“When the ball hits the water it boils a small amount of water immediately around it, creating a layer of water vapour. At the right combination of ball and water temperatures this layer becomes stable, so the ball is completely encased in the gas. We call this a Leidenfrost state.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-hydrodynamics.html#jCp
There are 137 large wildfires currently raging across the North American West, burning a total of 7.8 million acres. That’s not yet as bad as 2015, which saw 8.4.
A newly discovered species of prehistoric ant had anatomy that including a lethal feeding apparatus reinforced with metal.
via Meet the vampire ant from hell with huge jaws and a metal horn | New Scientist.
The lens restores clear vision at all distances without any visual quality problems. It can auto-regulate within the eye by connecting to the muscles that change the curvature of our natural lenses, which allows it to focus at different ranges – potentially much wider ranges than our natural sight is capable.
via Bionic lens can make vision three times better than 20-20 | NextBigFuture.com.
The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is using a revolutionary new climate modeling algorithm known as the finite-volume cubed-sphere (FV3) dynamical core to predict hurricane patterns.
via Irma and Harvey are Putting Experimental New Forecasting Tech to the Test – Motherboard.
Yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years. It is currently due to erupt which would create a global winter and millions would starve. An ambitious multi-generational solution is to cool the hotspot by installing geothermal plants.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a-supervolcano
X-CLASS SOLAR FLARE: Amateur astronomer Philippe Tosi photographed the sun on Sept. 6th, and his timing was perfect. He caught sunspot AR2673 in mid-explosion, producing the most powerful solar flare in more than a decade. His image of the X9-category blast, with Earth inserted for comparison, highlights the advantages of being 93 million miles away from the sun. The explosion could have swallowed our entire planet with room to spare. Via http://spaceweather.com/
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are some of the universe’s strangest phenomena: powerful radio signals that flash from distant space for milliseconds and then disappear. They have been attributed to everything from black holes to extraterrestrial intelligence.Because they’re so brief, and because radio telescopes can only watch a small area of the sky at a time, only about 2 dozen FRBs have ever been detected. Of those, only one has been observed to repeat: FRB 121102, which resides in a dwarf galaxy about 3 3 billion light years away from Earth.
via We’ve just seen 15 new mysterious cosmic radio bursts from space | New Scientist.
