, guided tours, exhibitions, and films.
Planning for this night was a bit complicated. There are always more things that interest you than you can visit.
My mom and I went to the University of Applied Sciences's Agriculture/Environment/Chemistry faculty first. It's probably the most distant from the other venues. One of the things we wanted to see there was about bats. On the LNoS website it had said that would be from 18 to 23.
The faculty's foyer finally had info about actual time. Ugh, we have no time for that!
We looked around the place and it was a bit unhelpful. There were things all over the foyer and its corridors, but none were signposted. You had to walk around the whole place to find stuff.
Indian music, in celebration of the 150th birthday of Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, a botanist & garden designer from here who was best known for his work at the Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens in Bangalore.
We did a water tasting from 5 different Saxon sources. I found the differences only minimal. But my mom and I agreed that #3 was the best.
Conjoined-twin tree.
Then we went to Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research's SupraTrans testing plant, where they had ballpoint pens as souvenirs, but also Leibniz cookies. More on that later.
I wanted to see the SupraTrans (a transport system based on superconducting magnetic bearing), because I had seen it on CNN's Make Create Innovate (it was nice to see someone from CNN come to Dresden for something that's not Pegida). I wish I could link you to the video, but if it's somewhere online, I can't find it. There's only a SupraTrans mention in this article.
I would have made you a slowed-down gif, but that thing is fast! All the balls moving takes place over just 2 frames. The flying ball is moving in 9 frames.
The vehicle hovers 10 millimeters above the track.
We got to test-drive it. Such a smooth ride, no wobbling at all! And so quiet.
Flash-foward to coming home and googling Leibniz and his relation to the cookies. So Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a polymath, which is why colleges are named after him. The well-known Leibniz butter buiscuits by Hanoverian food factory Bahlsen were named after Leibniz apparently because he had been the city's longtime court librarian. After a day of learning interesting stuff, the most astounding thing to me was a liguistic revelation. Bahlsen originally called them "Leibniz Cakes", but because "cakes" was pronounced wrong by the customers, they renamed them "Keks". The German word for cookies turned out to be younger than I thought and of English origin.
After SupraTrans we went to Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology.
OLED data glasses that scroll the image in the direction you're looking.
Don't ask me how it works, we only walked past it (but apparently the fluid contained starch):
We looked around the place and listened to some stuff (wow, you can test if stuff will be tolerated by the human body by exposing bone tissue to it), but it was getting late and we weren't really receptive anymore, so then we went home.
On the way out we saw this illusion making it look as if the pig is up there.
On Researchers' Night, Dresden's universities, science institutions, and science-linked companies will open their doors, their labs, auditoriums, and archives for the general public. Visitors can experience technology, science and innovation, arts and culture in multifaceted presentations, experiments, guided tours, exhibitions, and films.
Planning for this night was a bit complicated. There are always more things that interest you than you can visit.
My mom and I went to the University of Applied Sciences's Agriculture/Environment/Chemistry faculty first. It's probably the most distant from the other venues. One of the things we wanted to see there was about bats. On the LNoS website it had said that would be from 18 to 23.
The faculty's foyer finally had info about actual time. Ugh, we have no time for that!
We looked around the place and it was a bit unhelpful. There were things all over the foyer and its corridors, but none were signposted. You had to walk around the whole place to find stuff.
Indian music, in celebration of the 150th birthday of Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, a botanist & garden designer from here who was best known for his work at the Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens in Bangalore.
We did a water tasting from 5 different Saxon sources. I found the differences only minimal. But my mom and I agreed that #3 was the best.
Conjoined-twin tree.
Then we went to Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research's SupraTrans testing plant, where they had ballpoint pens as souvenirs, but also Leibniz cookies. More on that later.
I wanted to see the SupraTrans (a transport system based on superconducting magnetic bearing), because I had seen it on CNN's Make Create Innovate (it was nice to see someone from CNN come to Dresden for something that's not Pegida). I wish I could link you to the video, but if it's somewhere online, I can't find it. There's only a SupraTrans mention in this article.
Click to viewI would have made you a slowed-down gif, but that thing is fast! All the balls moving takes place over just 2 frames. The flying ball is moving in 9 frames.
The vehicle hovers 10 millimeters above the track.
We got to test-drive it. Such a smooth ride, no wobbling at all! And so quiet.
Flash-foward to coming home and googling Leibniz and his relation to the cookies. So Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a polymath, which is why colleges are named after him. The well-known Leibniz butter buiscuits by Hanoverian food factory Bahlsen were named after Leibniz apparently because he had been the city's longtime court librarian. After a day of learning interesting stuff, the most astounding thing to me was a liguistic revelation. Bahlsen originally called them "Leibniz Cakes", but because "cakes" was pronounced wrong by the customers, they renamed them "Keks". The German word for cookies turned out to be younger than I thought and of English origin.
After SupraTrans we went to Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology.
OLED data glasses that scroll the image in the direction you're looking.
Don't ask me how it works, we only walked past it (but apparently the fluid contained starch):
We looked around the place and listened to some stuff (wow, you can test if stuff will be tolerated by the human body by exposing bone tissue to it), but it was getting late and we weren't really receptive anymore, so then we went home.
On the way out we saw this illusion making it look as if the pig is up there.