davidthompson

A Little Bit of Whimsy

Speaking of things festive, here’s the world’s smallest snowman. At just 0.01 mm across, he’s slimmer than a human hair. Strictly speaking, he’s also made of tin.

The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.

The object was built by Dr David Cox of the National Physical Laboratory’s Quantum Detection Group. The video below should give you some idea of just how small the snowman is.

Faithful in sentiment, if not materials or size.

Quote of the Day (3)

I began my work at a time when invisibility was not fashionable at all.

Physicist Ulf Leonhardt, quoted here, in a piece noting how research into cloaking technologies has become popular and very nearly respectable. Needless to say, there are still one or two problems.

It’s difficult to find anybody in the know who expects there will ever be a device that hides itself and its contents at all wavelengths - if you can’t see it in visible light, then perhaps radar, infrared, ultraviolet or X-rays would reveal it. But optimism for practical uses is growing.

And there’s an issue I don’t recall being acknowledged in Star Trek. 

If a cloak were to make an object fully invisible to the outside world, then the outside world would be invisible to the object within the cloak. A thing (or person) inside a perfect cloak is not only invisible. It is blind.

And Not a Heat Ray in Sight

A selection of Martian landscapes.

Depth Perception

Just 8 km in diameter, Saturn’s moon Daphnis casts its shadow. The tiny moon’s gravity creates waves in Saturn’s A ring that extend above the plane to a height of 1.5 km. Image taken by Cassini in visible light on June 26, at a distance of approximately 823,000 km from Daphnis.

 

More, with animations. Related: Planetary Bling.

Not Bad for Hairless Apes

50 years of space exploration.

 

1 meg version here. Zoom version here. Image by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco. Via Coudal.  

Small Wonders

Finalists of the 2009 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. 

 

Above: Sonchus asper flower stem section, 150X. Photographed by Gerd A. Guenther, Düsseldorf, Germany.

Scars

High-resolution images of the lunar surface, as seen from Earth. Or, more precisely, from a back garden in Oxford.

 

Above: The Plato impact crater, photographed by Nick Smith, February 15, 2008. Diameter 109 km, depth 1.0 km. Via Things.

Elsewhere (12)

Counting Cats in Zanzibar highlights the work of Professor Sabri Abd Al-Rauf and the importance of a fragrant bride:

The mother [of the bridegroom] and other female relatives may look at the bride’s hair and neck, and may smell her private parts… But the groom is forbidden to look at any part of her except her face and hands.

The video of Professor Al-Rauf being interviewed has an endearingly demented quality, as these things often do. But it’s probably worth noting that the professor previously appeared on Saudi Arabia’s Iqra TV, explaining to viewers the finer points of wife-beating. Specifically, that, “beating [one’s wife] doesn’t mean beatings with a rod or beatings that draw blood… The beatings are intended to instil fear… declaring that [the husband] isn’t satisfied with this wife.”

The Quackometer takes issue with the Society of Homeopaths:

The result of this careful study was that the homeopathic treatment was no better than a placebo. But the homeopath authors do not conclude that homeopathy did not work; they speculate the tablets had not been stored properly or that the wrong combination of sugar pills was made. At no point do they propose as a possibility that homeopathy can have absolutely no effect on a third-world child with [diarrhoea]. 

And Deogolwulf spies a contender for Greatest Comment Ever by a Guardian reader.

Fondling Information

Readers may recall Silke Hilsing’s flexible interface prototype, Impress, (mentioned here), which allows users to squeeze and grope their information, modifying its features. Another Hilsing project, Virtual Gravity, gives a physical weight to data, with heaviness depending on, for instance, an item’s importance or popularity.

The point? I’m not quite sure. But it’s pretty and it’s blue.

The Sky is Glowing

The Aurora Australis above the South Pole Telescope at Amundsen-Scott Station, Antarctica.