Sinkholes, Climate Change, and Magnets - Oh my!

In celebration of Thirsty Thursday (an alliteration that I just made up), I have a sweet video for you of a very thirsty sinkhole in Louisiana:

Terrifying.

Now what would cause something like this? Mining! Specifically a salt mine in this case, but sinkholes have opened up because of oil drilling, fracking, and even the withdrawal of water. Humans need to be careful when extracting resources from the environment because there's often unintended consequences.

Speaking of unintended consequences, Congress just voted almost unanimously to add an amendment to a bill verifying that climate change is real. Somehow there's been denial of climate change despite 97% of scientists agreeing that it's happening and it's man-made - there's consequences to digging carbon out of the earth and setting in on fire. Check out this link if you want more info.

To end on a happy note, here's a slow-mo video of magnets CRUSHING objects:

Sweet.

Even those these are VERY strong magnets, they still only have a limited range - that's why the scientists have to push them closer together before they attract enough to move together on their own (violently).

Blog Begins Again!

Welcome back to Scott's Science Stuff blog! I'm going to be updating this twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the Spring semester, so make sure you check back here if you're interested!

First up, space! I'm all ABOUT that space:

Try getting THIS out of your head :)

Satellites allow us to take crazy pictures of earth - a lot of these look digitally made or altered, but I assure you that they aren't! Check 'em out here.

One of the coolest "satellites" is the International Space Station, which orbits the earth with people living inside. For more information on how orbits work, check out my blog post from last year here, but first watch this video on the epic project that is the International Space Station:

I know it's long but it's about the MOST expensive man-made object EVER!

Finally, I want to show you this awesome images that just might change your perspective on the world. You've probably seen timelapse gifs or movies like this before, where a still camera shoots at the sky for a whole night and you can see the rotation of the stars:

You're getting verrrryyyy sleeeeeeppy :)

But is the sky actually moving? The movement of the stars is why people used to think everything revolved around the earth - but you and I know that the EARTH is actually what's rotating! These guys took that information and modified their timelapse videos so that the sky stays still and the earth moves:

If you liked that, here's another link to a similar video, and here's a gif for the lazy:

 

Dizzy yet?