From New York city to Tokyo in just 45 minutes?

So, who's up for grabbing lunch in Tokyo today?

Yes, Tokyo, Japan.  Well, today this may not be a possibility, but scientists are working on new plane designs that could make this lunch date a distinct possibility.

XCOR, a rocket engineering firm, has announced the design of a new suborbital plane called the Lynx.  This vehicle would be able to take passengers from New York City to Tokyo in just 45 minutes.  Pretty amazing, right?  This plane would launch into the sky and reach about 60 miles above the Earth's surface.  This would place the passenger above almost all of our atmosphere.  Currently most commercial flights only get about 23,000 feet up (a little over 4 miles).  So, 60 miles above the Earth is a pretty large step up considering today's standards.  The lynx would be high enough for passengers to see the curve of the Earth, the blackness of space, and experience a little bit of weightlessness.  The flight would take only 45 minutes at the amazing speed of 3,800 mph (mach 5) that the engineering firm wishes to achieve. 

Travel has always been a great source of inspiration and invention among humans.  The earliest means of long range travel took place on foot.  Our earliest ancestors walked a lot.  This was made a little easier with the advent of floating wood on water, boats.  Once upon a time it took nearly nine months to cross the ocean.  As boats became more efficient the time took a little bit less, but you just could not make it faster than months at a time.  On Dec 17, 1903, the Wright brothers took one giant step forward in human transportation when they successfully flew the very first plane in North Carolina.  This design was very elementary compared to our modern day flying machines, but at the time this was a monumental achievement.  The Wright flyer was the first spark that ignited the rapid evolution of flying technology.  Shortly after the Wright brothers invention, planes developed into machines that could make trans-atlantic flights.  The first non-stop transatlantic flight went from Maryland to Ireland in a whopping 29 hours.  Think about that for a moment.  Humans were used to taking months to make this journey and suddenly there came a time in which it only took 29 hours, a fraction of the time it took on boat.  As planes developed the flight times got shorter.  Currently, a flight from Maryland to Ireland takes about nine hours.  So, let's zoom out a little, 9 months on boat, to 29 hours on early plane, to 9 hours using modern technology, in a relatively short time period of technological evolution.  Sure, 45 minutes seems bizarre, but consider what the first plane passengers must have thought when crossing the ocean below them.  What XCOR is hoping to do is just continuing the growth of technology and use the process of science to help advance a very basic component of human life, travel.

The Lynx plans on launching in 2013 with ticket prices starting at $95,000.  There has been no official announcement on the on-board baggage just yet.  Stay tuned for more developments!

The Guitar!

The Guitar: The Instrument The Rocked The World.

Last year, about 3 million guitars were sold worldwide. That's more than all other instruments combined! Clearly this data indicates a large popularity for this relatively recent musical instrument.   

Though its ancestors date back to pre-recorded times, the earliest 'guitar' dates back to the Renaissance. A neck, which contained a fret board and tuning pegs, was attached to a hollowed out wooden body to project the sound of the strings. These early guitars were all acoustic, requiring no electricity. This is where six strings were strung together to create an instrument that could play chords (two or more notes played together) or melodic lines in which notes could create basic musical sentences, note by note. The evolution of the guitar happened slowly over a few hundred years with basic changes to the types of shapes, materials, and sizes. The landmark evolutionary step for the guitar was in 1932 when, for the first time ever, it went electric. Like many inventions, the electric guitar came about as a necessity. In the 1930s Hawaiian styled slide guitar compositions were very popular. The guitar was commonly accompanied by various other instruments ranging from the bombastic percussion to loud and blaring horns! This presented a problem to the guitar players that who wanted to be able to be heard in their various musical combos.  

In 1932 George Beauchamp, Adolph Rickenbacker and a few others founded a company to manufacture a guitar that could be amplified. These steps would lead to a musical revolution that now yields the sale of 3 million units annually. So, how did they do this? Well, the answer lies in one of the most powerful forces that exists in our natural world, electromagnetism. The component added was the pick-up. The pick-up is a bar magnet surrounded by a tightly wound wire. This wire is wrapped around the magnet several thousand times. The pick-up is placed near the steel strings of a guitar. The motion of the strings, when plucked or strummed, creates a vibration in the magnetic field thus sending a current through the wire. That current comes out as a small electrical signal. Well, small's not going to cut it if we want to compete with drums and brass. So, the signal was then sent into a radio, which has the ability to amplify or boost electrical pulses and signals. This would create a larger more audible version of that electrical signal. This was the first time an electric guitar signal was sent through an amplifier to create a louder signal that could compete with the accompanying instruments.  

Soon after, this technology was harnessed by many other musical and technological explorers. Varying designs on both the guitar and the amplifier quickly started to appear. The evolution of the guitar took a drastic shift once this technical component was added. Currently there are thousands upon thousands of types of guitars and amplifiers ranging from the simple and basic to the bizarre and complicated. 

This new instrument was an integral player in the creation of new genres of music. The older classical orchestral music had no composed parts for guitar so new compositions were needed. Though there are some classical pieces that feature the guitar, the instruments footprint on the musical world really was made clear once musicians started to play blues, jazz, country, and bluegrass. These were the predecessors to nearly everything we hear on the radio today. Once the evolution of the instrument started to take shape, the evolution of genres quickly followed. Many musicians such as Robert Johnson, B.B.King, Fats Domino, and Jackie Brenston were helping establish the new genre of rock and roll, but there was much more in store for the guitar in the very near future. 

In the early 1940s a young truck driver in Alabama took standard blues music and presented it with a slightly faster tempo and a more pronounced back beat. That truck driver was one of the many people who helped create a brand new style of music that was, as of then, a pretty uncommon sound in the average American household. What was the music?  Rock and Roll.  Who was the truck driver? Elvis Presley. Presley would later go on to be called 'The King of Rock Music'. With the influence of these early blues based musical pioneers, a fleet of musicians from around the planet started to perfect their 'rock' sound, including a quartet from Liverpool, England. The Beatles released their first album in 1963 and created a seemingly unstoppable musical trajectory. The fab four ushered in a cultural revolution that would change the guitar forever. For the first time ever a guitar based musical group was upheld in the public limelight as international celebrities. The guitar driven sound of the mop-top quartet became a staple on radio and television across the world. Soon after, other guitar-led musicians would sweep international media and inspire generations of future musicians.

The guitar is the instrument that rocked the world. 

For Members: The Polar Express PJ Party Survival Guide

 

Hello there, Science Museum of Virginia members! Welcome to the first just-for-members entry in the SMV blog. We’ll be using this space to give you news on our special member events and offers.

Our phones have been ringing off the hook with PJ Party registrations. Our original date, Friday, December 7^th is full. Registrations for Saturday, December 8^th are quickly approaching our IMAX®DOME’s capacity. 

Both parties start at 5:30 pm, and the film begins at 6:30. Here are some helpful hints to make your family’s PJ Party experience one of the best of the holiday season!

Confirm your reservation date. If you have any question about which evening you’re signed up for, just call us at 804.864.1449 or email membership@smv.org.

• Arrive as early as you can and use the IMAX®DOME entrance.  This will give you time to check in, enjoy milk, cookies and crafts and get choice seats for the film at 6:30.
• Even if the holiday spirit moves you, please do not bring additional unregistered guests. We cannot guarantee that theater seats will be available for them.  
• If you registered and can’t come – please let us know so that other members can sign up and enjoy the party.
• HAVE FUN! If you have some PJ party photos you’d like to share after the event, send them to us!

Why Do We Sleep?

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ....

ZZZZZZZZ....

ZZZZ.....

Ah sleep, so peaceful!

So, why do we sleep?

Well, first of all every animal with a brain sleeps.  A lot of really important things happen while we are off in dreamy dream land.   Sleep is when the body gets a chance to repair and process things.  This allows our brain to be refreshed and our cells (throughout the body) to get repaired,  an important part of how wounds heal! 

Not only does it repair the body, but scientists believe sleep is also when your brain indexes and processes memories!  So, sleep is pretty important for our day to day brain functions.

Going without sleep can lead to some scary stuff too.  Losing just one hour of sleep has measurable consequences in loss of memory and cognitive abilities.  In fact there have been some high profile disasters like Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez that are a direct result of sleep deprivation. 

Also, sleep can affect the hormones that control appetite!  There's even a direct link between insufficient sleep and obesity!  Proper sleep is vital for a healthy body!

Also, that's when you dream and that's when you get to be an astronaut or pirate or what have you.  Get some rest, its good for ya! 

Learn more with some sleep related links:

http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689703/

http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/p/TheoriesofSleep.htm

Wait, Voyager traveled HOW far?!?!?

In 1977 NASA launched Voyager 1  and 2, two probes boldly going where no spacecraft had gone before!  After 35 years of zipping through space these ultimate inanimate explorers still work and are still communicating with us!  The Voyager program has been a vital source of information used by astronomers in understanding more about our own cosmic back yard.  Some of the most commonly used photos of our solar system have been snapped by Voyager 1 and 2 while they blast towards interstellar space!  The last planetary rendezvous was when Voyager 2 did a flyby of Neptune in 1989.  Since then the cosmic explorers have just been blasting on ahead and away from our sun.

These are unmanned spacecraft so they can travel at some pretty amazing speeds.  The speeds reached by these spacecraft allow them to travel huge distances, after all there's a LOT of space in space.  Voyager 1 is leaving our solar system and heading into the great-even-more-so-unknown of interstellar space at a whopping speed of 32,000 miles an hour!  This means this flying vessel can trek about 912,000 miles a day!! That's a pretty fast flight!

For more information on this program check out NASA's voyager page!

Ladies and Gents, The impressive PENCIL!

400 years ago lead was harnessed to wood and thus pencils were born!  Today, most pencils are made of graphite surrounded by a wooden shell.  The average pencil can draw a line for about 35 miles!  If you're not drawing 35 mile long lines you could be writing words, about 45,000 words is the average life span of a graphite pencil.  This prolific writing tool is used all over the planet so it’s no surprise that about 15 billion pencils are manufactured every year!  That's enough to reach (end to end) from Earth to the moon seven times.  Also, seeing as how pencils work in zero gravity, they're often used for space missions over standard pens.  This impressive tool has been used by such great minds as Thomas Edison, John Steinbeck, and Johnny Carson!  Remember to use a sharpener because writing with a broken pencil is...pointless! 

More pencil related articles can be found right here: http://www.economist.com/node/17043890
or here: http://www.pencils.net/facts.cfm

The Amazing Human Heart!

The Human Heart is pretty amazing! It's the power house of our circulatory system. One muscle with four chambers that pumps about 1900 gallons of blood every single day!  That's pretty impressive considering that this vital organ only weighs about 10 ounces.  Don't let size fool you though, the heart's work goes a long way, literally!  The average adult human circulatory system can actually reach about 60,000 miles. That's enough to wrap around the Earth four times!! On top of all this, as if that were not impressive enough, the human heart will beat about 3 billion times in a full lifetime!  Pretty impressive! No wonder we all <3 the human heart!