this tuesday, i got a chance to peek at what some of innsbruck’s chemists are doing:

right now, there’s an ongoing experiment based on the miller-urey-experiment [wikipedia: de, en] at the university of innsbruck.
stanley miller and harold clayton urey proved in 1953(!), that aminoacids (the base of all life-forms that we know of) could develop naturally under early atmosphere conditions of the earth.
this process is called “chemical evolution”.

nowadays, the composition of the early earth’s atmosphere is believed to be different than what miller and urey assumed, but the outcome is similar: organic molecules can (and will) form naturally, using very basic molecules (mainly water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) and energy in the form of lightning.

here in innsbruck, scientists made a small modification to this setup: clay minerals (silicates) were added, because they have proven to influence the chemical evolution (and they were there, a few billion years ago).
after one month, they’re going to analyze what looks like green goo, and see what molecules are formed in this different setup…

when data about the atmosphere of titan was collected in january 2005, they also tried a similar experiment for titan conditions (different atmosphere, temperatures below freezing, …), to see if life (in very simple forms) could have evolved there.
after all, it’s still unknown where all the methane comes from and why it’s still there.
from what we know now, it IS possible.

[view photos: miller-urey-experiment - chemical evolution]

after contemplating for a long time, anton and i decided to go see what it’s all about.
last saturday, several of innsbruck’s universities and scientific centers put on a collective open day night, called lange nacht der forschung.

while the whole event was clearly targeted at laypersons, i still thought it was nice. two shuttle bus routes through innsbruck were frequented every 15 minutes or so, there was free food & drinks near many stations, and the presentations were quite interesting (although we already knew much of what was said there).
i especially liked the topic of nano technology, with interesting showcase items like ferrofluids (wikipedia: [de], [en]).

we could also take a glance at a quantum computer, watch some 3D-visualizations (using polarizing glasses and all that) in an astronomy presentation, and had our fun with a thermographic camera.
unfortunately, there was not enough time to attend the guided tour through a production facility for hearing-aid implants.

 
[view photos: lange nacht der forschung]

hey!

did anybody notice the sundog that could be seen on …wait…
december 28th at 11:00 am CET that was!
(no, i don’t remember, the picture’s exif-data says so :shock:)

in case you missed it, that’s what it looked like:

seems to be a rather rare event, given that it’s caused by hexagonal ice crystals that need to have the same (=horizontal) orientation…
i was just given a scientifical explanation for this - check this site out for mor information.

besides: the german translation for sundog would be “nebensonne”