Stories tagged clouds

It's...a powedered donut with a bite missing: No! It's a dust bunny biting another dust bunny.
Courtesy kiwehowin.I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve always been very good at picking images out of clouds. Before anyone else can see anything but a boring ol’ cloud, I’m all, “Hey, look, it’s a bunny’s tail,” or “that one looks like a huge damn cotton ball,” or “that one looks like smoke,” or “can you see the snowdrift in that cloud?”

If the world is a party, I am the life of the party (I don’t get invited to a lot of “actual parties,” so this is good).

It’s frustrating then that some modern day Da Vinci, am Einstein for the 21st century, a veritable living Stephen Hawking, has invented a custom cloud-making machine, a device that can make clouds that look like anything you want.

If anyone in the world can look at a cloud, and immediately say, “Hey! It’s obviously a balled up gym sock,” where does that leave me and my God-given talents? It leaves me in the gutter. Or dead. I’m like a latter day John Henry. JHenry, perishing beneath the horrible, diaphanous advance of technology.

Slow down there, JHenry, and explain.

Former magician Francisco Guerra, not content to play God the old fashioned way, making clouds with smoke stacks and cooling towers, has created a machine to create custom shaped clouds out of soap and helium. The clouds are limited only by your corporation’s imagination, ranging “from Mickey Mouse to the Olympic rings.” No doubt this pervert will come up with something even more obscene than either of those images, I’m sure.

My only solace here is that the custom clouds, or “Flogos,” still sound a little crappy—although Guerra is working on machines to produce them on a large scale, Flogos are only about 3 feet in size, they generally hover at around 500 feet, and can drift up to 30 miles before they evaporate. I feel like a 3-foot-tall Mickey Mouse, 50 stories above your head, and drifting into the next county would have somewhat less than an impressive impact. Then again, the Flogo machine can produce a cloud every 15 seconds, or so, so I guess you could make a small army of Mickey Mice.

So the world moves on, leaving JGordon behind. If you need him, look for his body in the mountains, with his hammer in his hand.

Or look for him in a cubicle, holding a pencil and a photograph of himself.

Tags : clouds, inventions, Steel driving men

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Fitting that something called a "bore" would be found in Iowa: Photo by NASA. Minnesota trash-talk by Gene

Colliding masses of air over Des Moines, Iowa on October 3 formed waves of clouds known as an undular bore. (Time-lapse video at the link.)

What happened was an approaching thunderstorm plowed into a mass of stable, cold air, like the prow of a ship plowing through the water. This set up huge waves in the air, which rippled over Des Moines. Winds would whip around 180° as the waves rolled by.

Scientists think these types of waves may be more common than we know, and may play a big role in violent weather.

Tags : weather, iowa, clouds, atmosphere, undular bore

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Storm chasers know that puffy cumulus clouds often cause sudden rainstorms, while storms associated with stratus clouds form more slowly. Now physicists at England’s Open University have finally found an explanation.

They propose that neighboring water droplets in a stable stratus cloud don’t crash into each other because they’re all moving at about the same speed. But fast-forming, turbulent cumulous clouds contain water droplets moving at many different speeds. They crash into each other and form larger drops. As the turbulence grows, the drops grow quickly and fall as rain within a few minutes.

Cumulous cloud: These puffy clouds are associated with sudden rainstorms. Scientists are beginning to understand why.

Sun and rain
Ever noticed the bright, moving lines on the bottom of a stream, bathtub, or swimming pool? They’re called caustics, and they’re caused when ripples on the water’s surface focus sunlight. (Caustics form whenever light rays are bent by a curved surface or object and then projected onto another surface. This interactive shows you how.)

Caustics have a characteristic shape. Physicists can graph the phenomenon mathematically, and the graph also describes other phenomena, such as particle motion or the movement of raindrops within a cumulus cloud.

Caustics: What do the rippling patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool and cumulous clouds have in common? (Photo by R. Motti)

Atmosphere to outer space
The researchers say their finding won’t have any impact on weather forecasting. But particle collisions in turbulent gases must have been involved in planet formation. Perhaps the same theory can be applied?

If you're at the museum on Saturday afternoon (11/18), the MakeIt team can help you play with caustics. Does bending mylar in a different direction produce a new pattern? Does using a different color flashlight or a brighter or dimmer light affect the design?

You can also play with caustics at home.

Tags : weather, light, rain, clouds, cumulous, caustics, stratus, MakeIt, Make

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Female Red Winged Blackbird: Red-Winged Blackbird (female) -- Hillman Marsh (near Point Pelee), Canada -- 2006 May. Image courtesy Mdf.Q: What is a red-winged blackbird?

A: Red-winged blackbirds are a type of bird found in most of North and Central America. It is primarily a marsh bird and they are usually smaller than robins. The male’s red shoulder patches are what gives the bird its name. Although, by looking at these pictures, I think the female is the cooler looking bird. You can learn more about red winged blackbirds (and hear their songs/calls) here.
Male Red Winged Blackbird: Red-winged Blackbird, male, Bluffer's Park (Toronto, Canada), 2005. Image courtesy Mdf.

When searching for this answer I read up on red-winged blackbirds on Wikipedia. The images here are from that article. Interestingly, the photographer (Mdf) who took these pictures is on a mission to, “replace the barely adequate images of birds from the USFWS (and from other US Government agencies) with higher resolution, (hopefully) higher quality versions.” His images are impressive. This really has nothing to do with the question, but I thought it was cool, and worth mentioning.

Q: How do clouds form?

A: There are a lot of web resources about this, which I am going to defer to for this one – check out the “simple” answer at weatherquestions.com or read the article on clouds in Wikipedia.

Q: Why is blood red? Is it always red?

A: Iron atoms in our blood interact with oxygen to give our blood it’s red color. But not all blood is red! Horseshoe crabs have blue blood (due to the oxygen interacting with the copper in their blood), while most insects have clear blood as their “blood” is not involved in the transportation of oxygen.

Q: How long ago was this museum built?

A: The Science Museum’s current facility was opened in December 1999. The Science Museum was founded in 1907 as the St. Paul Academy of Arts and Letters, so we’re quickly approaching our 100th birthday!

Tags : birds, blood, clouds, red-winged blackbird

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