Newton famously contemplated gravity when watching an apple fall from a tree (not actually hitting him on the head, as seen here in LEGO by Brother Steven).
... why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground ... [he described is thoughts in a later conversation] ... why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths centre, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the centre. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.
Q is for quantum: Physics The smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently - by Lamont Cranston. Serge Haroche and David Wineland shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on studying individual quanta. Haroche devised a method for slowing down and examining photons, the smallest bits of light. Wineland found a way to trap individual ions (charged atoms) for study.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka. Gurdon's work goes back fifty years to when he first cloned an adult frog by taking DNA from mature cells and transplanting them into frog eggs to produce new tadpoles. The key thing here was that the mature cell held all of the information to code for all of the cells in the body, that is, a liver cell has all of the information to make blood cells or neurons or whatever, and so could become the basis for a complete organism. Yamanaka's work brings this idea forward, and he developed ways to turn back the clock on mature cells, essentially tricking them into reverting to the same state as embryonic cells that can grow into all sorts of new cells (i.e. they are pluripotent). These are called stem cells, and are one of the most promising areas of medical research today. Towel made these LEGO vehicles based on frogs and tadpoles.
Alfred Nobel (here in LEGO form by Michael Jasper) was a chemist who lived from 1833-1896. He invented dynamite, along with other explosives, and this allowed him to amass a great personal fortune. When his brother died, a newspaper erroneously reported it as his death, and they editorialized about how his legacy was this explosive that would kill untold numbers of victims in warfare. He was distressed that he might be remembered as a killer, so he wrote his will to set up a series of annual prizes, now known as the Nobel Prizes, to promote the sciences and the welfare of mankind. It's Nobel week, and I'm a bit behind, but let's take a look at the new Nobel laureates through the lens of LEGO.
Yesterday's Google doodle celebrated that 127 anniversary of Niels Bohr's birth. Bohr developed the planetary model of the atom, with the nucleus in the center and electrons following circular orbits, similar to planets circling the sun. KillerMoth26 designed this LEGO atom.
Manplus2 built this university chemistry lab. I really like how he captured a lot of the details found in all of the various labs I've ever taught in.
Details include the periodic table, and a waste container for disposing broken glass, needles, and other sharps.
Here's an eye wash and safety shower.
Here our student is working in the hood. Hey, shouldn't he be wearing goggles?
An international team of scientists and engineers are working together at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan. Electrons and positrons are slammed together in a particle accelerator at very high energies. The result of these collisions will be studied using the BELLE-II-detector to learn about CP symmetry violation. The idea here is that the equations used to describe matter suggest that you should be able to switch a particle with it's anti-particle, and the Charge and Parity should work out the same. However, everything around us seems to be made of matter, not antimatter. So why, if the equations suggest that these should be equally probable. This is one of the things that the Belle experiment is examining.
This LEGO model was on display last year at the funding agency of the KEK. I don't know the name of the builder.
I've previously noted Apojove's (i.e. Stephen Pakbaz's) Curiosity rover, here we see it being lowered from the sky crane, what mission planners had dubbed the 'seven minutes of terror'. Stephen offered his rover as a Cuusoo project and it achieved the crucial 10,000 votes. I hope they make this, as this seems perfectly in line with LEGO's and Cuusoo's ideals - given past LEGO/NASA collaborations and the two initial Cuusoo Japan sets. The only sticking point is that by the time a set gets made, public interest in the rover may have waned. I also wanted to highlight this interview with Stephen on Brothers-Brick about a month ago.
A perpetual motion machine has long been a dream for many. If you could start one up, you could hook it up to a generator and have free electricity forever. The problem is, it just can't work, as it would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The first law could be construed as "You can't win" (that is, you can't get extra energy from nowhere) and the second is "You can't even break even" (entropy of the system increases, so it will run down due, for instance, to friction). Hmm, come to think of it, those are also the first two laws of Las Vegas. Anyway, this hasn't stopped people from trying. One scheme to produce a perpetual motion device is the overbalanced wheel, first proposed by Bhaskara in the 12th century. In this scheme there is a spinning wheel with weights on the spokes. On one side the weights are farther from the axis, but as these spin around to the other side they move closer in to the axis. A weight further from the axis produces a greater force, or torque. Since the weights on the left side in the picture below are further out than those on the right, this should produce a downward pull on the left side, and the wheel will spin counter-clockwise. Unfortunately it turns out that the energy produced by the weights moving down on the left is used to lift them up on the right and also to move them out from the center, and so no new energy can be produced. What's more, even if you give this a push and start it moving, friction will slow it to a stop. That doesn't stop Maarten Steurbaut's Perpetuum Mobile from being a beautiful and intriguing LEGO creation, though.
In 1822 Charles Babbage described the plan for a difference engine - a mechanical device that would use turning geared columns to calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions. Due to technical difficulties and cost overruns, it was never completed, and Babbage moved on to his analytical engine (unfortunately for mechanical computing, also never completed). Today, through the magic of LEGO, we can see his dream realized, the 3-digit difference engine by Aecarol.
Yesterday I discussed the Digi-Comp I, an educational toy that was a mechanical computer. The same company followed up with what was probably a more fun version, the Digi-Comp II. In this version, marbles rolled down a ramp, and depending on how you set different gates, they would roll to the left or right, flipping switches as they went, leading to the output of a mathematical problem. A bit like the game Plinko on the Price is Right, but the balls aren't just bouncing randomly. Here's a good explanation on a giant version. Brdavis built a LEGO version.
A simple computer works by combining binary bits of data via logic operations. 0 OR 0 gives 0, 0 OR 1 gives 1, 1 OR 1 gives 1. 0 AND 0 gives 0, 0 AND 1 gives 0, 1 AND 1 gives 1, and so forth. Clever combination of AND, OR, NOT and IF functions allow you to perform mathematical and other operations on multi-digit binary numbers. Do this millions of times on a silicon chip and you've got the laptop I'm typing on right now. Before silicon chips, transistors and vacuum tubes, there were mechanical computers that work by physically moving switches or wheels to indicate the changes in value. An extremely simple example is the odometer on your car (if it's not electronic). Every so many rotations of the axle leads the tenth-mile wheel to move forward. Once that wheel turns all the way around, it causes the mile wheel to move forward one click. Once that goes around from 0 to 9, it causes the ten mile wheel to move forward one click. If you go 100,000 miles, or a million, or however many digits the odometer has (I'll have to go out to my car and look), the whole register clears and it flips back around to zero. This, of course, is an extremely simple mechanism only built to count in a forward direction. The early history of computing is all about the development of mechanical adding machines and other calculators.
This leads us to the Digi-Comp I. This was an educational toy sold in the 1960's where you move two levers back and forth, and depending on how you 'programmed' it, that is, how you arranged a series of wires, a little counter would give you the result of a simple mathematical operation.
Ornithology is the branch of zoology that focuses specifically on birds (Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Aves). Ornithology is a fun science in that anyone can get involved. I grew up with a field guide to North American birds and a pair of binoculars sitting next to our kitchen window where we could sit and watch the various birds (and squirrels) coming to our bird feeders. You can tell that DeTomaso is a bird lover as well, as he has made a large number of very accurate and lifelike models of different birds. He's done over 20 so far, and keeps on going. He's proposed this as a series of actual LEGO sets, which you can suppor on Cuusoo.
I just saw the news that Neil Armstrong passed away today at the age of 82. Here's Balakov's LEGO reproduction of a famous photo from the first moon landing. It's actually a photo of Buzz Aldrin, but it was taken by Armstrong.
DNA replication is the process that your cells use to copy their genetic blueprint. This occurs every time cells divide, so that each new cell has a complete set of instructions. The process involves unzipping the two complementary strands of the parent DNA, and then using free nucleic acids and an enzyme called a DNA polymerase to construct new strands to pair up with each of the parent strands.
Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR, is a process to run this replication artificially in a laboratory. This is often used to analyze DNA samples. Typically analysts get only a very small amount of a DNA sample, and by using PCR they can create a large amount of identical DNA to study. This might be used to identify a blood sample or other evidence at a crime scene, in something like paternity testing, or to identify the DNA of a bacteria or virus to diagnose disease. The Abbott m2000(R) is an automated instrument to run PCR testing to identify various disease agents. Dave and John from briXwerX have made a number of m2000 models on commission for Abbot Molecular.
