Reality Crowd


Timelapse: Nightscapes from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

Sometimes our view of the world around us is held back by our own perceptional limitations. When we use technology to work around those limitations a whole different view of our surroundings is opened to us. Check out these timelapse shots of the night sky. Amazing.

When talking to someone about the validity of religion, out of body experiences usually come up at some point. When close to death many people have the experience of floating outside their own body and observing themselves from outside their own skin. Scientology was supposedly inspired from an out of body experience L. Ron Hubbard had while under the influence of Nitrous Oxide. These experiences would seem to lend credibility to the soul / body split that nearly all religions preach. It would seem to indicate that our “self” can be separated from our body. If I can float outside my own body, it must mean that I posses a soul…right?

Well, hold on a second. Now it seems that by using virtual reality equipment, two teams of researchers have been able to induce out of body experiences in healthy test subjects. Wearing virtual reality headsets, subjects were shown a live picture of their own back. Then, two plastic rods were used to stroke the back of the subject as well as their “virtual” back. It seems that the combination of visual and tactile input easily tricked the body into believing it was behind the actual body.

Link to the scientific American Article

Hit the jump for some videos about out of body experiences
Read the rest of this entry »

It turns out the coldest place in the universe is not somewhere in deep space. It’s not on the dark side of the moon or out at the far edge of the cosmos. It’s right here on earth in a lab at MIT. While it is impossible to ever reach absolute zero, scientists are excited to get as close as possible to it.

The current record holder is Wolfgang Ketterle’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. They have achieved a temperature of just 810 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. How did they do it? Here is an excerpt from the Smithsonian Magazine article about the achievement:

Ketterle’s achievement came out of his pursuit of an entirely new form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The condensates are not standard gases, liquids or even solids. They form when a cloud of atoms—sometimes millions or more—all enter the same quantum state and behave as one. Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose predicted in 1925 that scientists could generate such matter by subjecting atoms to temperatures approaching absolute zero. Seventy years later, Ketterle, working at M.I.T., and almost simultaneously, Carl Wieman, working at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Eric Cornell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder created the first Bose-Einstein condensates. The three promptly won a Nobel Prize.

What happens when matter starts to approach absolute zero? All sorts of crazy stuff. Electrical resistance disappears in some elements causing superconductivity. Liquefied gases become “superfluids” that can move through barriers that hold any other type of fluid, and defy gravity in strange ways. Other researchers pointing lasers at Bose-Einstein condensates have found that they can slow down and even stop light waves.

You can learn more about the wacky world of absolute zero at:
Nova website on Absolute Zero (PBS)
Wikipedia entry on absolute zero
BBC Four’s absolute zero documentaries

Hit the jump for some great videos about absolute zero
Read the rest of this entry »