As you can see, although it looks ok, my first go wasn’t a total success. There are 5 questions, each with three choices so that means a possible 3^5 = 729 different versions. On my second go I got hands up but I’m not saying how until I’ve sold it for a lot of money.
This isn’t too serious- more for bright kids but it is interesting and lovely illustrated. If you really want to design a roller coaster , I suggest you get one of the “Roller Coaster Tycoon” game series. There you can design it to be ultra elaborate of different designs and as extreme or not as you like.
Popularity: 13% [?]
It is believed that our ancestors originated in Africa and about 60,000 years ago slowly spread through the world.
In the last couple of years National Geographic Magazine and IBM created a 5 year research project called The Genographic Project to try and trace through DNA the path’s that early man took.
The Genographic Project has recently published a report on human mitochondrial DNA data from the first 18 months of the project, published in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. Most DNA is contained in the cell but separate parts of the cell called organelles (akin to organs in a body) such as Mitochondria also contain DNA. Interesting stuff.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Gerhards.net is a German and English website about space and astronomy. Using data from EUMETSAT the site displays monthly cloud animations on Earth.
This is fascinating stuff- watching the equatorial winds going from East to West while further north and south they go in the opposite direction. The satellite is geostationary positioned on the equator at 0 degrees latitude so it shows the view from the UK in the north, over Africa down to Antartica.
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It has never really been easy to show just how devastating a nuclear weapon is, in film. The TV series Heroes in episode three uses the approaching clouds of dust (also used in Battlestar Galactica), a popular method I think, since footage of the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11. Understandably, there are few survivors to the close up of a real nuke blast!
The Nuclear Weapon Archive is a very detailed look at Nuclear Weapons with statistics, list of arsenals, articles with photos and comment. I didn’t appreciate for instance that 130,000 weapons have been built since 1945. No technical specifications of weapon designs are found on this site. All information is from public sources, or based on reasonable inference or speculation from public information.
A google search of the site reveals 331 pages. My only complaint about the site is the poor navigation. Like many sites that are labours of love, it has evolved and is in my opinion, in need of a good redesign! But the content can not be flawed. Excellent stuff.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Since it was discovered that dropping mentos mints into a bottle of diet coke releases the co2 in the diet coke very rapidly, turning it into into a water cannon (really!) there has been an arms race to see who can create the most spectacular display of it.
I suspect that this video may prove to be the best one so far, at least until the next one. With help from Coca Cola and Mentos (No doubt they supplied a lot more than the the 251 bottles of diet coke and the 1500 + Mentos used in the video), to the guys at eepybird who made the video (and starred in it).
The reason for this reaction is nucleation where the surface of a mentos mint is able to help release the super saturated co2 stored in the diet coke very very quickly.
Don’t swallow diet coke and mentos at the same time- it is dangerous! (There are videos of people doing this I understand!).
For a humourous take on Mentos/Diet Coke experiments and videos here’s something I wrote!
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Sometimes when writing for this blog, I come across something that’s totally new yet has been around yonks. Like a way to start a fire with compressed air!
This isn’t a new thing, it’s called a Fire piston - a cylinder with a place for a piece of wood at the end. it was patented in England in 1807 and several native tribes also developed it. Fire pistons can be made of wood, plastic or metal.
How does it work? Basically it just compress a volume of air and the temperature obeys Boyle’s law and rises to around 400 degrees C, enough to light the wood. There’s a nice animation here.
Link (To more photos of Firepistons on a different site)
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Evolution is a principle that sticks in the craw of some religions. After Intelligent Design and trying to force teaching of creationism have both failed, the next attack on Evolution is to try and hide the evidence from public view.
The Telegraph newspaper reports that in Kenya the 6 million strong Pentecostal church wants Dr Richard Leakey’s ground-breaking finds, housed in a museum near Nairobi relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing. The collection includes the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7 million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Dr Leakey’s team in 1984 at Nariokotome, near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.
Popularity: 4% [?]