Singapore’s SkyPark infinity pool lets you swim to the edge of the world

  You’ve got to admire an architect who can take an ordinary hotel pool and turn it into a genuinely terrifying attraction.
The newly built Sands SkyPark in Singapore offers guests a place to cool off on the 55th floor, nearly 200 metres above ground. Featuring a disappearing edge, the infinity pool gives the illusion of water extending to the horizon, where it ends sharply and the city begins – a pants-filling experience for those afraid of heights.
This nifty innovation comes with a heavy price tag. The SkyPark forms the top platform of the world’s most expensive hotel, the $7 million Marina Bay Sands development.
If the pool doesn’t grab you, there are several other jaw-dropping architectural achievements to marvel over: the sloping towers, which curve by 26 degrees at the steepest point, for example, or the breakneck speed of construction, where one floor was completed every four days.

Observatory Captures a Violently Beautiful Solar Flare On Video

Scientific observations often has to do with being in the right place at the right time, whether intentionally or not. In a stroke of good luck last Thursday the sun’s rotation, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, and a sizeable M 3.6 class solar flare all lined up to allow SDO to capture a gorgeous profile view of said flare unfolding in high definition.
The resulting 16-second video released by NASA over the weekend captures the 90-minute solar event at a cadence of one frame every 24 seconds, creating a time-lapse of the eruption spewing, twisting, and collapsing back to the surface, giving the illusion of seamless motion though the actual event moved more statically.
Unlike the massive solar flare that disrupted communications on earth and spawned beautiful auroras in the Northern Hemisphere earlier this month, NASA says Thursday's flare was directed away from Earth and does not pose any threat.

Atomtronics, Or Atoms Spun By Laser Beams, Could Replace Electronics

A new type of circuit involving a whirling donut of supercold gas could lead to the world’s first “atomtronic” devices, potentially more powerful than electronics or spintronics, researchers say.

It probably won’t be powering your next smart phone, however – it involves laser beams and supercold temperatures a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Atomtronics involves super-cooling atoms to form Bose-Einstein condensates, which could theoretically be used to create analogues to electrons, diodes and transistors. The atoms in the condensate flow as a current, which can be switched on and off like a normal circuit.

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland suspended sodium atoms in a magnetic field and cooled them down, then trapped them in a pair of crossed laser beams, as Science News explains. They further cooled the atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, resulting in a Bose-Einstein condensate – the atoms began to act as one quantum particle. The researchers flattened it into a donut-shaped ring with a radius of about 20 micrometers, Science News says.

Another set of lasers zapped the ring to start it spinning. Because the condensate acts as one unit, it spins without friction, meaning it could theoretically spin forever. In this case, it only lasted about 40 seconds, the lifetime of the condensate. The researchers say the method could be used to build a new type of rotation sensor.

Atomtronics uses atoms in strange quantum states to power devices or computer memory. This is different from spintronics, which stores information based on the spin of individual electrons, allowing each one to store two bits of data instead of one. Computer scientists and particle physicists have made several advances in these fields in the past several months.

Last fall, a University of Utah team figured out how to store quantum data in the nuclei of phosphorus atoms, in a step toward creating quantum memory. In August, Ohio State researchers built and tested the first spintronic memory device.

Atomtronics is still a mostly theoretical field, as Science News points out.

Two Planets Discovered Sharing the Same Orbit

In a cosmic first, the Kepler telescope has discovered two planets sharing the same orbit. There is a theory that says our moon was created when a body sharing our orbit crashed into Earth, but up until now no one had found evidence of co-orbiting planets elsewhere in the universe.

It is possible that such a phenomenon could occur when matter around a newborn star forms into planets. In a planet’s orbit around a star, there are two places where a third body can safely orbit. These spots, known as Lagrange points, are 120 degrees in front of and behind whichever body is smaller. The discovered co-orbiting planets, located in the four-planet system KOI-730, are always 120 degrees apart, permanent fixtures in each others’ night skies.

Fifty million years after the birth of our solar system, the moon may have formed from the debris of a collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body named Theia. For this to be true, Theia would have to have hit earth at a relatively low speed. Richard Gott and Edward Belbruno of Princeton University say that this could only have happened if Theia had originated in a Lagrange point. The discovery of the KOI-730 planets shows that it is possible.

Maybe someday these co-orbiters will collide and form another moon. But it won’t happen for some time, as simulations show that the planets will continue to share their orbit for at least 2.22 million more years.