Major Types Of Engines

This Facial Reconstruction of Henri IV King of France by French artist Philippe Froesch is Mindblowing!

This was all done digitally through a combination of programs like Cinema4d and Zbrush. Traditional methods are still used in his digital reconstructions as you can see in the bottom left picture. The dots poking out from the skull are facial tissue depth markers. They tell the reconstruction artist how thick the tissues should be at certain points on the skull  based on large collections of data. 

A sand pendulum that creates a beautiful pattern only by its movement.

But  why does the ellipse change shape?

The pattern gets smaller because energy is not conserved (and in fact decreases) in the system. The mass in the pendulum gets smaller and the center of mass lowers as a function of time. Easy as that, an amazing pattern arises through the laws of physics.

Today marks the birthday of Alfred Nier (1911-1994), a pioneer in the field of mass spectrometry. Here’s a brief mass spectrometry introduction! PDF here: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-1bw

Chain Reaction.

Everyone knows that a line of standing dominos creates a fun chain reaction when you knock the first one over; but did you know you can use increasingly larger dominos and get the same result? 

The setup.

Professor Stephen Morris knocks over a 1-meter tall domino that weighs over 100 pounds by starting with a 5mm high by 1mm thick domino.He uses a size ratio of 1.5, meaning each domino is one and a half times larger than the last one. This is the generally accepted maximum ratio that dominos can have to successfully knock each other over.

Hans Van Leeuwen of Leiden University in the Netherlands, published a paper online showing that, theoretically, you could have a size ratio of up to two. But that’s in an ideal (and probably unrealistic) situation.

Fun fact.

There are 13 dominoes in this sequence. If Professor Morris used 29 dominoes in total, with the next one always being 1.5x larger, the last domino would be the height of the Empire State Building.

Source: Physics Buzz.

Revising like.

Subjects shown: Advanced dynamics, vibrations and waves, properties of matter, electricity and magnetism. All first year.

When the eyes move, the eardrums move, too

Gruters found that when the eyes moved, both eardrums moved in sync with one another, one side bulging inward at the same time the other side bulged outward. They continued to vibrate back and forth together until shortly after the eyes stopped moving. Eye movements in opposite directions produced opposite patterns of vibrations.

Simply moving the eyes triggers the eardrums to move too, says a new study by Duke University neuroscientists.

The researchers found that keeping the head still but shifting the eyes to one side or the other sparks vibrations in the eardrums, even in the absence of any sounds.

Surprisingly, these eardrum vibrations start slightly before the eyes move, indicating that motion in the ears and the eyes are controlled by the same motor commands deep within the brain.

Continue Reading.

States of Decay: Visiting the World's Largest Body Farm [Graphic Content]

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In a field northwest of San Marcos, Texas, fifty human bodies lie exposed to the elements, each in a different stage of decomposition.

Some are fully mummified, their flesh dried out by the harsh Texas sun. Others have been picked over so voraciously by vultures that their bones are frayed. The most lurid are the fresh ones: week-old bodies that have ballooned to twice their normal size and crawl with thousands of maggots.

This is Freeman Ranch, part of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University—otherwise known as the world’s largest body farm. By observing bodily decay under varying conditions, researchers hope to help law enforcement better estimate time of death in criminal investigations.

[via: Vox]

Planche casse-pied. Feutre (contour) et marqueurs à alcool (colorisation).

When a feather and a bowling ball are dropped in a vacuum, they hit the ground at the same time. This experiment demonstrates Galileo’s falling objects theory, which states that the speed of a falling body is independent of its weight. Watch the BBC video clip here.