STEM and Politics

Most people are not prepared for earthquakes. The USA has not had many major earthquakes, and the top 8 largest magnitude earthquakes all happened in Alaska. On the west coast, there is a monster waiting to be released; the Cascadia Subduction Zone, capable of creating a magnitude 9.2 earthquake.While most people think of the San Andreas fault as causing "the big one" with a magnitude 8 earthquake, this is the real "big one". This massive Earthquake, when combined with the tsunami it will create, will cause around 10 thousand deaths and wreck havoc mostly on the coastal Pacific Northwest. It doesn't look bad, as it only causes severe shaking on the coast and less sever shaking more inland, but it will cause shaking from Redding, CA all the way to Bellingham, WA. And don't forget the tsunami! The map above doesn't even mention the concentrated shaking of the Seattle fault, which is much more violent around Seattle, with shaking reaching IX (below). Th...

     We humans (At least I think that we all are) pride ourselves on having things that robots can supposedly never accomplish or obtain in our lifetime. Among these are touch, emotion, taste, and many others. The time has come for us to cross off 'touch' on that list. New scientists from the University of Minnesota have engineered a 3D "skin" that would have fabric embedded with electronic sensors that would be arranged similar to our own nervous system. A model of what the touch sensors would look like on a human hand.      The engineers have created a unique printer. It consists of 4 nozzles all with their own "ink". This ink layers up to form electrode parts, the base consisting of silicone. The top and bottom electrodes contain electric conductive "ink". There is also a coil - shaped pressure sensor and an exterior layer that holds everything in place. This layer is washed away during the final stages of manufacturing. These 3D printed s...

     How many digits of pi do you know? Most Americans know only 3.14, but you may know more. 5 digits? 20? 50? 100? 200? Personally, as a pi geek, I know over 200 digits of pi - but really, that'll do you no good. With 10 digits of pi, you could calculate the circumference of the earth to a fraction of an inch, and with 30 digits, you could calculate the spherical volume of the universe. However, I do know that pi memorizing seems to be a hobby for math geeks, and I know some people that memorize hundreds of digits of pi [cough, cough David]. But if you don't have a list of digits of pi in your pocket all the time, here are some ways to calculate pi (arranged in order of easiest to hardest): One of the easiest ways to calculate pi, however, this way converges very slowly and you will need to calculate a few hundred terms to get a few correct digits, so this is not recommended, unless you can program a computer that can calculate a few thousand terms per second. The Gr...

     I'm posting this in advance thanks to Hanting, someone I know. Here are some facts for June, the first month of SUMMER! You should read this. There is enough DNA in an average person’s body to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back — 17 times. The average human body carries ten times more bacterial cells than human cells. At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. There are 8 times as many atoms in a teaspoonful of water as there are teaspoonfuls of water in the Atlantic ocean. The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in a lifetime. When Helium is cooled to almost absolute zero (-460°F or -273°C), the lowest temperature possible, it becomes a liquid with surprising properties: it flows against gravity and will start running up and over the lip of a glass container. If Betelgeuse would explode transiting from the red supergiant stage to supernova then our sky wo...