Also Being A Scientist Pretty Much Gives You A Free Pass To Be As Eccentric As You Want Like You’ll

the InSight landing was so exciting!

~ november 26, 2018

A single-celled organism dying

This is how far into the earth humans have dug so far.

What if we can breathe in space but the Government just tells us we cant so that we dont try to escape.

Lunar Eclipse 2019

Image Credit: Zachary Wells

Liquid oxygen is magnetic

Liquid oxygen sticks between the poles of a strong magnet until it boils away into its gas state. This is because it has unpaired electrons, which make each oxygen molecule a tiny magnet with a dipole. Normally, when oxygen is in a flask or in the air, these microscopic magnets point in all directions, cancelling out and meaning that there’s no net magnetic field. When it pours over the permanent magnet, the magnetic molecules all slightly align, creating an induced magnetic field, which reacts with the permanent magnet, making the oxygen stick to the poles. This is called paramagnetism. Click here to watch the video.

The edges of this flame are black. No camera trickery, no special effects. What’s going on here is down to some interesting science and some excited electrons.

When you burn sodium it emits a monochromatic yellow/orange light. This happens because when sodium heats up, electrons in the atom’s orbitals become excited and they jump up to a higher energy level. When they drop back down to their original energy level they release a photon of light of a specific wavelength, which for sodium is yellow/orange.

As well emitting photons, sodium atoms also absorb photons of the same wavelength. That means if you have a light source emitting the same monochromatic light (like the sodium street lamp which we have here) the sodium atoms in the flame will absorb the light making the flame look dark.

For more flame filled visuals and a more detailed explantation of this phenomenon, check out our latest video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn2OyQh6o7U