Trivia

Why does calling someone “yellow” mean cowardly?

Before the United States’ Civil War, there were two opposing sides on the issue of slavery. As the debates between these two groups continued, agitators on both sides published anonymous pamphlets and flyers which attacked public figures. These unsigned publications, which typically contained vicious lies and rumors, were usually printed on cheap, unbleached paper that had a yellow tint. When it was learned certain newspaper editors were contributing to the publishing effort, the practice became known as “yellow journalism.” Eventually, the term “yellow” became known as a cowardly act.

Calling all female bikers: Just Ride

The start of the 2014 Cape Town International Female Ride Day. 

Cape Town – Once a year, the call goes out to women motorcyclists all around the world: Just Ride!

And, on the first Saturday in May, that’s exactly what they do; women’s motorcycle clubs and riding groups in more than 20 countries get out there on the roads to highlight the growing number of female riders worldwide, encourage women who’ve always wanted to ride but never had the gumption to get their butt on a bike, and make their presence felt “in numbers too big too ignore”.

International Female Ride Day was founded in Toronto, Canada in 2007 by motorcycle racer, riding instructor and founder of online women’s motorcycle magazine Motoress, Vicki Gray.

It went international that first year and has now, in its ninth year, become a global event involving thousands of women in Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Egypt, England, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand and in dozens of places across the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Gray refuses to dictate what form individual rides should take; some are fund-raisers for chosen charities, others are testosterone-free track days at iconic circuits such as Laguna Seca in Monterey, California, but the majority are exactly what she had in mind eight years ago – a way to bring women bikers together to be visible and Just Ride.

INTERNATIONAL FEMALE RIDE DAY IN SOUTH AFRICA

In Johannesburg the riders will meet Harley-Davidson Johannesburg, 167 Rivonia Road, Morningside from 8am on Saturday 2 May for a 9am departure, on a marshalled ride to Ciao Baby at Cedar Square for breakfast. Any female rider on anything with two or three wheels, handlebars and an engine is welcome to join the ride.

A buffet breakfast will be available at R80 per person, and each rider will receive a metal badge commemorating the ride.

Cape Town’s International Female Ride Day will start from Cape Town Harley-Davidson in Somerset Road, where dedicated parking has been arranged at the Caltex garage next door and the riders will be treated to coffee and muffins – and helium balloons to to decorate their bikes – from 8am.

The ride will start with an official group photo on the garage forecourt, followed by a marshalled ‘brag ride’ through the city, and then on to the Dockside Café in Langebaan, for a leisurely brunch (for own pocket) where each rider will receive a metal badge.

Any female rider is welcome, and there will be a small prize at the end venue for the best-dressed bike.

For more information on both rides, contact Mirinda Vermaak of Lady Bikers SA on 021-824 3397.

Unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft is falling to Earth – live

All the latest developments as Progress M-27M vessel, which was carrying supplies to the International Space Station, is said to be out of control

The Russian space agency has conceded its out-of-control cargo spacecraft will not be able to dock with the International Space Station.

Roscosmos admitted the Progress 59 freighter’s failed mission will cost 2.59 billion roubles (£32.8 million), a spokesman for the agency said.

Igor Komarov, head of Roscosmos, listed a series of problems that had made the vessel tumble out of control since early on Tuesday, Reuters reported. He said:

Because of this, the craft’s continued flight and its docking with the ISS is not possible.

Here’s what else we learned throughout the day:

Progress 59 launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday without issueThe spacecraft is 7m long and holds 2.5 tonnes of food, water, fuel and other suppliesThe vessel malfunctioned soon after it reached orbit on Tuesday and went into an uncontrolled spin.It is rotating at a rate of 360 degrees every five seconds
The spacecraft is travelling at more than 16,000 miles per hour.The vessel is 160 miles above the Earth.It could take up to two weeks for Progress 59 to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, at which point it is expected to break up.You can follow Progress 59 using satellite tracking websites Satflareand N2YO.Igor Komarov, head of Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, says they are now considering different options for a “water landing”.

My colleagues Ian Sample and Shaun Walker have filed this report.

In light of information that Progress 59 could be orbiting the Earth for up to two weeks, we have decided to close the live blog. I’ll leave you with this clip from Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning thriller Gravity to serve as a reminder that the spacecraft was thankfully unmanned.

A Russian spacecraft is spinning out of control – but don’t panic

News that a Russian spacecraft is spiralling out of control and plunging to Earth may have alarmed you this morning, but don’t worry – the situation is more like a missed parcel delivery than a Hollywood apocalypse movie.

The spacecraft in question, an uncrewed Progress capsule, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday morning and should have arrived at the International Space Station six hours later.

The Russians launch these spacecraft to the ISS every few months, carrying regular deliveries of food, water and other supplies needed to keep the station and the astronauts on board in good health.

Normally these missions go off without a hitch, but this latest one, designated Progress M-27M, failed to deploy its antennas after launch. As a result, mission controllers have been unable to make full contact with the spacecraft.

Video downloaded yesterday shows that it is currently spinning out of control. If the Russians can’t make contact, the spacecraft should return to Earth in the next few days and burn up in the atmosphere.

Well-stocked space station

That doesn’t mean you should be on the lookout for falling debris though – Progress capsules, like most of the spacecraft that deliver supplies to the ISS, are designed to burn up once they have delivered their cargo. For M-27M, this will just happen earlier than expected.

Astronauts on board the ISS aren’t at risk either, as the station keeps reserve supplies for exactly this eventuality. The last delivery, made by a SpaceX Dragon capsule a couple of weeks ago , left the astronauts with enough food to last until September. SpaceX is due to launch another Dragon in June, so supplies shouldn’t be a problem.

The Russians had planned another Progress launch in August, but may be delayed while they investigate the underlying cause of this failure, to avoid the same thing happening again. The last Progress mission that failed to make its delivery was in 2011, but that was actually due to theSoyuz rocket that lofts the craft into orbit.

The same rocket is currently the only way for humans to get into orbit, so that failure threatened to leave the ISS unoccupied while the Russians investigated, but in the end everything worked out fine.

The trillion-frame-per-second camera

Researchers from Japan have developed a new high-speed camera technology, called STAMP, that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second. The prototype camera is shown here in the lab. Credit: Keiichi Nakagawa, University of Tokyo

When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at close to one sixth the speed of light, or approximately 28,000 miles/second. Scientists now have a new tool to take movies of such superfast movement in a single shot.

Researchers from Japan have developed a newhigh-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second. That speed is more than one thousand times faster than conventional high-speed cameras. Called STAMP, for Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography, the new camera technology “holds great promise for studying a diverse range of previously unexplored complex ultrafast phenomena,” said Keiichi Nakagawa, a research fellow at the University of Tokyo, who worked to develop the camera with colleagues from an array of Japanese research institutions.

Conventional high-speed cameras are limited by the processing speed of their mechanical and electrical components. STAMP overcomes these limitations by using only fast, optical components.

Another optical imaging technique, called the pump-probe method, can create movies with an even higher frame rate than STAMP, but can only capture one frame at a time—limiting its use to processes that are exactly reproducible.

“Many physical and biological phenomena are difficult to reproduce,” said Nakagawa. “This inspired me to work on an ultrafast camera that could take multiple frames in a single shot.”

Nakagawa himself experienced the need for such a camera while he was a master’s student studying how acoustic shock waves changed living cells. Scientists believe mechanical stress, like that caused by acoustic waves, might increase bone and blood vessel growth, but they had no tools for capturing the dynamics of such a fast, transient event as a shock wave passing through a cell.

“Since there was no suitable technique, I decided to develop a new high-speed imaging technique in my doctoral program,” Nakagawa said.

STAMP relies on a property of light called dispersion that can be observed in the way a misty sky splits sunshine into a rainbow of colors. Similarly, STAMP splits an ultrashort pulse of light into a barrage of different colored flashes that hit the imaged object in rapid-fire succession. Each separate color flash can then be analyzed to string together a moving picture of what the object looked like over the time it took the dispersed light pulse to travel through the device.

In the first iteration of STAMP, which the team described in a paper published in Nature Photonicsin August 2014, the number of frames that the camera could take in a single shot was limited to six.

Currently, the team is constructing an improved STAMP system that can acquire 25 sequential images. Nakagawa believes the number of frames could eventually be increased to 100 with current technology.

Nakagawa notes that because STAMP operates on the assumption that all the differently colored daughter pulses interact with the imaged object in the same way, the camera should not be used to image samples whose optical properties change over the range of wavelengths STAMP uses.

Even given STAMP’s limitations, the technology has enormous potential, Nakagawa says. His team has already used it with image electronic motion and lattice vibrations in a crystal of lithium niobate and to observe how a laser focused onto a glass plate creates a hot, rapidly expanding plume of plasma.

Nakagawa notes that the camera could be used to explore a wide range of ultrafast phenomena for the first time, including the laser ignition of fusion, the phase transition of materials, and the dynamics of a Coulomb explosion, an event in which intense electromagnetic fields (for example from a narrow laser beam) can force a small amount of solid material to explode into a hot plasma of ionized atomic particles.

“I think it is important to note that there might be many potential applications of STAMP that I have not imagined,” Nakagawa said. “I hope more researchers will become interested in STAMP.”

Naughty Husky

That look after doing something you shouldn’t…