(Source: euthanasium, via curious-courtney)

boogiesbc:

iQ Alarm clock

Instead of the snooze button which you unwillingly press in the morning, this alarm clock has questions that need your lucidity to solve them. This way, you will surely get up fast in the morning.

(via astrotastic)

Breitling Models New Timepiece After Missing Historic Space Watch

Swiss watchmaker Breitling is offering a new timepiece to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its watches’ first launch into space, which was also the first time an American astronaut wore a wristwatch into orbit.

The newly issued Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute borrows some features from the chronograph that astronaut Scott Carpenter wore on NASA’s Mercury-Atlas 7 mission, a historic watch has been missing for the half-century since Carpenter set the record as the second American to circle the Earth.

Carpenter, one of NASA’s original seven astronauts, lifted off on May 24, 1962. Flying aboard Aurora 7, the name he gave to his Mercury capsule, Carpenter orbited the planet three times on NASA’s first manned mission focused on science.

Recognizing that his tasks in space would involve timekeeping, and having been introduced to the Navitimer as a trusted watch used by pilots, Carpenter approached Breitling to produce a modified version of the timepiece for his orbital flight. The astronaut suggested Breitling keep the Navitimer’s unique circular slide rule for making flight calculations but replace its tachymeter dial with a 24-hour display.

“NASA needed to conform its practices to the ways of the future and anticipate the pressures exerted by changing technology,” Carpenter told Kris Stoever, his daughter and co-author of his 2002 autobiography “For Spacious Skies,” when asked about the design principle involved in the 24-hour dial. Carpenter would be reading off times from space in 24-hour format and he felt he and his fellow astronauts would “want to be able to say what they read.” [Photos of NASA’s 1st Manned Spaceflights]

“Nowhere on a 12-hour dial does it say ‘8 p.m.,’” he said.

Ultimately, NASA adopted a watch without a 24 hour dial, the Omega Speedmaster, but Carpenter’s original Breitling gave way to a new version of the Navitimer, named the “Cosmonaute,” of which the 50th anniversary edition is the latest model.

The watch that started it all however, has become history itself.

Lost to time

Almost five hours after embarking on the fourth manned U.S. spaceflight — the second to enter orbit — Carpenter’s Aurora 7 spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Due to a targeting mishap, the capsule landed about 250 miles (400 kilometers) off course.

In the process of his delayed recovery, once outside the spacecraft, Carpenter — still wearing his Navitimer — was submerged in the ocean. The watch was less than water tight, so Carpenter returned the timepiece to Breitling for repair soon after the mission.

Rather than repair and return the space-launched watch, Breitling instead presented Carpenter with a new Navitimer Cosmonaute, the production model he had inspired. At the time, the watchmaker probably thought it was a generous gesture, and Carpenter appreciated the new timepiece.

Today, the first watch flown on a U.S. crewed spaceflight would be very valuable, if not priceless. The only known photographs of it were captured by happenstance, when NASA photographers caught the watch in pre-flight shots as Carpenter strapped into Aurora 7 for his history-making flight.

To this day, it’s unknown what became of the watch that orbited the Earth. Breitling has searched through its vaults to no avail.

Next best thing

Breitling launched the 50th anniversary “Scott Carpenter” edition of the Navitimer Cosmonaute on May 24, 2012 at astronaut- and cosmonaut-studded events held in Miami, New York City and Houston.

Carpenter himself was present at the Big Apple event as part of several anniversary celebrations that also reunited him with his mission’s recovery ship, the U.S.S. Intrepid aircraft carrier, which is now a Manhattan-based sea, air and space museum.

The anniversary-edition timepiece, which is limited to just 1,962 pieces in honor of the year the watch and astronaut flew, includes a 24-hour display and manually winds, two features Breitling points to as nods to the watch that flew in space.

The back of the watch features a Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion scale, another detail that is faithful to vintage Navitimer models.

The caseback is also etched with a commemorative logo for the Aurora 7 mission.

mothernaturenetwork:

How the human mind warps time
Time has a slippery nature in our minds. Sometimes it flows quickly. In other situations, it trickles at an unbearably slow pace.

expose-the-light:

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Time

1  “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental—and timeless—reality.

2  Try explaining that when you get to work late. The average U.S. city commuter loses 38 hours a year to traffic delays.

3  Wonder why you have to set your clock ahead in March? Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread around the world.

4  Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during Daylight Saving Time, saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil.

5  By observing how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked, and postal clerks spoke, psychologists determined that the three fastest-paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo, and New York.

6  The three slowest? Shreveport, Sacramento, and L.A.

7  One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.

8  This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.

9  Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a milli­second every 24 hours.

10  Modern technology can do better. In 1972 a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time, so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second.

11  To keep this time in sync with Earth’s slowing rotation, a “leap second” must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year’s Eve.

12  The world’s most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second.

13  Until the 1800s, every village lived in its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.

14  This caused havoc with the advent of trains and timetables. For a while watches were made that could tell both local time and “railway time.”

15  On November 18, 1883, American railway companies forced the national adoption of standardized time zones.

16  Thinking about how railway time required clocks in different places to be synchronized may have inspiredEinstein to develop his theory of relativity, which unifies space and time.

17  Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nano­seconds each flight.

18  According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.

19  Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

20  There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

(via scinerds)

quantumaniac:

There is No Such Thing as Absolute Time

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, there is no such thing as absolute time. What this means is that there is no universal ‘clock’ ticking the time - every frame of reference has its own perception of time. Thus, there’s no such thing as an absolute present - or future, or past. 

All time on Earth is relatively the same for all reference frames because all humans are not moving very fast - and nowhere near light speed. However, if we were moving at drastically different speeds, we would find that time ticks more slowly for the person moving more quickly - we would age at different rates! Similarly, if one of us was closer than the other to a major gravity well like the Earth, we would age slower than someone who wasn’t.

GPS satellites, of course, are both moving quickly and at significant distances from Earth. So their internal clocks show a different time to the receivers on the ground. A lot of computing power has to go into making your sat-nav work around the theory of special relativity.

(via theuniverseishuge)

quantumaniac:

Atomic Clocks

Clocks are a basic measuring device, they have been utilized for thousands of years in various forms. The first rather accurate clock was the sundial, but since then humans have utilized the atomic scale for incredibly accurate time keeping. 

In its most basic sense, an atom can be thought of as a mini solar system - with the most massive object in the center, being orbited by smaller objects. 

The atom can be pictured as a mini solar system, with the heavy nucleus at the centre surrounded by electrons in a variety of different orbits. By absorbing or releasing energy, the electrons orbiting the nucleus can perform a “quantum jump,” jumping or falling to the next energy level. The energy absorbed or released is in the form of Electromagnetic radiation, the frequency of which depends on the differences in the quantum levels. Electromagnetic radiation is released during a quantum jump, and by measuring the frequency of this radiation - we can measure the passage of time. This transition is the source of the term “quantum jump”, quantum referring to the tiny but precise amount of energy needed to allow the electron to jump to a different level.

The most common atom used in modern atomic clocks is a caesium atom, and was first used in 1955 by Louis Essen. The most modern form of atomic clock is known as a caesium fountain - which projects a cloud of caesium atoms into a microwave chamber and allowed to fall under gravity. As the atoms fall, the fountain utilizes lasers to slow them down - and these slow atoms allow a more accurate measurement of quantum jumps.