Showing only Notes + Links tagged science
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.Carl Sagan in Cosmos. Here’s the recipe for Carl’s apple pie (via Kottke)
Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium’s Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.
(via Kottke)
Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State →
Duh! I love when science confirms my own unconventional beliefs.
(via Kottke)
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.Charles Darwin (via brocatus)
If you’ve got a 16 tesla magnetic field, you can levitate a frog.
The levitation trick works because giant magnetic fields slightly distort the orbits of electrons in the frog’s atoms. The resulting electric current generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction to that of the magnet. A field of 16 teslas created an attractive force strong enough to make the frog float until it made its escape.
Best part: it doesn’t kill the frog.
(via kottke)
While browsing Mike Frumin’s blog (after stumbling across his wonderful Subway Sparklines) I came across this awesome video of an MRI scan of his brain! In the post he also confirms that he doesn’t have a tumor, which is good news!
I know MRI’s aren’t really good for you and usually happen because something is suspect, but I still think it would be awesome to have a video of my brain!
C. Telfer, one of my wonderfully inspiring art teachers, finally has a portfolio online. I love this piece, made out of glass, which looks like a petri dish!
Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria communicate | Video on TED.com
This is definitely one of my top 5 talks from TED 2009, I’m so glad it’s finally online! I have nearly zero interest in mollecular biology, but Bonnie Bassler is, above all, a passionate and engaging presenter. She thinks we can stop diseases by studying how bacteria communicate. Wonderful research!
m (via Mirror Sight - Core77)
Mathematician Andrew Hicks uses math to design mirrors. Not just any mirrors: His panoramic mirror reflects 360 degrees without any distortion; his perspective-rectifying mirror gives a wide-angle view without distortion, and was designed to help a stair-climbing robot navigate steps; and his “true mirror” reflects images without flipping them around.
“I saw the weirdest thing with Ezra,” says Annie. “Down on 1st [Avenue]. We saw a True Mirror. It shows you what you really look like.” “What’s a True Mirror?” asks Shady.
Though I’ve never actually seen one, I’ve heard of True Mirrors. “It’s like this,” I say. “Every time you look in a mirror, the image of you that you see, is not what other people see. You know what I mean? Like the part in your hair is on the other side.”
“So?” says Mike.
“Well it goes beyond that. Most people, their faces are not truly symmetrical. Take me, I got one eye that’s bigger than the other if you look close. My bigger eye is on the left, but in a mirror I see it on the right. So the reflection of you that you’re accustomed to, and the You that other people see are two very different things.”
[After traipsing down to the store] I’m the first person to look into the thing, and it’s jarring. The initially weird thing is that you raise your right hand and see your reflection raise its left. After that, as you look closer you see a face that looks very similar to yours, but something is definitely…off. The eyes are all wrong. Birthmark on the wrong side. Jawline not the shape you remember it.
“S’f*cking creepy,” I say, backing up.
The others take turns looking into it, and narcissistic though it sounds, it becomes sort of mesmerizing. You see this person who looks so, so much like you and yet they are not the person you know. An almost exact replica, but one sure to be sniffed out by an expert. A near-perfect doppleganger who could charm his way into your friends’ kitchen, but an accidental cut while making a sandwich would reveal the green alien’s blood within.
Before we leave I take one last look in the mirror. It’s depressing enough seeing my normal reflection—eyes not as bright as they once were, little lines forming where the skin was once smooth—but something about the True Mirror draws it into sharp relief. It’s the visual version of hearing a recording of your voice and recoiling at the unfamiliar tone.
Jonah Lehrer - Out of Our Heads : The Frontal CortexAlva Noë, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, argues that consciousness remains a mystery because we’ve been looking in the wrong place. In his provocative and lucid new book, Noë writes that scientists have been so eager to locate the mind in the brain that they’ve neglected to consider the possibility that our mind might not be inside our head.
Then where is it? Don’t worry, Noë isn’t an old-fashioned Cartesian dualist: He doesn’t believe that our consciousness is some metaphysical gift from God. Instead, he suggests that who we are and what we know is inseparable from where we are and what we’re doing: “Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own,” Noë writes. “Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, body and world. … It is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.”
Noë sells this audacious idea with a series of effective metaphors. For instance, he begins the book by comparing consciousness to a dollar bill. He notes that it would be silly to search for the physical correlates of “monetary value.” After all, the meaning of money isn’t in the paper, or the green ink, or the picture of George Washington. Instead, it exists in the institutions and practices that give the paper meaning. Similarly, our awareness of reality doesn’t depend entirely on what’s happening inside the brain, but is a side effect of how we, as individuals, interact with the wider world.
We are the products of a billion year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of Hydrogen and Helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.Jill Tarter in a Feb 2009 TED Talk
Materials geekery: The hardest substance on Earth - Core77
Looks like diamond is no longer the hardest substance in the world. That distinction now goes to the material of lonsdaleite, which scientists have discovered is 58% harder.
Diamonds are relatively easy to come by—just get someone to propose to you—but lonsdaleite’s a little trickier to acquire. We get our hands on the stuff only when certain meteorites crash into the Earth.
The only remaining question is, which is harder: Lonsdaleite, or marriage?
Ha.
Biggest known diamond in the universe →
According to American astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a white dwarf star in the constellation of Centaurus has been found to have a 3000-kilometer-wide core of crystallized carbon, or diamond.
It weighs 2.27 thousand trillion trillion tons - that’s 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a 1 followed by 34 zeroes. The biggest earthly jewel is one of the British crown jewels, the 530-carat Star of Africa.
Darwin.
Today, February 12, 2009, it’s exactly 200 years since Charles Darwin was born. In November it’ll be a hundred and fifty since On the Origin of Species was published. That’s worth noting, I think.
