Unexpected Christmas gift…
There’s a weekly competition on a website I visit quite often to make pictures on a theme. This week’s one was ‘inappropriate Christmas cards’:
EDIT: Just to clarify – this is a joke! (In case anyone got the wrong idea!)
Glowing fuel rods… Do they actually glow?
Yes, apparently they do: clicky! I’d never seen that before, and had wondered if it was a cultural myth. Apparently not! It’s rather pretty, isn’t it?
The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov effect, which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium.
Huh? Faster than light? How does that work? There goes Einstein…
Anyway, the image is from a series of photos by Taryn Simon published in the New York Times this weekend. You can see a short article about them here.