Only 2 years old, ‘lil Rose from Seattle aces her Periodic Table of Elements game. Next up, a play date with 3 year old Jonathan who conducts the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 5th for laughs, and another pal, Samuel, who recites the poetry of Billy Collins and Lord Alfred Tennyson. I’m feeling a little better about our future…
via BoingBoing
Some congratulations are in order for a team of students from The University of New South Wales. Earlier this month, they set a world record for the fastest solar-powered car. Their car, traveling 88km/h (or 54 miles per hour), broke the previous record of 79 km/h. We’re not talking about NASCAR speeds, to be sure. But the research that went into making the UNSW car could mean big things for future generations of green-powered cars. Wired has more on the story, plus some photos…
An evolving fractal landscape, all created with a WebGL 3D fractal renderer. If you join/log into Vimeo, you can download the video right here and watch “Surface Detail” in full detail…
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Every year, The New Scientist sponsors an illusion contest, and, above, we have the winner of the 2010 edition: A contraption created by Koukichi Sugihara (Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Japan) that appears to defy gravity, allowing wooden balls to roll up slopes. But, in actual fact “the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion.” You can now make submissions to the 2011 edition.
Fun with science. The world’s smallest periodic table etched onto a strand of hair belonging to chemistry Professor Martyn Poliakoff (University of Nottingham). This clip comes from the Periodic Videos collection and it comes recommend by the great @OliverSacks.
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A Periodic Table Visualizing the Year & Country in Which Each Element Was Discovered
The Periodic Table of Elements Presented as Interactive Haikus
In the late 1870s, Thomas Edison, America’s prolific inventor, perfected the phonograph and captured a very early recording of the human voice – his own voice reciting the still popular nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. (Get mp3 here.) Later, the Edison cylinder also recorded for posterity Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, etc.) talking with other musicians in a light moment.
The Edison cylinder was actually preceded by another sound-recording device, the phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857. Not long ago, scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory extracted a recording not heard in 150 years, a voice singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.”
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison (1909)
Bike Tricks Courtesy of Thomas Edison
For centuries, humanity has been utterly transfixed by the cosmos, with generations of astronomers, philosophers and everyday ponderers striving to better understand the grand capsule of our existence. And yet to this day, some of the most basic, fundamental qualities of the universe remain a mystery. How Large is the Universe? is a fascinating 20-minute documentary by Thomas Lucas and Dave Brody exploring the universe’s immense scale of distance and time.
“Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus that the universe dates back 13.7 billion years. Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time – 13.7 billion light years. That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers. In fact, it’s even bigger – much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery.”
For more on the subject, see these five fascinating ways to grasp the size and scale of the universe.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.
When was the last time the lunar eclipse and winter solstice coincided? The U.S. Naval Observatory says 1638; Starhawk, a prominent Wiccan, puts it at 1544. Needless to say, these coinciding events are a rarity. So, in case you missed it, we have a nice time lapse video shot by William Castleman in Gainesville, Florida. Castelman also produced this fine gem: The Milky Way Over Texas.
via @6oz
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