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Let’s celebrate, with balloons!

The first manned flight of a hot air balloon took place in France in 1783. However, sky lanterns, paper and wood hot air balloons that don’t carry people, have been around in China since as early as 300 BC. Why did it take ever so long? During the research for episode 37, I became interested in the subject of balloon powered flight. Join me as I talk about what I found, just for fun.

Here’s an article on the BOOMERanG experiment, which is what got me on this kick in the first place.

BOOMERanG Balloon Flight Sees A Flat Universe Filled With Dark Energy

Here’s an article on a record set for highest skydive, set in 1960 by a fellow who jumped from a balloon.

Inside the Original Space Dive

Here’s a video on the same subject.

Sky Dive From The Edge Of Space (1960)

Here’s a page and video for when the record was broken, a jump from a balloon at 128,000 feet.

Felix Baumgartner | Red Bull Stratos

Felix Jumps At 128k feet!

Here’s an article on how you can build your own sky lantern.

Candle Powered Hot Air Balloon

Have an article on the Nazca lines.

Nasca Lines

And a couple of articles on a hot air balloon, capable of carrying people, built with methods available to the Nazca culture.

Nazca | Julian Nott

Latin American Aerials

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The cyborg Olympics

Special thanks to @seeingwithsound, creators of the vOICe, (see episode 19,) for telling me about this one.

In 2016, competitors came together to strive for the gold. The only thing is, these athletes used their brains, interfaced with computers, in order to compete.

Here’s an article about the cyborg Olympics that I first read when @seeingwithsound shared it on twitter.

How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics’ Brain Race

Here’s a link to episode 14, when I talked about some of the early developments of the technology the competitors used.

Ep 14: A monkey matrix

Here’s a ted talk that demonstrates the technology.

A headset that reads your brainwaves

And finally, here are a couple of commercially available devices.

g.GAMMAsys – Active electrode system with comfortable cap and a very high signal quality.

g.USBamp-RESEARCH – g.tec’s high performance biosignal amplifier, acquisition and processing system.

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Hey universe, let’s hear some noise!

What would eventually be called the theory of the big bang was first described by Georges Lemaître in 1927. This early description included predictions later verified in 1929, but it wasn’t until 1964, when the cosmic background microwave radiation was accidentally detected, that the theory was taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community.

Check out episode 47’s show page, where there are links that provide much of the background to this episode about the background microwave radiation.

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It’s still getting bigger

In episode 42, we learned that in 1923, Hubble found out that spiral nebula are actually spiral galaxies, changing our understanding of the size of our universe. In 1929, using spectral lines, (see episode 44 and episode 46,) and building off of work previously done by Vesto Slipher, he discovered that the universe is not only bigger than we thought; it’s still getting bigger. This provided supporting evidence for the theory of the big bang.

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Frequency, wavelength, color and motion

What is the Doppler Effect, how does it work, and what does it tell us?

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It takes two dead stars to make gold?

In episode 43, we talked about how our universe makes the chemical elements that our world and we are made of through processes like nuclear fusion, and exploding stars. That may not be enough. Elements like platinum gold and uranium might come from the collision of two neutron stars, possibly the only way to have enough neutrons handy.

Here’s a video simulation of two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole.

Watch 2 Neutron Stars Merge

Here’s an article on when such a collision was observed in this, our real world.

Collision of dead stars produced the world’s gold

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What stars are made of

In order to find out what a star is made of, pass its light through a prism, and examine the resulting rainbow, or spectrum.

Here’s an article that includes an app that will let you play with the effect of different chemicals on a spectrum.

Absorption/emission lines

And here’s the history, with names and dates, on how we figured out this particular trick.

Spectral Lines and the History of Spectroscopy

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Pop go the stars

For our universe to produce minds, we require many different chemical elements. Those elements were created by the stars. The lighter elements fuse together and provide the energy for stars to shine, and to keep from collapsing under their own gravity. Heavier elements, anything heavier than iron, require the stars to go pop—to explode into super novas which create the rest of the heavy elements.

Here’s a page on Nucleosynthesis, the process that created the chemical elements that make up our planet, and us.

Nucleosynthesis – The Physics Hypertextbook

There is some debate as to exactly when the first stars formed.

Here’s a page on an estimation of when the first stars formed based on data collected by NASA’s WMap satellite.

When did the first stars form in the universe?

Here’s a page with a different time, based on data collected by the European space agency’s Planck satellite.

First stars formed even later than previously thought

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It’s bigger than we thought

In 1923 Edwin Hubble used a variable star to prove that the Andromeda Nebula was actually the Andromeda Galaxy. Before his measurements, it was widely believed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the only island of stars in the universe. Boy, did we get it wrong!

Have a look at NASA’s page about when they pointed the telescope named after Edwin Hubble at the star he used to measure the distance to M31—Andromeda.

Hubble Views the Star That Changed the Universe

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A bright approach

To measure distances to astronomical objects that are more than a few thousand lightyears away, astronomers use standard candles.