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Cool video, but what a disappointingly inaccurate title. Spoiler alert: they spent days finding metallic dust, cleaning the dust, and sifting through the sampl
by rm999 8y ago
Cool video, but what a disappointingly inaccurate title.
Spoiler alert: they spent days finding metallic dust, cleaning the dust, and sifting through the samples with a microscope. They shipped ~15-20 interesting samples to Europe where an expert with an electron microscope analyzed each sample. The expert presumably spent a lot of time analyzing each sample on his expensive equipment and found zero meteorites.
The title insinuates it's easy to find meteorites with no specialized equipment, but everything about the video contradicts this.
- fouc 8y agoI don't think the video mentioned anything about an electron microscope. Jon Larsen is basically an amateur scientist that figured out what micrometeorites would look like by a process of elimination. Clearly a regular microscope is sufficient for this. The nice images from Jan Kihle are due to a camera/microscope system that takes a snap shot at different focuses to make a composite picture. It wouldn't be an electron microscope. This is clearly within the range of amateurs if you have a microscope & the book and just get good at eliminating unlikely samples.
- rm999 8y agoAh whoops you're right! At 8:39 I saw a mention of a scanning electron microscope and thought they were saying they used it in the analysis. They are actually saying one would be needed for that particular sample.
- nkurz 8y agoI don't think the video mentioned anything about an electron microscope. It's not emphasized, and not present at all in the audio, but there is "mention" within the video. At 8:40 in the video (https://youtu.be/9q3uNcJh4pc?t=516 https://youtu.be/9q3uNcJh4pc?t=516), when showing the response from Larsen, the sentence after the highlighting reads "a scanning electron microscope (SEM) examination ... would be necessary". So you are right that it wasn't done, but it apparently would have been the next step for a confirmation.
- TomK32 8y agoI was about to write "Let's leave the composite picture as an excercise for the image processing class" but there's already software for this [Focus stacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking) and even some python code https://github.com/sjawhar/focus-stacking/ https://github.com/sjawhar/focus-stacking/
- andremendes 8y agoI agree the title can mislead someone to think it's easy but after watching the video I think it's fair to say the title is accurate. Micro meteorites are in fact everywhere and they indeed describe a way to find them. The fact they didn't succeed in finding one is shadowed by the quality of the overall content.