Category: 2011
A bumble bee.
I have been wanting to see what I can do with IR imaging in my backyard. Folks at the Discovery and Animal Planet channels use IR imaging regularly to show thermal patterns of animals and plants. So I guess I could do something with…
You don’t have to wait until it rains to catch a sight of rainbow. You can create one any time as long as there is sunshine. Just use a garden nozzle to create a mist and you will see a rainbow.
Go to the simulationTheo Jansen is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor who builds large works that resemble skeletons of animals that are able to walk using the wind on the beach. His works are a fusion of art and engineering.Theo Jansen’s famous mecha…
Yesterday I reported evidence of tiny water permeation across a piece of paper on top of a cup of water. In order to double-check my theory, I placed a piece of transparency film on top of another cup of water and left the two cups overnight. When I ca…
I have blogged about some intriguing IR images when a piece of paper is placed on top of a cup of water. The part of paper above the water warms up (Figure 1) because of the release of latent heat of condensation of water vapor to its underside. If you…
Bob Tinker, Emeritus President of the Concord Consortium, noted, “The creation of probeware represents one of the most valuable contributions of computers to education.” In 1981, Robert Tinker and Stephen Bannasch from the Technical Education Research Center developed the first educational temperature grapher. This software was developed for the Apple II computer and was part […]
I have been “shopping” for a learning theory that can frame the value added by IR visualization to hands-on experiments. Here is a candidate theory.There are four learning pathways to the brain: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Theory has it…
Scientists have known for a long time that ocean currents affect climate. The big unanswered question is how ocean currents change during the periods of greatest change–from ice ages to periods of global warming. During the Eocene period, 38 million years ago, the Antarctic had a temperate climate. What is now the midwest United States […]
A new study has been published disproving the previous explanation for the end of the Marinoan ice age, also known as “Snowball Earth.” That ice age ended abruptly about 600 million years ago. The debunked explanation stated that methane bubbled up from the oceans and was consumed by microbes, which released carbon dioxide into the […]
An interview with Charles Xie, creator of the Molecular Workbench software.