Absolute Zero Premieres on NOVA, January 2008
This winter, NOVA chronicles the race to conquer cold in the film Absolute Zero.
Produced by Emmy-Award winning producer David Dugan in collaboration with executive producer Meredith Burch, and based on Tom Shachtman’s book, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, this NOVA special will be presented as two hour-long programs on January 8 and January 15 at 8:00 p.m. (check local listings).
Absolute Zero features the struggle of philosophers, scientists and engineers over four centuries as they attempt to understand the nature of cold, from dark beginnings to an ultra-cold end point. Along the way they created cold technologies that have transformed the way we live, and gained insights into the nature of matter itself. NOVA brings this frosty subject to life using a combination of colorful historic recreations and insightful interviews with science historians and Nobel Prize winners.
Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold (January 8) begins with 17th century court magician Cornelius Drebbel, who successfully created the world's first air-conditioning system in Westminster Abbey. Other memorable characters include Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius who created the first thermometers; Frederic Tudor who became one of the richest men in America simply deciding to farm and sell ice; and Clarence Birdseye who made his name with frozen food.
Absolute Zero: The Race for Absolute Zero (January 15) tells the gripping story of the decades-long scientific race between Scottish physicist James Dewar and Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, as the two men fought to reach the coldest temperature. Their discoveries opened the door to the modern era of refrigeration and air conditioning. Absolute Zero’s final chapter climaxes in the Nobel-winning breakthrough, the production of a new form of matter that Albert Einstein predicted would exist within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. This is a temperature so cold that the physical world as we know it transforms completely, electricity and fluids flow without resistance, and the speed of light can be reduced to 38 miles per hour. Three men, in two different labs, were awarded the Nobel Prize for being the first to see the peculiar state of matter that occurs near absolute zero.
“I hope viewers come away from the documentaries with a new appreciation of the thought and care that scientists have put into the study of cold over almost four centuries,” says author Tom Shachtman. “The films are a testament to what motivates and energizes all of science – our insatiable curiosity about the world in which we exist.”
Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold author Tom Shachtman, and Linda Devillier, president of Devillier Communications, discussed the book, the PBS program, and the national educational outreach campaign at the NASSMC 2006 Annual Coalition Director's meeting.  |
Of Interest...
| Items selected for this section come from a variety of sources – including but not limited to NASA, NSF, ESA, Science (AAAS), Nature, Smithsonian, New Scientist, Live Science, Science News, and Discover Magazine – and are meant to represent the vast and ever-changing body of scientific research. Selected for their interest value, these items are neither juried nor validated by NASSMC or its member coalitions. |
+ Sun may be smaller than thought: The Sun may be smaller than we thought, a new study argues. If correct, then other properties of the Sun such as its internal temperature and density may be slightly different than previously calculated. Understanding the Sun's interior is important as it might help scientists make predictions about space weather and answer questions about the solar system. The Sun has no solid surface. Its atmosphere merely gets thinner and more transparent farther from its centre. ~ via New Scientist
+ Colossus loses code-cracking race: An amateur cryptographer has beaten Colossus in a code-cracking challenge set up to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer. The competition saw Colossus return to code-cracking duties for the first time in more than 60 years. The team using Colossus managed to decipher the message just after lunch on 16 November. But before that effort began Bonn-based amateur Joachim Schuth revealed he had managed to read the message. ~ via BBC News Science and Nature
+ India enters supercomputing race: A computer system designed in India has made it into a top ten of the world's fastest supercomputers. Computer giant IBM continues to dominate the list—which is compiled twice a year—with a total of 232 out of the top 500 supercomputers. Its Blue Gene/L supercomputer—used to ensure the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable—comes out at number one. The Indian system—known as EKA—made it into fourth place. The world's fastest supercomputer—BlueGene/L—has been significantly upgraded in the last six months. ~ via BBC News Science and Nature
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Earlier long-necked pots would have been used for beer making. Chemical evidence in a pot such as this is seen as proof that beer brewing involved fermenting cacao (Illustration: PNAS/National Academy of Sciences) |
+ Ancient beer pots point to origins of chocolate: Chocolate was first produced by the ancients as a by-product of beer, suggests a new archaeological study. And evidence from drinking vessels left by the Mesoamericans who developed chocolate suggests that the source of chocolate, cacao, was first used 500 years earlier than thought. Mesoamericans – who flourished in central America before it was colonised by the Spanish – developed chocolate as a by-product of fermenting cacao fruit to make a beer-like drink called chicha still brewed by South American tribal people. ~via New Scientist
+ New planet discovered around nearby star: Astronomers funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced their discovery of a fifth planet around the nearby star 55 Cancri, making it the only star aside from the sun known to have five planets. The research results have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Lead author Debra Fischer, assistant professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University, said the fifth planet is within the star's habitable zone, in which water could exist as a liquid. Although the planet is a ball of gas, liquid water could exist on the surface of a moon or on other rocky planets that may yet be found within the zone. ~via NSF
+ Flying lemurs are the closest relatives of primates: While the human species is unquestionably a member of the primate group, the identity of the next closest group to primates within the entire class of living mammals has been hotly debated. Now, new molecular and genomic data gathered by a team including Webb Miller, a professor of biology and computer science and engineering at Penn State, has shown that the colugos -- nicknamed the flying lemurs -- is the closest group to the primates. A paper announcing the results will be published in the journal Science on Nov. 2. The team was led by William J. Murphy, associate professor in the Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences at Texas A & M University. ~via Pennsylvania State University/NSF
+ Japan's melody roads play music as you drive: Motorists used to listening to the radio or their favourite tunes on CDs may have a new way to entertain themselves, after engineers in Japan developed a musical road surface. A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of "melody roads", which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel. The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes. ~via Guardian Unlimited
+ Yellowstone rising: The Yellowstone "supervolcano" rose at a record rate since mid-2004, likely because a Los Angeles-sized, pancake-shaped blob of molten rock was boiled up 6 miles beneath the slumbering giant, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) report in the Nov. 9 issue of the journal Science. "There is no evidence of an imminent volcanic eruption or hydrothermal explosion, that's the bottom line," says seismologist Robert Smith, lead author of the study and a geophysicist at the University of Utah. "A lot of calderas [giant volcanic craters] worldwide go up and down over decades without erupting." ~via NSF
+ Hubble zooms in on heart of mystery comet: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has probed the bright core of Comet 17P/Holmes, which, to the delight of sky watchers, mysteriously brightened by nearly a millionfold in a 24-hour period beginning Oct. 23, 2007. Astronomers used Hubble's powerful resolution to study Comet Holmes' core for clues about how the comet brightened. The orbiting observatory's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) monitored the comet for several days, snapping images on Oct. 29, Oct. 31, and Nov. 4. Hubble's crisp "eye" can see objects as small as 33 miles (54 kilometers) across, providing the sharpest most detailed view yet of the source of the spectacular brightening. ~via NASA
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In this artist’s portrayal of the IC 10 X-1 system, the black hole lies at the upper left and its companion star is on the right. The two objects orbit around a center of gravity once every 34.4 hours. The stellar companion is a type known as a Wolf-Rayet star. Such stars are highly evolved and destined to explode as supernovae. The black hole companion is shedding its outer envelope in a powerful wind, and some of this gas is captured by the black hole’s powerful gravity.
Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA. |
+ Black hole record shattered: In athletic events such as swimming or running, a world record will often stand for several years before it’s broken. The same thing usually holds true for astronomical records as well. But in the case of black holes that form when their parent stars explode as a supernova, a record established less than two weeks ago has just been shattered. Black holes are objects with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. On October 17, astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory announced that a black hole in the galaxy M33 contains 16 times the mass of the Sun. For two weeks it was the heaviest known black hole of its type. Such black holes are known as "stellar-mass" black holes, because they have masses typical of stars. But in a paper to be published on November 1, another team is announcing a stellar-mass black hole with at least 24 times the mass of the Sun, and perhaps as many as 33 solar masses. ~via NASA
+ Birds navigate using magnetic compass-vision: For decades, scientists have known that migratory birds use Earth’s geomagnetic field—along with light, stars, and other cues—to guide them on remarkably long journeys. But it is unclear just how birds sense this relatively weak field and use it for navigation. Now German researchers have provided new evidence supporting the notion that migratory birds actually see magnetic fields. Postdoctoral fellow Dominik Heyers and his colleagues peered into the brains of garden warblers, which travel seasonally between northern Europe and southern Africa, and uncovered a link between neurons in the eye and a region of the brain thought to be involved in migration. ~via Discover Magazine
+ After 250 years of classifying life, 90 percent remains unknown: Most people can tell the difference between some types of berries, or bugs or trees, but much of the planet's life remains unnamed and unseen. A stunningly egotistical Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, tried long ago to set humanity on track to remedy that. His book, "Systema Naturae," first published in 1735 at 13 pages long, proposed a hierarchical system for classifying plants, animals and minerals (we later chipped away minerals into the domain of geology) and launched an effort to identify and inventory all the world's living things. Now 250 years after publication of the book's latter editions, scientists still have discovered as few as 10 percent of the species now living on Earth, said Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, who spoke here last week at an event at the New York Botanical Garden to celebrate a visit of Linnaeus' personal copy of the book's first edition. ~via LiveScience
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