today and tomorrow

Maybe you’ve heard about the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer long, circular particle accelerator. CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) has build this huge research centre a 100 meters under the border of France and Switzerland. It is almost finished now, actually they are still cooling down the entire collider to -271.25 °C (-456.25 °F). When everything is up and running they will do high-energy collisions.
That sounds all very exciting… but I’m really amazed by the beauty of this. Who says that engineers don’t have any sense for esthetics? Just look at these pictures!

Photochromic chemicals are … I don’t even know. In this video, you can see a tube filled with a clear liquid (a hexaarylbiimidazole derivative). But when you expose it to UV light, it changes it’s color to green instantly. If you want to know more about it, then read this article at The Chem Blog.

found at MAKE: Blog

Magnetic Movie is a film by Semiconductor. They made magnetic fields visible in a very nice way, 3D CGI at its best, while scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries. Watch it!

EDIT: To set things straight, this video is a 3D CGI visualisation of how magnetic fields could look like. It is not real, just a mix of video footage with computer generated imagery.

Here is the full version.