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About this blog

A fantastical blog that follows my adventures in AP-C Physics

Entries in this blog

College?

What's this? New AP-C students? Welp a new dawn has... dawned and I have made the short stroll of 18 miles to RIT. So what has changed? Not much. Right now you AP-C'ers are taking, I assume, mostly college level courses and believe it or not they are actual college level classes, like no joke. With Calculus, Physics and other classes I was (and you are) taking the equivalent of a Freshman year in college. If it sounds intimidating its because it is, taking that big of a step a year early i
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Martian Light Explained

THANK GOD. That strange light on the martian surface that the curiosity rover captured and I talked about here has been explained. The supposed UFO, martian confirming, NASA is hiding things from us, light has been dismissed by NASA in a recent statement as a cosmic-ray. "These [lights] can be caused by cosmic-ray hits or sunlight glinting from rock surfaces, as the most likely explanations." explained the government pawns at NASA. Cosmic-ray or not why did this make so much news? Why did I w
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New Excuse: "I can't help it, it's genetic"

A new study suggests that procrastination may not be behavioral, and perhaps be determined by genes. The Study ties impulsiveness to procrastination as procrastination, in most cases, is the impulse to put off mundane tasks in favor of more pleasurable ones. I could think of someone that fits that description. I can't say that I'm not a procrastinator, however I tend not to be that impulsive, however I do like to put off mundane tasks for better ones. But can you blame me, who wouldn't rather
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OSIRIS-Rex

NASA's next mission might be their coolest yet. What could top landing on the moon, curiosity and voyager? Landing on an asteroid. NASA's next mission is to survey and map 1999 RQ36 or Bennu, collect samples, and then return to earth in 2018. They want to collect said samples to analyze the content of the asteroid to see if asteroids could have had a hand in creating life on Earth. The mission should kick off in September of 2016 and will be the first to involve landing on an asteroid.
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Permafrost passes gas

So as you all know by the head lines and angry tree huggers, our use of fossil fuels is going to cause climate change and we are all going to die in a grand and spectacular apocalypse. A recent study only cements our impending doom, the study analyzed the effect of the melting permafrost up in the great north and the news is not good. It seems that as the permafrost melts it releases a lot of methane which is much worse of a greenhouse gas than carbon-dioxide. Because of the melting the ratio of
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An Exomoon?

Our solar system is very well cataloged. We know all the planets, their moons and almost all the meteors that reside in our solar system. However, once you get out side of our solar system we have a few planets, but no moons...until now. Recently the first Exomoon (exo meaning outside our solar system) has been found. The host Exoplanet in question is called MOA-2011-BLG-262 and is about the size of 4 Jupiter's with its supposed moon smaller than the Earth. All this "supposed" stuff is becaus
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Meet the Next Processor

The next processor is going to be very, very powerful. Current processors use a series of very very small electrical "switches" to dictate one of two possible states: closed or open, or in computer speak, a 1 or 0. The computer collects these various 1s and 0s puts them in order and interprets them. This basic raw computer language is called binary and is the driving process behind all computer functions. So the more switches in a processor, the more powerful it is. So why is the next proces
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Teslas and Fire

Cars are complex machines. The run off of the oxidation and ignition of gasoline which drives several pistons attached to a drive shaft which spins the wheels. However a certain car made by a certain company named Tesla runs entirely differently. It runs off of batteries which power an electric motor which sends power to the wheels. However if this process doesn't involve violent explosions like a gas car does, how come a few Tesla's still catch fire? Well its all about what the batteries hav
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ALIENS ON MARS

An image from the nav cam on the Curiosity rover on April 3rd reveals a bright light in the distance. A sign from extraterrestrials? a bright rock? people prepare your foil caps.
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Black Hole powered Spaceship

The future of intergalactic travel may be closer than you think. Although the process may be a few hundred years down the road, some scientists believe that the starship of the future could be powered by a black hole. As Newton's famous equation states all matter has a energy according to e = mc2. Currently the process in which we launch our rockets (burning tons of liquid and solid fuel to produce thrust) only yields under 1% of the energy that matter is capable of. This is where the black h
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Disco Ball Moon

I saw a video recently that you all might enjoy. It shows what the moon would look like if it were a disco ball and orbiting at the height of the international space station. Check it out:
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Coolest Telescope Lesson Ever

While a group of undergrads were learning to use a telescope from there professor at the University of London they spotted something amazing: a super nova. On Jan 21 the students' 10 minute lesson about telescopes turned into a rush to document this amazing occasion before the weather turned. The super nova happened in the sector M82 and is one of the closest of the super novas to our solar system.
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A Dwarf Planet has WATER

Just recently on the dwarf planet called Ceres a atmosphere full of water vapor has been observed. This is the first planet in our solar system besides our own to have traces of water found on it. Ceres used to be the largest asteroid in our solar system but because of its size has been named as a dwarf planet. But before you make plans for your expedition to Ceres there's one problem, its in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and its very very cold. Ceres' surface is covered in ice whic
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Black Holes... Don't Exist?

So as my last post on black holes has seemed to gain some traction I decided to do a follow up. After a bit of research I have found out that we are all living in a lie, as it turns out, (according to Hawking) black holes don't exist. So maybe that's not entirely true, Hawking goes on to site that the properties that have been associated with black holes may not be true. He says the fact that nothing can escape a black hole is not entirely true and that the event horizon might not actual
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Mars One

In keeping with the mars theme I found myself on the homepage of Mars One. Mars One is a privately funded expedition to mars that will transport 4 people to mars with no way back. The 15 year endeavor is currently looking for applicants from the general public to train until 2024 for the trip to mars. Anyone can apply and they are still accepting applications so if you ever wanted to be stranded on mars, now's the time. The launch of the first crew is set for 2024 along with a second crew in 202
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Plasma Powered Rocket

All this talk about mars is great but how are we going to get people to mars in a timely and efficient manor? Enter the plasma propelled rocket. Developed during the past 4 decades by Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra, the rocket could make it to mars in a blistering 39 days. The engine works by using radio waves to heat gasses to create plasma which then, using magnetic fields, is propelled out the back to create thrust. Because the large amount of thrust that thi
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An Underwater City

So I have recently been playing the original Bioshock. For those of you that don't know Bioshock is a game set in the underwater city of rapture. Set in the 1960's you play the main character Jack who has just been in a plane crash in the Atlantic just off of Iceland. After the crash you find a strange lighthouse in the middle of the ocean and swim to it. Then after getting into a pod inside the lighthouse you are brought to rapture. So how can a city exist on the bottom of the ocean? W
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Next Car Game

Next Car Game is an early access game that is in very early alpha, so what makes it so unique? The Physics Engine. This game is the first game to feature a soft body physics engine which makes it one of the best games to destroy things in. So what is a soft body physics engine? Most physics engines today don't deal too well with materials and how objects interact. Games like GTA do a relatively good job of recreating the effect of a car breaking down, but aren't able to reach a full soft bo
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Opportunity

Well its been a while since there has been any talk about the rovers on mars and they are still chugging along. The interesting thing about that is that one of the rovers, the opportunity rover, has just reached its ten year anniversary on the big red planet. The opportunity rover landed on mars on January 25, 2004 to carry out a 3 month exploration of the surface. Remarkably after 10 long years the rover is still able to move and collect data along with its big brother curiosity. Its
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Cornering in the Snow

Snow, like it or hate it snow is a big part of the current landscape here in upstate New York. Although snow may seem like a luxury to others in warmer climates, the reality is that snow, a part from its appearance, makes everyday tasks 10 times harder and driving is one of the most common examples. A normal 20 minute journey can be made into an hour long ordeal with just an inch of snow. During these winter months 225,000 car crashes happen because of snow, so how can I be safe while driving in
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Why? (awake and thinking)

So by my time it is about 1 am on Monday night and I yet again find myself restless... Of course, my mind starts to wander. I have recently watched a TED talk by someone a few of you might know: Michael from the YouTube channel vsause (please excuse the most likely incorrect use of punctuation). Michael talks about why people ask questions and why people have been so interested in the questions he answers in his videos. This got me thinking, why do I want to learn about all this physics in the
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Solar Wind

So many a person may be thinking, "I know what normal wind is, but what is this solar wind crap?" Well you came to the right place. Solar wind is exactly what it sounds like, "wind" from light. Basically this phenomenon is based on the fact that the sun, or any other star, emits a stream of plasma that consists of electrons and protons traveling at very high speeds. Recently there has been talk about figuring out how to harness this energy to create a spaceship that can travel long distanc
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The Quantum World and Why it Doesent Make any Sense

So the quantum world is a relatively new thing. This new world has only recently been discovered and it indeed very odd. This is because when you start to get down to individual atoms physics doesn't entirely hold up like its supposed to. The most known phenomenon that was discovered was the fact that electrons can act like both a wave and a particle. This was found during a famous experiment call the double slit experiment. In this experiment several electrons were sent through two slits and
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Black Holes and Worm Holes

Black holes, probably one of the first things many people think about when they think about space. But what is behind this matter sucker? All the black holes we know about are singularities that are created by a super nova. As a large star starts to run out of fuel to power the nuclear reactions that keep it alive, the gravity that holds the gas of the star together starts to tear the star apart. If the gravity that holds the star is strong enough, the fuel that is left in the core of the sta
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Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Not much is known about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, however one explanation of these objects could be that our current understanding of gravity is horribly wrong. These objects were first discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998. Before this time it was widely thought that the rate a which the universe was expanding was slowly decreasing from the rate at which it first started. However, as the Hubble Telescope observed supernova, it determined that the most distant had occurred 7.7 b
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