The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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NASA wants you to know they’re pretty handy here on Earth, too. This here shows a way to make trains and other things that use big, strong bearings safer, by using tricks we learned on Skylab. Before it crashed.

As they explain:

Marhsall Space Flight Center’s scientists have developed a detection concept based on the fact that bearing defects excite resonant frequency of rolling elements of the bearing as they impact the defect. By detecting resonant frequency and sub…

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This is the bus that takes the astronauts to work at the space station. It’s a long commute for a longer shift – they took two days to orbit Earth before getting into position, and then they’ll spend five months up there.

The Soyuz MS-08 rocket launched with Expedition 55 Soyuz Commander Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos and astronauts Ricky Arnold and Drew Feustel of NASA, Wednesday, March 21, 2018, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

From the NASA Image of the Day…

From De formatione ovi, et pulli, by Fabricius ab Aquapendente, also known as Hieronymus Fabricius or Girolamo Fabrizio d’Acquapendente. He was an Italian surgeon who helped found modern embryology at around the same time the first English colonies in North America were still just an idea, and cutting-edge transportation technology consisted of figuring out a way to stick another sail or two on a ship.

I found these eggs hidden in the Wellcome Library.

This is an animated gif showing a ring singularity or “ringularity” of a spinning black hole. A black hole that doesn’t spin will collapse into a point; a spinning black hole (also called a “Kerr black hole” after the mathematician who described it) will bulge at the equator and create something weird: a ring with zero thickness but a non-zero radius. It’s big in one direction, but not there in another.

The center of gravity will appear to be different depending on where an observer is r…

SONG: “Titanium” (penitential cover)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: This has no scientific source; it’s a penitential cover for being late for the February song. (I think I’m still one behind from November.) It’s originally by David Guetta, though people might know it best because Sia sang it.

ABSTRACT:
This song should be squarely in the “unhip” bracket. It’s not quite old enough to be cool in a nostalgic retro way, and not quite new enough to have been in the top 40 in recent memory. Anythin…

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Funny I should have found this image today, right after discussing Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (a book bloody and wonderful, including cameos by Merlin Sylvestris, Sami shamans, heirloom apples, and Hermann Goering) with my wife.

Not so much because this picture has a goshawk in it – I went looking for pictures of Astur paluvibarus intentionally – but because it’s got one posed up front with an osprey. The discussion which I was having revolved around whether people …