The Aug. 24 flight experiment was the brainchild of Ron Fugelseth, a California-based motion graphics producer whose son has a beloved toy train named Stanley. Fugelseth decided to launch Stanley into the air using a weather balloon affixed to a three-foot parachute. The procedure involved several months of monitoring the winds, as well as calling the Federal Aviation Administration prior to launch to confirm that the train-toting balloon would not interfere with any airplane flight paths. The hour-long climb into the stratosphere ended with a 20-minute fall into a corn field where Fugelseth and his son retrieved Stanley.

Fugelseth caught the flight on video with an HD camera focused on Stanley, who was secured atop a wooden dowel perch. The footage has been edited into a two-and-a-half minute YouTube video that has already garnered more than one million views. Fugelseth even went so far as to animate Stanley’s face using After Effects and Photoshop to mimic how he imagines his son sees the toy train.

In order to easily find the landed train, Fugelseth equipped Stanley’s balloon with an old cell phone for GPS. The foam box surrounding the camera and phone was also colored bright orange for easy spotting — which, in a corn field, was surely useful. In addition, the dad used the University of Wyoming’s balloon trajectory website to plan a launch site that would keep Stanley from hitting anyone.

“I launched him from a location that I knew would bring him down into farm land,” Fugelseth wrote in the YouTube video description. “The prediction website was only 5-10 miles off, so he landed safely in a corn field, far away from any towns…. I didn’t want Stanley to be a murderer. Plus, I wanted to make sure my son got Stanley back. ”

Photo and video credit: Ron Fugelseth/YouTube

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In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was, in fact, expanding — and not static. Once Einstein knew the universe was expanding, he discarded his cosmological constant theory and later called it “the biggest blunder of his life.”

Fast forward 90 years and the world’s most powerful digital camera has photographed the very thing that Einstein felt was the biggest blunder of his life: dark energy.

Another theory, however, suggests that dark energy is a new force and will eventually fade away just as it arose, but that is somewhat beside the point.

The point is, there is a new, totally badass camera that can photograph the affects of dark energy on space and time — and do so from a mountaintop in Chile.

What is Dark Energy?

According to NASA’s Astrophysics division, more is unknown than is known about dark energy. We know it is there because of how it affects the universe’s expansion, but that’s about it. Most scientists currently believe that roughly 70 percent of the Universe is dark energy, 25 percent is dark matter, and the rest — everything we’ve ever observed from Earth — makes up the remaining 5 percent.

Makes ya feel kind of small, eh?

Why is the Dark Energy Camera Significant?

The official press release states:

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time.

The Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, and light from over 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light years away is able to be viewed in each snapshot.

In December, after the camera has been fully tested, scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey ever undertaken. Over the next five years they will basically create a detailed color map of one-eighth of the sky, discovering and measuring 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters and 4,000 supernovae.

Read more about the Dark Energy Camera and check out the video below for a cool timelapse of the camera’s construction below:

Photo: The Blanco telescope in Chile. Credit: T. Abbott and NOAO/AURA/NSF

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On an expedition sponsored by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the vessel will continue drilling off Japan’s Shimokita Peninsula for three more weeks hoping to go as far as 7,220 feet below the seafloor. It set off in July.

But unlike the kind of drilling most of us are familiar with, the Chikyu and her passengers are not looking for oil or other natural resources ripe for exploitation.  The Agency explains that the purpose of the project is to understand carbon cycling, methane and natural gas below the sea floor.  These issues are “not only directly linked to issues of Japan’s energy resources but [are] also an important scientific area for understanding past global warming events, ecosystem changes, and for building a future sustainable low-carbon society.” Named the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition, Expedition 337, the work is being conducted within the framework of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program.

The excitement behind the discoveries was clear in statements made by scientist, Fumio Inagaki. “This scientific vessel has tremendous potentials to explore very deep realms that humans have never studied before. The deep samples are precious, and I am confident that our challenges will extend our systematic understanding of the nature of life and earth.”

Co-Chief scientist Kai-Uwe Hinrichs from the University of Bremen, Germany echoed those sentiments.  “I am very glad that I am here today and could witness this wonderful and important moment. Everybody on the ship worked really hard to make this happen. And, I am very pleased about the high quality of the core samples, which show only minimal drilling disturbance. This is very important for our research.”

I have to imagine that Inagaki and his colleagues have not seen James Cameron’s The Abyss – if they had they might have thought twice about whether to venture so deep into the unknown, especially without Ed Harris to protect them.

Featured Image via Shutterstock

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According to Xinhua News, Hong Kong government scientists announced last Thursday that they had located the supervolcano in southeastern China. The volcano, known as the High Island Supervolcano, spewed forth 1,300 cubic kilometers of ash about 140 million years ago — enough to blanket all of Hong Kong.

Last Thursday’s press release says that the resulting caldera suggests that the original diameter of the High Island Supervolcano spanned a distance of about 18 kilometers (or just over 11 miles).

A handout from Hong Kong’s Geotechnical Engineering Office said that the supervolcanic eruption on China’s southeastern seaboard would have produced a global environmental impact and could be related to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I don’t know a T-Rex tough enough not to run from a cataclysm like that.

What makes a volcano “super”?

For a volcano to be classified as a “supervolcano,” it has to have the potential to eject more than 1000 cubic kilometers, or 240 cubic miles, of volcanic material. The city of New York, meaning all five boroughs — Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island — is 300 square miles. We’re talking about almost that many cubic miles. In other words, a LOT of volcanic material.

The scope of such an eruption is one thousand times greater than any volcanic eruption seen by modern humans. The power behind such an eruption lies deep within the Earth’s crust, where gargantuan chambers of magma form under the intense 2500 degree Fahrenheit heat rising from the planet’s mantle.

Is an extinct volcano still dangerous?

It’s important to note the difference between extinct and dormant volcanoes — but the determination between the two can be difficult. Volcanoes that no longer have a magma supply are extinct, while dormant volcanoes may still have a magma supply but have not shown activity for a long time.

Scientists have determined the High Island Supervolcano is extinct, and that it poses no risk of erupting again. This means that people living in southeast China (and any lingering dinosaurs) can breathe easy.

Main photo credit: dmourati/Flickr

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Now, scientists say they may be a step closer to overcoming this challenge as well. Scientists at Harvard University have developed a cyborg-like tissue that can facilitate cell growth, while simultaneously measuring the ongoing activity and status of those cells.

The study, published recently in the journal Nature Materials, details the researchers’ attempts to embed a three-dimensional network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues. By introducing this nanoscale “scaffolding” into the tissue, the scientists were able to create cyborg-like tissue capable of detecting electrical signals generated by cells deep within the tissue, and to measure changes in those signals facilitated by cardio- or neuro-stimulating drugs.

“In the body, the autonomic nervous system keeps track of pH, chemistry, oxygen, and other factors, and triggers responses as needed,” Daniel Kohane, a Harvard Medical School professor in the Department of Anesthesia at Children’s Hospital Boston, told the Harvard Gazette. “We need to be able to mimic the kind of intrinsic feedback loops the body has evolved in order to maintain fine control at the cellular and tissue level.”

Although previous research has allowed scientists to grow tissues on top of electronic frameworks, these attempts only resulted in 2D cultures, which limited usefulness. With the most recent advance, the resulting material was spongy and porous enough to be seeded with heart and nerve cells — and to allow those cells to grow in 3-D cultures.

As you might imagine, there are number of ways in which accurate recreations of human tissue could be of use to the scientific community. The Harvard team responsible for the cyborg tissue say pharmaceutical testing is likely to be a big one. We can only wonder if someday this advancement will be the first major step toward large-scale androids that can sense environmental changes just like humans.

Featured photo credit: kaibara87/Flickr

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Mr. Tesla held various electric engineering jobs throughout Europe before moving to the United States in 1884. Landing in New York City with just a few cents in his pocket, he found employment with Thomas Edison thanks to a recommendation letter that, if truly written, stands as one of the best in history—Charles Batechelor, a contemporary of Edison and a talented engineer and inventor, is supposed to have written to Edison:

“I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”

While working for Edison, Mr. Tesla made major contributions in engine and electrical generation and transmission technology. He and Edison had a falling out and he started his own company in 1886. He continued plowing through science, technology and engineering, making huge leaps in electricity generation (he was transmitting power wirelessly to street lights in a time when most of the world got around on foot or by horse), radio transmission (he built the world’s first transmitter), and computer science (he invented the AND gate, whose cousin the NAND gate forms the base of all that is possible with computers).

Volumes have been and will be written about the breadth and width of the contributions Nikola Tesla made to our world (a good case is brilliantly put forth here by The Oatmeal), but I’ll focus on a few of my favorites here (read a full list of his ~300 patents here). Here are three amazing things invented by Nikola Tesla.

The electronic logic gate
All digital technology, from the computer or smart phone that you’re using to read this to the microwaves that heat up our leftovers to the pacemakers that help regulate irregular heartbeats is built on a sea of 1s and 0s—the binary building blocks of our modern life. Zoom down far enough onto a circuit board and you find a network of connected “logic gates,” tiny little structures that pass and regulate electric current in different ways. You can imagine each gate having a gate keeper that allows the current through if the conditions are right. An AND gate will allow electricity to flow (which is seen as being “on” or 1) only if all of its inputs are flowing with electricity (no electricity is taken as “off” or 0). An OR gate will allow the electricity to flow if at least one of its inputs is “on.” In addition to AND and OR, there are also NOR, NAND, XOR, XNOR and NOT gates. These handful of logic gates can be assembled to do any kind of computation (in fact you can actually build any other gate using just the NAND gate) possible.

Computer chips can easily have billions of microscopic logic gates, all connected in a way that allows them to do the work we design them to do. Logic gates move the electric signals that we abstract our lives on to. As you are reading this article, an untold number of logic gates are clicking on and off to make it happen. There is a connection of logic gates between your eye and my typing fingers, an almost unimaginable number of OR, AND, and XOR gates channeling electric intention to drive the computer I am writing on, the servers and routers that channel my words around the internet, through to the computer, cell phone, or refrigerator that you’re reading this story on.

Tesla invented the logic gate as part of wirelessly controlled miniature boat that he unveiled in 1898. His invention, which he called a “teleautomaton,” was the first machine built capable of being controlled wirelessly with radio waves. His need to control the signals between the boat and the wirelessly connected driver lead him to devise a part that would toggle an electric signal one way or another depending on a set of prescribed circumstances (if all incoming signals are “on,” toggle “on,” else toggle “off”). Tesla’s logic gate was refined, shrunk and propagated throughout the world, but at the most abstract level it hasn’t changed a bit.

The wireless transfer of electricity and information
As the calendar clicked over from 1899 to 1900, Tesla was busy planning the design and construction of a tower that would, if it worked as he thought it would, revolutionize our world, bringing wireless communication and electricity to anyone on the planet more than a hundred years before the iPhone. Tesla was given 200 acres of land in Long Island by James S. Warden, a rich lawyer, banker and land developer, to use to build laboratories, work space and the Wardenclyffe Tower, his most ambitious project at the time. The Wardenclyffe Tower was designed to transmit both electricity and information through the air, allowing any device equipped with an antennae to operate without being physically plugged into the energy grid and to gain access to a worldwide communications network that sounds eerily similar to our modern day system. In an 1908 interview, Tesla described his proposed system:

As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction.

Tesla raised funds for his project from investors like J.P. Morgan and John Jacob Astor, then began construction. The Wardenclyffe Tower was nearly completed in 1904 when most of Tesla’s investors withdrew their financial support. Tesla was unable to raise more money and the facility was abandoned by 1911.

Wardenclyffe has been in the news recently thanks to a campaign lead by the popular internet cartoonist The Oatmeal, who is raising money through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to purchase the Wardenclyffe grounds. The Oatmeal, responding to the possibility that the land could be commercially developed, rallied the fundraising campaign around the idea of turning it into a museum dedicated to telling Nikola Tesla’s story. As of the time of this article’s publishing, $TK has already been raised toward the $850 thousand goal (there is a matching state grant).

Tesla Oscillator
In 1898, Tesla claimed he had built and deployed a small oscillating device that, when attached to his office and operating, nearly shook down the building and everything around it. His oscillator was a small device weighing just a few pounds that would create countering force on a fune-tunable level (think of a free-standing piston popping back and forth that you could control with a dial). Tesla said that he was able to tune the timing of the oscillator to the natural harmonic frequency of the building in such of way that each small oscillator motion added just a little more energy to the wave of flex in the building. Given enough little pushes, even the largest structure could be shaken apart. Make the pushes big enough and maybe even the ground itself could be shaken apart.

That’s what Tesla said happened—his device produced waves of energy that spread to the buildings around his office, causing people to panic at the unyielding earth quake. Realizing the potential for large scale havoc, Tesla said he took a hammer to the oscillator to disable it, instructing his employees to claim ignorance to the cause of the tremors if asked.

Sadly, Tesla never properly demonstrated his oscillator (he told the story of the shaken building years after it was to have happened) and eventually sank into financial ruin as his health and mental clarity degraded with age.

The TV show “Mythbusters” spent some time exploring the idea of the Tesla Oscillator and were able to build a small, 6-lb. oscillating device that created strong vibrations throughout a large steel bridge. It’s not a hard jump to the idea of a larger device (what happens at 25 lbs., 50 lbs., 100 lbs.?) being able to shake loose the bridge. What would happen with a large, 1,000-lb. oscillator? 10,000 lbs.? A better question might be “how much does the oscillator have to weigh in order to cause a proper earthquake?”

Main image credit: Rex Herbert; logic gate credit: Stefan506; Wardenclyffe remains credit: Americasroof; oscillator credit: FreeInfoSociety.com

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The laboratory, however, remained and recently came up for sale. In an attempt to reclaim the property and turn it into a museum and educational dedicated to the scientist, the non-profit organization, Friends of Science East, is trying to buy it. But at $1.6 million, the Shoreham, New York land will not come cheap.  With New York State’s pledge to match up to $850,000 in funds for the purchase, the organization found itself with the price cut in half but still steep.

Enter online cartoonist Matthew Inman, known by fans as “The Oatmeal,” and suddenly raising that $850,000 is becoming not a question of if, but only when.  Within only a few days, the fundraiser is less than $150,000 away from its final goal. (At the time of writing, the indiegogo fundraiser campaign had raked in $707,502.)

Inman calls Tesla “the greatest geek who ever lived” and is trying to entice corporate sponsorship to the project by comparing it to saving “a herd of drowning kittens.” He says he is driving the fundraiser as “a bit of an apology [to Tesla] from mankind for being a bit crappy, greedy, and myopic while he was alive.”

Image via IndieGogo

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At the Senate hearing on climate change yesterday, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama (who has received $113,200 from oil and gas companies so far this year) responded to Senator Barbara Boxer’s informed words about the percentage of climate scientists accepting of anthropogenic climate change. From ThinkProgress:

Sessions: Madam Chairman, I am offended by that, I’m offended by that — I didn’t say anything about the scientists. I said the data shows [sic] it is not warming to the degree that a lot of people predicted, not close to that much…

Boxer: The conclusion that you’re coming to is shared by 1-2 percent of the scientists. You shouldn’t be offended by that. That’s the fact.

Sessions: I don’t believe that’s correct.

Take a look:

It’s a sad, sad day when our elected officials are “offended” by the idea that climate change is caused by human behavior. How can we ever expect to move forward on solutions when denialist dinosaurs like Sessions are holding office in this country? Personally, I am “offended” that this guy is in a leadership position at all.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Things started to perk up a bit around Europe after a few chaotic centuries. The High Middle Ages, which began around 1000 AD, was a time marked by population growth and advances made in the worlds of art, science, business and technology. Stone castles sprung up across the land and engineers were hired to build clever machines of war for wealthy lords and leaders. The nobility expanded their financial support of scholarly and artistic work while the growing commercial sector helped drive many technological jumps in their pursuit of a better bottom line.

It’s easy to forget the debt we owe to early society for the work they did in advancing human knowledge. We wouldn’t have computers if we hadn’t figured out how to measure the passage of time. We couldn’t have sent a man to the moon if we never invented glasses. Take a little time now and read over six really important inventions of the Middle Ages.

The Heavy Plough
The plough was a major breakthrough in the history of humankind and allowed people to greatly expand their fields and grow crops in soils too hard for hand digging. Early ploughs were, more or less, a pointy stick dragged behind a draft animal, cutting lightly through the soil. A farmer would walk along with the plough and lift the plough blade so that it didn’t get caught on rocks or roots. These ploughs were fine for lighter soils but had trouble in harder soils.

Enter the heavy plough, which uses wheels to support a heavier blade. The exact place and time of the first use of the heavy plough are not known, but it’s safe to peg its introduction to somewhere in Asia around 200 AD. The Romans were rocking the heavy plough not too long after that, and by roughly 600 AD, the rest of Europe was on board. Farmers were able to open up extensive new fields thanks to the heavy plough, boosting crop yields and population numbers (aka all of our distant relatives).

Water Mills
Water mills use a turning wheel spoked with water-catching paddles to generate power for operating machines like grinders and saws. These mills were developed by the Greeks before being used throughout the Roman empire. Though they were invented hundreds of years before the Middle Ages, their numbers exploded during this time. By around 1000 AD there were tens of thousands of mills harnessing river and tidal power throughout England, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The technology invented by the Greeks was further refined during the Middle Ages and was used to power tanneries, blast furnaces, forge mills and paper mills which evolved into the machinery used in today’s factories and facilities.

The Hourglass
The exact origins of the hourglass aren’t clear, but it’s generally accepted that it was widely adopted in Europe by the end of the High Middle Ages (~1500 AD). The hourglass was a popular choice for sailors who used it to mark the passage of time which allowed them to determine their longitude (location east to west). The hourglass was preferred over earlier water clocks because their sands were unaffected by the rocking motion of an ocean-bound ship. They were used on shore to measure time for church services, cooking, and work tasks.

Mechanical clocks supplanted the hourglass, though it wasn’t until the 18th century that a suitable marine replacement was found.

Liquor
Distillation describes the separation of different liquids within a mixture, usually through the application of heat. It’s an important technique used in science and industry (oil refineries distill crude oil into a large number of components like gasoline, kerosine, paraffin wax and plastic-base) but has also given the world the gift (or curse, depending on how you look at it) of liquor. Whiskey, brandy, gin, rum and vodka are all produced by distilling mashed grains, potatoes, molasses, wine or fruits.

Distillation was first worked out by the Greeks and Egyptians but wasn’t used to produce distilled spirits until 1200 AD or so with the invention of liquors like Irish whiskey and German brandy. We had a pretty solid handle on distilling liquors by the end of the Middle Ages. Although modern distilleries are obviously more advanced than the ones used in the Middle Ages, the basic techniques haven’t changed much from “heat up the liquid and separate its components when they boil at different temperatures.”

Eyeglasses
As someone born with relatively bad eye sight, I am particularly thankful to 13th century Italians for coming up with the eyeglasses. They were first documented in the early 1300s with early models made to be held up by hand or pinched on the nose. It wasn’t until the 1700s that designs featuring arms that bent around the nose became widely used. Life for billions of people around the world (including the author) would be a dismal, blurry affair if not for the humble eyeglasses.

The Printing Press
Unlike the other items on this list, the origins of the modern printing press can easily be tracked to one man and one place: Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz, Germany. Around 1440 Mr. Gutenberg developed his now famous press which allowed, for the first time, industrial scale printing. It’s hard to emphasize how important the invention of the Gutenberg press was to the development of the modern world. The press meant ideas could be spread through books and pamphlets, newspapers and journals. Science, technology and history all saw great leaps as institutional knowledge began to accrue around the world. Without Gutenberg, there would be no internet. And without the internet you wouldn’t be reading this article right now. Also, no pictures of funny cats and bacon.

Main image credit: Bbadgett; heavy plough credit: Wien/Vienna pd-us; water mill credit: Andreas Trepte; hourglass credit: Brian Jackson/Shutterstock; liquor credit: Ziko; eyeglasses credit: Brenda Gottsabend/Flickr; printing press credit: artnet.com

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