Who would’ve thought that technology would actually inhibit progress and communication? The 19-year-old was the fourth alternate for the 1000m competition and somehow, the other three alternates could not be found either. Officials even contacted Beckert’s sister, Stephanie, in hopes of reaching the skater.

He called back 17 minutes before the race, but was too late to get to the Richmond Olympic Oval in time.

One German site says that Helge Jasch, manager of the German speed skating team, has taken blame for the mistake because he didn’t tell Beckert to report to the oval. He figured that the chances of the fourth alternate making it into the field were infinitesmal. Ninety-nine times out of 100, he’d be right.

Now it’s nearly impossible to think back to a time without cell phones but it makes you wonder what folks did in similar situations before the invention of this little pocket distraction.

yahoo.com

Pi day is a great day here at the Science Center and it’s just around the corner! We’re going to celebrate this very special number in delicious, fun and challenging ways. Starting at noon, you’ll be able to jump right into the Pi madness! Help us complete our Pi chain using as many digitis as you can, make a pi necklace, test your knowledge in Pi trivia, play Pi games and see if you can handle the pie eating contest! Even if you don’t want to dive face-first in a pie you can still enjoy a tasty MoonPie, so generously donated by the MoonPie Bakery down in Chattanooga. It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday so Pi Day will be a party for him too.

Here are some Pi facts and some history of Pi. Brush up so you’ll be on top of your game come March 14!

What is pi ()? Who first used pi? How do you find its value? What is it for? How many digits is it?
By definition, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi is always the same number, no matter which circle you use to compute it.
For the sake of usefulness people often need to approximate pi. For many purposes you can use 3.14159, which is really pretty good, but if you want a better approximation you can use a computer to get it. Here’s pi to many more digits: 3.14159265358979323846.

The area of a circle is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or “pi r squared”:

A = pi*r^2
A very brief history of pi

Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn’t know its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that it was a little bigger than 3; the Babylonians had an approximation of 3 1/8 (3.125), and the Egyptians had a somewhat worse approximation of 4*(8/9)^2 (about 3.160484), which is slightly less accurate and much harder to work with. For more, see A History of Pi by Petr Beckman (Dorset Press).
The modern symbol for pi [] was first used in our modern sense in 1706 by William Jones, who wrote:

There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of particular Curve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitate the Practice; as for instance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to (16/5 - 4/239) - 1/3(16/5^3 - 4/239^3) + … = 3.14159… = (see A History of Mathematical Notation by Florian Cajori).
Pi (rather than some other Greek letter like Alpha or Omega) was chosen as the letter to represent the number 3.141592… because the letter [] in Greek, pronounced like our letter ‘p’, stands for ‘perimeter’.

About Pi
Pi is an infinite decimal. Unlike numbers such as 3, 9.876, and 4.5, which have finitely many nonzero numbers to the right of the decimal place, pi has infinitely many numbers to the right of the decimal point.
If you write pi down in decimal form, the numbers to the right of the 0 never repeat in a pattern. Some infinite decimals do have patterns - for instance, the infinite decimal .3333333… has all 3’s to the right of the decimal point, and in the number .123456789123456789123456789… the sequence 123456789 is repeated. However, although many mathematicians have tried to find it, no repeating pattern for pi has been discovered - in fact, in 1768 Johann Lambert proved that there cannot be any such repeating pattern.

As a number that cannot be written as a repeating decimal or a finite decimal (you can never get to the end of it) pi is irrational: it cannot be written as a fraction (the ratio of two integers).

Pi shows up in some unexpected places like probability, and the ‘famous five’ equation connecting the five most important numbers in mathematics, 0, 1, e, pi, and i: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.

Computers have calculated pi to many decimal places. It’s easy to find lists of them by Googling ‘digits of pi’.

mathforum.org

The comedic, improv, musical Planetarium Show, Starball, will also be at the Science Center this weekend! Imagine that all the stars and constellations are gone and YOU have to re-create them! Join fellow visitors in the Planetarium to help bring the constellations back. The performers will use the audiences’ own dreams to create new constellations and they’ll also use improv to provide a musical soundtrack along the way. Starball is happening on Saturday and Sunday.

Not to be forgotten is Pluto - Formerly Known as a Planet - Fest! This one is happening on Saturday (12-4pm) in celebration of the King of the Ice Dwarfs. Guess what your weight would be on other planets, cast your vote in the “why or why not” chain and tell us why you think Pluto should be resinstated as a planet or why you think it shouldnt. Recreate the Pluto/Charon system using delicious treats and make a 3D model of Pluto’s surface! Folks from APL will be on hand as well to answer questions about New Horizons.

We hope to see you this weekend!

http://www.mdsci.org/exhibits/GPS.html
http://www.mdsci.org/events-calendar/events/Starball.html

Here are the previous top ten snowstorm records for Baltimore:

•28.2 inches on February 15-18, 2003
•26.5 inches on January 27-29, 1922
•22.8 inches on February 11-12, 1983
•22.5 inches on January 7-8, 1996
•22.0 inches on March 29-30, 1942
•21.4 inches on February 11-14, 1899
•20.0 inches on February 18-19, 1979
•16.0 inches on March 15-18, 1892
•15.5 inches on February 15-16, 1958
•14.9 inches on January 25, 2000

It’s exciting to experience this kind of history, but definitely not as exciting to have to dig out of it! The cities and towns are doing their best to regroup and get things back on track. Makes you wonder if the old addage “no two snowflakes are alike” can really apply in this case! (technically it can’t, but that’s another blog subject!)

The chinchillas will belong to the education department and will be used to help our guests learn about all kinds of different animal characteristics, from feeding to habitat and everything in between. Chinchillas hail from South America and are crepuscular rodents. The term crepuscular refers to animals who are most active around twilight. Unfortunately, Chinchillas are often used for their fur, to make coats and hats and other accessories. These two youngins will never have to worry about meeting such a fate though, as the only place they’ll be worn is possibly on a staff member’s shoulder.

The last thing to do is to think of names for the little guys. The entire staff has submitted entries and here are the top five choices:

-Coil & Spring
-Nano & Pico
-Wilbur & Orville
-Milo & Otis
-Issac & Albert

All votes will be counted by the end of the day Tuesday! Check back to find out what their new names will be!

For more information please visit our website:

http://www.mdsci.org/exhibits/davinci.html

Stay tuned for the next traveling exhibit: GPS Adventures! It finds its way here on Saturday, February 20th.

http://www.mdsci.org/exhibits/GPS.html

“We made a new version of a nanocar that looks like a dragster,” said James Tour, a chemist at Rice University who was involved in the research. “It has smaller front wheels on a shorter axle and bigger back wheels on a longer axle.”

The miniscule vehicle is about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair and is pushed along by heat or an electric field.
Spherical molecules called buckyballs made of 60 carbon atoms each serve as the big rear wheels. Due to chemical attractions, these wheels nicely grip the “dragstrip,” which is made of a superfine layer of gold rather than pavement. For the front wheels, the scientists opted for a less sticky compound called p-carborane.

Tour’s group built nanocars before with buckyballs as all four wheels, but these autos hug the road too tightly and require temperatures around 400 degrees Fahrenheit to get rolling. Nanocars with all p-carbonane wheels, on the other hand, slip and slide as if on ice, said Tours, making them difficult to image and study.

By incorporating both wheel types, the nanodragster can cruise at lower temperatures with greater agility and range of motion.

Microscopic auto-body shop
To make the new nanodragster, Tour’s team started with a previously built, off-the-shelf short axle and front wheel unit in their lab, which is sort of a nano-Monster Garage. They then chemically hooked this up to a pair of aligned hydrocarbon molecules called phenylene-ethynylene—the vehicle’s chassis. The rear axle came next and finally the buckyball wheels went on.

Once the new nanocar gets rolling, it can reach speeds of up to nine nanomiles, or 0.014 millimeters (.0005 inches), per hour, which is relatively fast for their size, said Tour.

The tiny hot rods can also do tricks. “Because the front wheels don’t stick to the surface as strongly, they’re more prone to lift up, so [the nanodragster] does seem to pop a wheelie at times,” Tour told TopTenREVIEWS.

By learning how to drive nanovehicles, Tour hopes to pave the way for small but technologically useful structures, such as electronics, that could be built atom-by-atom .

The research appeared in a recent issue of the journal Organic Letters.

msnbc.com
American Chemical Society

http://www.mdsci.org/events-calendar/events/Starball.html

Scientists from Harvard University recently demonstrated a way to catch and release light—but it’s not easy. In other words, no one will be using the new method to play a game of catch with flashlight beams anytime soon. The researchers were able to build a trap that held light for about 1.5 seconds. That may not seem like much time to hold anything, but 1.5 seconds is enough time for light from the moon to reach Earth.

Lene Hau is the physicist who led this study of how to stop and release light. Physicists study matter, energy and motion. In the case of Hau’s experiment, she had to use her knowledge of all three.

The light trap wasn’t built from normal materials. Hau and her team instead used a material called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. This material is unusual because it does not represent any of matter’s usual states: solid, liquid or gas. It’s not even a plasma, the fourth state of matter found in high-energy experiments and on the sun.

Instead, BECs are a fifth state of matter. They exist only at the coldest possible temperatures, a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. (Absolute zero is the coldest possible temperature in the universe. It’s so cold that not even atoms can move around.) BECs are one of the strangest known materials. Solids, liquids, gases and plasmas are all made up of individual atoms. But when some materials are cooled to almost absolute zero, their atoms seem to collapse into one teeny-tiny blob, and that blob is called a BEC.

The scientists used a BEC to stop light in a way similar to the game of Gossip (also known as Telephone, or Whisper Down the Lane). It’s an easy game to play: One person whispers a message to a second person, who listens. That person then turns to a third person and passes on the message. The third person should now have the same message as the one sent by the first person (though it might be slightly different). In Hau’s experiment, the light is like the message, and the BEC is like the person in the middle — who hears the message and then passes it on.

Hau and her team fired a pulse of light into a BEC — so they had to do their experiment at very cold temperatures — and the light changed a small group of atoms. These changed atoms (called an imprint) dug a little hole for themselves in the BEC — like a footprint. The research team then turned off a control laser, which made the light’s footprint “sit” in the BEC. “It can snugly sit there for long periods of time,” Hau told Science News.

The scientists waited for 1.5 seconds and then turned the control laser back on. When they did, the trapped light pulse came out of the BEC.

Just as the message at the end of the game of Gossip might be slightly different than it was at the beginning, the light pulse was a little weaker than it was when it started. And just as the middle person in Gossip uses the memory of the message she has stored in her brain to pass the message on, the BEC uses the imprint to transmit the pulse of light.

Finding new ways to control light might pave the way for the development of technology that uses light to store and transmit information. Researchers have been working on ways to stop and release light for years, but the Harvard team says its approach is better in some ways than attempts in the past. Another physicist, Irina Novikova, who works at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., said that Hau’s work is a “beautiful demonstration” of how it is possible to catch light for a long period of time before releasing it

sciencenewsforkids.com