Cool shit thanks to Science

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Tue May 26, 2009 6:29 am

Diamonds from Dead People If my wife-to-be ever dies I'd be sorely tempted to have this done and keep it for an engagement ring for wife number 2. Just because it would be funny.

I'm going straight to hell aren't I?

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Thu May 28, 2009 5:31 am

I want to be turned into a diamond when I die - talk about heirloom jewelry.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu May 28, 2009 5:39 am

It's probably a lot cheaper than having a body-in-the-ground funeral.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu May 28, 2009 5:52 am

My preference would be for my body to be used as a medical cadaver.

Barring that possibility, I can see the appeal of turning your remains into a useful or appealing keepsake. I'd be more inclined to suggest that my skull be turned into a drinking cup or something, though. It would give more entertainment to generations who didn't know me personally.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 28, 2009 6:03 am

cracked did "The 6 coolest things you can do with your dead body", which mentioned the diamond thing, there's also loaded into bullets, fireworks display, turned into pencils, power a city, and get plasticized.

I'm tempted to, when I die, assuming I got married and had a kid, to get turned into a diamond ring for my wife and set of pencils for my kid, who I'll have raised to game and kept my friend who uses pens and white out on character sheets away from. The pencils actually come with a box that has a built in sharpener and compartment for the shavings.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:My preference would be for my body to be used as a medical cadaver.

Barring that possibility, I can see the appeal of turning your remains into a useful or appealing keepsake. I'd be more inclined to suggest that my skull be turned into a drinking cup or something, though. It would give more entertainment to generations who didn't know me personally.

you know, I occasionally look for skulls online for that exact purpose...

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri May 29, 2009 12:23 pm

I want the gem.

My father was cremated, and we spread him into a tributary of the Rogue River, when we blessed our house. My step father was also cremated, half in a steel jar in the ground in the city he worked and half to be put in the river My mother and spouse also want cremation.

My spouse's family had a can of 'Bob' that they were firing out of cannons. Apparently there was both alot of him, and he wanted to be made into gunpowder. So the did. And fire 'one for Bob' at every roundup.

-Crissa

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Sat May 30, 2009 5:52 am

Well it's apparently 3000 is about the cheapest, and that's before the cremation. Assuming that's cheaper than a plot and headstone, yeah I'd say it's a deal.

My first choice for disposing of my remains would be donated to science, but this would be better than wasting some perfectly good ground to be stuck somewhere no one will see.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Fri Jul 03, 2009 4:41 am

Brain controlled transportation

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Fri Jul 03, 2009 5:25 pm

ckafrica wrote:Diamonds from Dead People If my wife-to-be ever dies I'd be sorely tempted to have this done and keep it for an engagement ring for wife number 2. Just because it would be funny.

I'm going straight to hell aren't I?

HAHAHAHAH, this was talked about on Bloomberg about two years ago and we kept cracking up at my last place ofwork. Apparently as the website says, you don't really have to be dead for it to work. You just need a lock of hair. My co-worker at that time, who was awesome, explored some and found out that you could also make pet gems which cost less but were still extraordinarily expensive. Boston Legal made an episode about this because the terms of service apparently doesn't specify whose carbon is being used in the diamond. So the diamond that was made was from either someone else's cremation or from a general carbon pile. The whole scam had our whole branch laughing for months. We used to threaten each other we'd shave the other bald and send in to be made into a life gem. (never mind the exorbitant cost that we weren't going to pay.)

On a personal note: I will probably see if I can somehow donate my body to a research study of some sort.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Mon Jan 30, 2012 8:36 pm

'Smart paint': http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 131505.htm

Anyone know how this stuff actually works? Changes in conductivity based on cracking or surface deformation?

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Jan 30, 2012 10:52 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Anyone know how this stuff actually works? Changes in conductivity based on cracking or surface deformation?

I would guess so, but offhand, the resistance properties of a carbon nanotube was not something that was around when I was in college. My guess is that the resistance would change when stretched which would occur with structural deformation.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jan 31, 2012 1:47 am

Doesn't really matter. It's cool and all, but the data collection and interpretation is the harrd part. It doesn't matter how cheap the paint is if you need to spend hundreds of engineering hours to develop custom algorithms for each bridge.

Essence · Post by **Essence** » Fri Jan 04, 2013 8:59 pm

K-k-k-k-k-k-killler Necro!

Science has replicated Dark Matter -- or something very like it -- in the lab, incidentally also discovering anti-gravity and more crazy Pyramid-related voodoo in the process! All by just getting some potassium really fucking cold!

http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas- ... ro-1.12146

It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery.

Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no energy at all, and higher temperatures correspond to higher average energies.

However, by the 1950s, physicists working with more exotic systems began to realise that this isn't always true: Technically, you read off the temperature of a system from a graph that plots the probabilities of its particles being found with certain energies. Normally, most particles have average or near-average energies, with only a few particles zipping around at higher energies. In theory, if the situation is reversed, with more particles having higher, rather than lower, energies, the plot would flip over and the sign of the temperature would change from a positive to a negative absolute temperature, explains Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.
Peaks and valleys
Schneider and his colleagues reached such sub-absolute-zero temperatures with an ultracold quantum gas made up of potassium atoms. Using lasers and magnetic fields, they kept the individual atoms in a lattice arrangement. At positive temperatures, the atoms repel, making the configuration stable. The team then quickly adjusted the magnetic fields, causing the atoms to attract rather than repel each other. “This suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” says Schneider. “It’s like walking through a valley, then instantly finding yourself on the mountain peak.”

At positive temperatures, such a reversal would be unstable and the atoms would collapse inwards. But the team also adjusted the trapping laser field to make it more energetically favourable for the atoms to stick in their positions. This result, described today in Science1, marks the gas’s transition from just above absolute zero to a few billionths of a Kelvin below absolute zero.

Wolfgang Ketterle, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who has previously demonstrated negative absolute temperatures in a magnetic system2, calls the latest work an “experimental tour de force”. Exotic high-energy states that are hard to generate in the laboratory at positive temperatures become stable at negative absolute temperatures — “as though you can stand a pyramid on its head and not worry about it toppling over,” he notes — and so such techniques can allow these states to be studied in detail. “This may be a way to create new forms of matter in the laboratory,” Ketterle adds.

If built, such systems would behave in strange ways, says Achim Rosch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, who proposed the technique used by Schneider and his team3. For instance, Rosch and his colleagues have calculated that whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature, some atoms will move upwards, apparently defying gravity4.

Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,” he says. “This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely.”

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 1:57 am

Essence wrote:All by just getting some potassium really fucking cold!

That's not even the best part. They only made it really fucking cold so they could make it really fucking hot; any system with a negative temp is "hotter" than any system with a positive temp, as energy will flow from the negative temp system to the positive one. After taking their supercooled potassium, arranging it into a special shape, and flipping a switch, it likely became the hottest potassium on the planet. It just so happens that the only way to make super hot potassium is with super cold potassium, because too much heat energy would get in the way of keeping the potassium hot.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 6:59 am

My mental image of the process involves a witch doctor sacrificing a chicken.

Shit just ain't natural, man...

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Wed Jan 16, 2013 7:00 am

Apparently we can now define mass from the same particles and constants used to define time and length. A new experiment can measure the frequency of two identical particles in motion, which is a function of their velocity and mass. This provides a measure of mass independent of physical artifacts such as the official kilogram prototype. You still need two cesium-133 atoms, but any two cesium-133 atoms will do.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Jan 16, 2013 2:15 pm

My university is making a giant, shielded underground pool of xenon to find dark matter. With several hundred pounds of xenon and enough lead, rock, and water to block most every cosmic rays, they expect to get something like three-five flashes a year from dark matter interaction.

They're planning to go up to two tons of xenon after a while, whether they get results from this or not.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Jan 16, 2013 2:17 pm

Where the heck did you get xenon?

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Jan 16, 2013 2:28 pm

I'm not personally involved in it. The university is pretty big, and it turns out you can just buy xenon. Though then they have to reprocess it because industrial xenon isn't pure enough. They need to remove radioactive krypton.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Jan 16, 2013 2:30 pm

This sounds like the coolest science project ever. Anything involving the letter krpton or the word x is immediately awesome.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:20 am

Is this the Case Western LUX or is this something totally different?

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:27 am

Yeah, that's the one.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:40 am

When did you graduate?

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:51 am

breakthrough in energy storage

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 03, 2013 8:08 am

Really not sure what the Canadian press is talking about there. You don't need rare metals to do electrolysis of water, you need baking soda. You need a cation in solution with a lower electrode potential than H+. That means you normally need one of: Li+, Rb+, K+, Cs+, Fr+, Ba2+, Sr2+, Ca2+, Na+, Ra2+, or Mg2+. Now obviously, you aren't going to use Strontium, because that's stupid and dangerous. But Sodium Hydroxide works just fine, and it's not exactly hard to get.

Rust has a close electrode potential to Hydrogen, meaning that creation of Hydrogen Gas will be in equilibrium with smelting of iron. That's just basic physical chemistry.

-Username17