Cheerful Curmudgeon

What happens when lightening strikes an airplane?

According to Edward J Rupke, senior engineer at Lighting Technologies, Inc., not much. (Image courtesy of Edward J. Rupke and borrowed from Scientific American.com.)

Although passengers and crew may see a flash and hear a loud noise if lightning strikes their plane, nothing serious should happen because of the careful lightning protection engineered into the aircraft and its sensitive components.

I have been asked that question many times and, though I have never heard anything to make me worry much about it, I did not know the details of the answer. You can read the full article at Scientific American. Ask the Experts: Physics: What happens when lightning strikes an airplane?

I’m a space junkie so I was thrilled to read in Slashdot

Jivecat writes: “All those extra cameras NASA has added to the Space Shuttle to watch for debris impacts have yielded what may be the coolest Shuttle launch footage ever. The forward-facing view from the right-hand SRB shows, at about the 2:58 mark, booster separation and Discovery zooming away. Other views are available at the main mission site.”

Nature.com reports, in Geometric whirlpools revealed – Recipe for making symmetrical holes in water is easy, that it is surprisingly easy to make “holes” in a bucket of water that have all kinds of interesting shapes.

The researchers found that once the plate was spinning so fast that the water span out to the sides, creating a hole of air in the middle, the dry patch wasn’t circular as might be expected. Instead it evolved, as the bucket’s spin sped up, from an ellipse to a three-sided star, to a square, a pentagon, and, at the highest speeds investigated, a hexagon.

Photo credit: T.R.N. Jansson

From talking with my high school aged sons, it sounds like high school science classes have become downright boring. I suspect budgets and fear of liability law suits have chased the hands-on lessons out of the classrooms. That is truly a shame since I fondly remember many experiments from my school physics, chemistry and biology classes. Perhaps this new phenomenon will entertain and educate future generations.

This is really important and the last day of the program. See the web site for complete details.

National TBIS Key Exchange Program

Exciting, Breaking News, from the Weizmann Institute. Scientists have finally figured out how a material cracks:

Physicists attempting to find a formula for the dynamics of cracking, to allow them to predict how a crack will advance in a given material, have faced a serious obstacle. The difficulty lies in pinning down, objectively, the fundamental directionality of the cracking process: From any given angle of observation or starting point of measurement, the crack will look different and yield different results from any other. Scientists all over the world have experimented with cracking but, until now, no one has successfully managed to come up with a method for analyzing the progression of a forming crack.

Perhaps now someone will be able to bake matzo which actually breaks along the lines.

ScienceDaily reports in Deciphering The Mystery Of Bee Flight that scientists have finally figured out how bees fly.

Their wings beat over a short arc of about 90 degrees, but ridiculously fast, at around 230 beats per second. Fruit flies, in comparison, are 80 times smaller than honeybees, but flap their wings only 200 times a second.

When bees want to generate more power–for example, when they are carting around a load of nectar or pollen–they increase the arc of their wing strokes, but keep flapping at the same rate.

and

“This is one of those cases where you can make a mistake by looking at an animal and assuming that it is perfectly adapted. An alternate hypothesis is that bee ancestors inherited this kind of muscle and now present-day bees must live with its peculiarities,” Dickinson [professor of bioengineering at California Institute of Technology] says.

Maybe “survival of the fittest” may have to be replaced with “survival of the most persistent.”

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

When the Romans invaded ancient Judea, thick forests of date palms towering up to 80 feet high and 7 miles wide covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south. The tree so defined the local economy that Emperor Vespasian celebrated the conquest by minting the “Judea Capta,” a special bronze coin that showed the Jewish state as a weeping woman beneath a date palm.

Today, nothing remains of those mighty forests. The date palms in modern Israel were imported, mainly from California. The ancient Judean date, renowned for its succulence and famed for its many medicinal properties, had been lost to history.

Until now.

Elaine Solowey, a UCLA-educated botanist, living in Israel and specializing in the study of ancient plants, has successfully germinated 2,000 year-old Judean date seeds which were found on Masada.

Read the article. Imagine being able to touch (and maybe eat) a piece of Biblical history.

New Scientist ran an article on Monday titled, Mission to build a simulated brain begins. It opens with,

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday.

The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design.

The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

On the one hand, it reads like bad sci-fi. “Mission to outer space begins!” or some such grandiose scheme involving peta-hyper-chrono-drive spaceships and (gasp) mechanical brains!

On the other hand, it strikes too close to the heart dismiss lightly. We can get so caught up with fights like evolution vs. creationism that we lose sight of the real mysteries in the universe. The question of how brains actually work has intrigued me for decades.

I remember trying to get a handle on it back in college. I took two 400 level courses at the same time, Artificial Intelligence and Psychology of Thinking. (It took a bit of finagling for me to get into the psych course, since I had not taken any of the prerequisites, so here is a belated thanks to my parents. I told the professor that they had degrees in psych and social work so of course I was prepared for his class. Fortunately, the prof bought it.) But I digress.

I hoped that if I took AI and psychology at the same time, I might learn how our brains work from two perspectives and thereby gain a deeper understanding. I ended up being deeply disappointed. I learned that the shrinks knew more about aphasia than thought, knew a bit about what pieces of the brain were responsible for “vision” or “hearing” or “speech” but didn’t have a clue how any of them worked. From the geeks, I learned how to play go, that they didn’t have any solid ideas about how a brain “knew” stuff, and that the computers of the day weren’t anywhere near fast enough to approach solving the problem.

Today my hope is rekindled. Over the last few months, I have bumped into literature that the brain works more like an orchestra than a digital computer (The Music of the Brain). This seems much more reasonable to me. Rather than try to force the brain to work like the model that we have at hand, we may have found a model which more closely matches reality.

“Blue Brain” may just be a key component in this discovery journey. We may finally have the computing power to actually test our theories.

We’ve come a long way in the 25 years since I was at the University of Michigan. I can’t wait to see how much we know 25 years from now.