Lamda Space

• Penguins have a gland near their beaks converts salt water into fresh water. Once the gland gets full, a penguin will knock his beak on a rock to empty the salt out.
• If a bryophyte (e.g. moss) runs out of water, it just goes into suspended animation and comes back to life when it gets water. Which means, theoretically, mosses can live forever. This condition is referred to as poikilohydry, which is the ability to dessicate (dry out) without damage.
• Tropical rainforests in the Amazon have their soil nutrients periodically replenished by the Sahara Desert. Wind blows dust particles all the way from the desert, across the ocean, to the tropics where the sand and its associated nutrients help the fertility of the rainforest.
• The bacteria inside your body takes on an evolutionary path that is specific to you and contains species that are different from anyone else’s bacteria. As well as the fact that there are (on average) more bacteria housed in your body than people in the world.

Fascinating. All the universe is math.

The curvature of spacetime is described by a type of object called a field - which really just means it’s a set of numbers (matrices, in particular) with some value at each point in space and time, each saying how much curvature there is in various directions. There are lots of other fields - the electromagnetic field is a famous one - and while the spacetime field is certainly special, since it describes the background that all the other fields move on, it’s nonetheless the same kind of thing fundamentally.

Quantum theory tells us that fields and particles are inextricably linked - particles are nothing other than energetic excitations in a field. So just as the excitations or ripples in the electromagnetic field give rise to electromagnetic waves, or photons, so we expect the gravitational field to give rise to particles called gravitons. We already know half the story, we know that spacetime has classical (i.e., non-quantum) ripples called gravitational waves that are very much analogous to electromagnetic waves, and we know that when you throw quantum mechanics in the mix, the electromagnetic waves become photons.

But there are various technical difficulties with taking Einstein’s theory of spacetime and making it work as a quantum theory. As I said, they’re quite technical, but they have to do with the fact that at higher and higher energies, the theory “blows up” and starts spitting out infinities, making it impossible to calculate anything.

Electron microscope image of a snowflake

Ric Kaner set out to find a new way to make graphene, the thinnest and strongest material on earth. What he found was a new way to power the world.

Micro to macro scale

thesciencellama:

Acoustic Levitation

Using sound waves to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing pharmaceutical drugs and drying them in mid-air. Why do this? This is useful because most of the drugs on the market are either amorphous or crystalline and the crystalline form doesn’t get absorbed by the body. So levitating the solution allows the drug to be made into an amorphous state (by evaporation) because if it were to touch any surface it would simply crystallize. They call this “containerless processing”.

The frequencies used are just above the audible range at about 22 kilohertz and when the two speakers are aligned they create two sets of sound waves, perfectly interfering with each other creating a phenomenon known as a standing wave. This allows the objects to levitate in areas within the waves known as nodes as the acoustic pressure is enough to cancel the force of gravity.

Video Source - Argonne National Laboratory

(via robotindisguise)

Trees and the aurora 

Aurora Australis 

Fluorite (also called fluorspar) is a halide mineral composed of calcium fluoride, CaF2. It is an isometric mineral with a cubic habit, though octahedral and more complex isometric forms are not uncommon. Crystal twinning is common and adds complexity to the observed crystal habits.

The word fluorite is derived from the Latin root fluo, meaning “to flow” because the mineral is used as a flux in iron smelting to decrease the viscosity of slags at a given temperature. This increase in fluidity is the result of the ionic nature of the mineral. The melting point of pure calcium fluoride is 1676 K.

In 1852 fluorite gave its name to the phenomenon of fluorescence, which is prominent in fluorites from certain locations, due to certain impurities in the crystal.

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NASA-NOAA Satellite Reveals New Views of Earth at Night

An unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever before.

Bubble Chamber Generator: generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles

Bubble chamber photographs provide an insightful introduction to the exotic short-lived particles that emerge from all high energy accelerator experiments.

Since they show actual trails of bubbles that are formed as charged particles force their way through an unstable liquid, bubble chamber pictures are perceived by non-particle physicists as real, and therefore a good way to introduce particle physics. The pictures themselves are quite often easy to understand in an intuitive, qualitative way.

The pictures, moreover, possess a mysterious, cosmic beauty that is particularly appealing to the non-scientist.

A composite false-color image of fire in space. The bright yellow traces the path of a drop of fuel, shrinking as it burns, producing green soot. In Space, Flames Behave in Ways Nobody Thought Possible.