Citizens of a small solar system in the Ursa Major constellation are being spammed grossly by inferior earthlings representing a particular earthy food company called Doritos, trying to increase sales of their flag ship product, the tortilla chips. In a 6 hour broadcast from an array of high power subspace radars on the Norwegian island of Svalbard on Earth, an MPEG file containing the ad piece was repeated over and over again, to make sure the Ursa Majorians would identify the message as intelligent.

The event has later been deemed pretty unintelligent as the inhabitants of the only habitable planet in the aforementioned solar system looks exactly like giant tortilla chips. They took the ad piece as a declaration of war, and have announced a soonish preemptive strike on Earth, probably causing the demise of the human race. As a fine example of same human race would have put it: “Doh!”

Milky Way Times is monitoring the situation and we’ll of course bring you any update as fast as possible. And don’t forget to vote on the top 5 human things you won’t miss.

*Snapping out of what seems to be an unending stream of science fiction thoughts induced by this news piece over at New Scientist.*

Now back to work on that subspace device… and maybe that runaway thoughts controller too.

I know, shocking isn’t it? But i figured i’d ruin this neat little youtube video for you. If you’re an internet addict like me, you’ve most likely seen it already, if not here it is:

Neat? Yes. Real? No.

I was suspicious as soon as i saw it, remembering one of my professors describing ages ago how bags of popcorn actually get popped in the microwave, and this just seemed extremely unlikely. I’m happy to report that i wasn’t the only one, and one of the blog columnist over at Wired.com contacted a physicist and officially debunked it. Long story short, microwaves do not actually heat up the corn kernels to make them pop, they heat up a filament inside the bag, like aluminum, that absorbs the microwaves and turns them into heat (which then in turn heats the kernels creating the popcorn). Aside from that, mobile phones just don’t produce that strong microwaves, just think how easy it is to boil water in a microwave and then imagine what would happen if you were holding a strong microwave source, probably wouldn’t be pleasant (in fact the US Army is now working on microwave weapons). Anyway, check out the article, they even hint to that it might be cellphone companies going for viral advertisement that made this video, although i don’t know why you’d want people to associate your phone with strong microwave radiation.

Yay for skepticism!

Now if you’ve followed the posts here on ReducedMass, you might have noticed me missing for a few days, only to resurface and explain it away with beer-drinking, so surely, news about a space-beer could not be more fitting. Of course it is the Japanese, the makers of countless gadgets and weird TV-shows, that bring us the space-beer.

And it’s not just a name slapped on a product either, like the infamous space-pen that ruled the infomercials in the 90’s (although it is used in space), no this is actually a beer, made out of barley that was grown in space! Now obviously there are many other ingredients needed to make a beer, all of which will sadly be made under a boring gravity field on earth, but non-the-less, this is as close to space-beer as we’ll get for now.

Sadly this is not something you and I will be able to buy (unless you’re filthy rich) as they will only make around 100 bottles, because they only have enough barley for that. The ones that will be in charge of brewing those 100 space bottles, is the Japanese brewery Sapporo holdings, and i must say, i like the cut of their jib, just check out their reason for wanting to brew it.

Researchers said the project was part of efforts to prepare for a future in which humans spend extended periods of time in space — and might like a cold beer after a space walk.

Maybe it’s just me, but i sure as hell look forward to the day when i can take a casual spacewalk and have a space-brewed beer to wind down, who’s with me?

Original story: Yahoo! News.

And really, it’s not (good, that is).

Found this little news-gem over at the Yahoo news (Via AP), claiming that the toilet over at the international space station is broken! The good news is, that the poop part of the toilet is working fine, but the pee one isn’t. Now that news article makes it sound rather tame, it’s only the pee one that isn’t working, they do have a temporary place to pee, and spare parts are being sent. I did however also find a news piece over at MSNBC on the same subject, which seems a lot more pessimistic, and is saying that there have been repeated attempts at repairs that have only been temporary, and the same problem always re-surfaces. They even go as far as saying it is a “fabrication flaw”, and that they expect the spare parts from NASA to fail quickly as well. Is MSNBC just spicing things up a bit to get more viewers? Quite possibly, but i wanted to show their side as well as they claim to have insider knowledge on the matter.

All is not lost however! As the astronauts DO have a backup system. The old way of going in space, adhesive bags to seal up fecal matter. It may not be glamorous but they may have to make do with that until further notice. According to MSNBC, there is a new module set to arrive late this year which would have additional toilets (I’m assuming they mean the Russian multipurpose lab module), lets hope for their sake that they can work something out until then and won’t have to use the bags for that many months.

Here’s a short video of Col. Chris Hadfield explaining how a space toilet works:

Alright, just a quick post here, i came across this video yesterday and thought it was a really cool concept

I was hoping the website they were advertising was actually exciting and had more similar videos, explaining physical concepts in an innovative way, sadly i was mistaken and the website seems like a boring front for applying for research grants and searching for Post-doc positions.

Well it’s another lazy Sunday, and i figured i’d make a quick little post. One of my friends on facebook posted a video of a nerdy math song called “I will derive”, a spoof of the “I will survive” song. The singing is god awful and the lyrics are kinda sluggish at times, but i’m a sucker for nerd/geek humor. I figured I’d do a short little compilation of a few math songs i’ve come across on youtube through the years. I won’t pretend i understand everything in them, but sometimes just hearing people laughing at a nerdy joke that’s over my head is enough to make me laugh.

Click on “Read more” if you want to see the videos (so as to avoid cluttering the frontpage).

(more…)

Yes i know i know, no posts for two days. As you may be used to by now (as this always seems to be my excuse) there was some drinking going on, “drinking midweek?!” you might say, and you’d be quite right. Except for the fact, that this week there was a Champions League finale to watch. If you don’t follow football/soccer (which probably means you’re American), think of it as the Superbowl of club football.

Now i’ll be making a real post later tonight, but to mark the occasion of Champions League glory, i thought i’d post a semi-science video on one of the greatest football goals ever scored. Roberto Carlos’ amazing backline curveball goal. It’s a crappy video camera recording off a TV, but they explain all the gory details and numbers behind it (speed of ball, curve, angle etc). Hearing all the facts behind this goal are truly inspiring, suffice to say it SHOULD be impossible, but he made it happen.

Well, since noone objected to last weeks link spamming, i’ll give it a whirl again (plus it’s easier for my hung-over brain to write then a full-blown article). Like last week, it’s basically just websites/blogposts i came across throughout the week that weren’t really news, but still interesting. If you have suggestions for links, send them to kari@reducedmass.com and i’ll have a look, maybe i’ll include it next week. Enough chatter though, on to the links.

The radiation pseudo medical-science of the early 1900’s: This is by far my favorite link this week. It is an article discussing a pseudo medical-science from the early 1900’s that involved getting a good dose of radiation every day to stay healthy. Much like other crap such as homeopathy, there were never any real research done on this, it was just assumed to be natural and good. Very interesting and almost comical read.

Visual representation of some crazy equations: This may be too nerdy for many, but i thought it was interesting still. It’s basically some guy that has apparently plotted a variety of functions with fancy colors and all. He’s also got a pretty fancy of a simulation of a galaxy. I honestly don’t know many of the equations he’s playing with, but if nothing else, it’s pretty psychadelic.

Clearing up electricity misconceptions from school-books: Now i’ll admit i didn’t read the entire website, but i think it’s a good subject and fairly easy to navigate to find something that you may have been taught wrong. The basic premise is that most books taught at the elementary school level are teaching things that are wrong, and this website aims to clear up some of the misconceptions that may have been born from this. If nothing else i’d suggest scrolling through the front-page reading the table of contents, you can see pretty quickly what the misconception being discussed in each chapter is, and decide if it is something you need/want to read or not. Some of the stuff is pretty pedantic really, but still interesting.

Well the title may be a bit dramatic, but i wanted to do a quick post on binary (0’s and 1’s) and i can only assume that Hollywood is right and computers are indeed plotting our inevitable destruction (and are presumably doing so in binary). Bottomline is, i once again saw a pretty cool video on youtube and wanted to do a quick post about it. Unlike the Brian Cox TED-Talk video though, i know a bit (get it?!) about binary so i’ll explain a little. Here’s the video if you want to skip he explenation, but if you don’t understand how binary math works it might be fun to read below the video first and then watch it (although i’ll admit it’s not as exciting as the video).

Binary addition is one of the simplest thing you can do with binary numbers really, and it gives a neat little window into how computers work (on a very simple level anyway). So lets say you have 3 bits, so your binary code will be any permutation of 3 0’s or 1’s, like 000, 010 101 etc. First off, we need to know how we read binary numbers, so lets call the 3 bits for a,b and c, so our number is abc. We start by numbering each decimal place, counting up from zero, starting from the right, so c is in the zeroth place, b in the first, and a in the second place. We then take our bit, and multiply it by two lifted to the power of whatever decimal place we are in and add them all up. So the mathematical equation would look like this: abc=a*2^2 + b*2^1 + c*2^0. Now we know that 2^0=1, 2^1=2 and 2^2=4 (next places are 8, 16,32 etc. as you see in the video). So putting it all together we see that 101=1*4+0*2+1*1=5.

What happens if i want to add two binary numbers together? Well the math rules are really quite simple, 0+0=0, 1+0=1, 0+1=1 and 1+1=0 (but here you carry the 1 over to the next decimal). So lets say we are looking at 001 (1) and 010 (2), we start and take the first number to the right in both numbers, that’s 1+0=1, second number in both added together is 0+1=1 while the third is 0+0=1, so in the end we get 011, and using the knowledge we had before we see that it’s 3, which is obviously the correct answre for 2+1. These are clearly exceedingly simple numbers, but expanding this into much larger numbers is really just a formality of adding more bits, it obviously takes longer to calculate, but the method is the exact same.

Hopefully that was clear enough, writing math in HTML isn’t the most end-user friendly thing in the world, but as always we can recommend the wikipedia article on it, if you still have questions.

First things first, sorry for the lack of updates in the past few days, partly caused by not finding much interesting stuff to write about, and partly caused by beer-drinking induced by various Christian and socialist holidays. Drinking aside, it’s been awfully quiet around here for a few days so sorry about that.

I’m going to try something new in this post, so let me know if it’s something you’d like to see more of or if you’d prefer for this kind of link-spamming to stay on reddit/digg etc. I realize that these posts tend to be like the clip-show of blogging, but bear with me. The basic idea is that I often see interesting science stuff around the interwebs, but it’s not really news as much as it is posts by other science bloggers about something interesting. Now I’d like to expose you to it, but it would basically be stealing their content if we did a post on the exact same thing here, so we’ll try it like this.

Seven warning signs of bogus science: This article is a bit long, but even if you just skim through it and look at the bold headlines for each section, it’s 100% worth it. It is basically a pocket guide to spotting when a proposed science theory/news is bullcrap. Originally intended to help judges decide if scientific evidence in court was good or bad science, having the skill to spot red-flags in stuff like this is something everyone should have.

Bad astronomy’s video tour of CERN: Phil Plait, the man behind bad astronomy is quite the jet-setting rockstar when it comes to science bloggers. He was actually invited to Europe for a few days and got the grand tour of the new Large Hadron Collider over at CERN. Check out his youtube video as he guides you through it, the size of it is incredibly impressive and i, at least, find it to be awe-inspiring thinking of all the things that went into creating it and how complex it is, such a feat of engineering.

Alright that’s about it for this time around. Not a whole lot to start with, but hopefully (assuming your verdict isn’t that you hate these kinds of posts), we can expand on this and have more substantial link-hoarding post next time.