jtotheizzoe:

staceythinx:

Modern science meets traditional craft in these art quilts by Betty Busby available in her Etsy store. Click on the images to see what each quilt represents. 

When I say that you should go check out the rest of these quilts, GO CHECK OUT THE REST OF THESE QUILTS.

My favorite: Purkinje

discoverynews:

Tiny Robo-Fly Uses Micro Energy to Buzz

For 12 years, Harvard engineering professor Robert Wood has been trying to get a fly-sized drone off the ground. He and his colleagues have had to overcome issues of weight, aerodynamics of wing flapping, power supply, and figuring out how to manufacture a robot smaller than a quarter. Finally, the little robo-fly is airborn. Read more

How to 3-D Print the Skeleton of a Living Animal: Amazing story from Wired Science about a grad student working in an imaging lab who figured out how to take a CT scan of a rat and turn into into a 3D-printed skeleton!

(via jtotheizzoe)

Cuba creates four anti-cancer vaccines, media ignores it

(Source: jayaprada, via mizoguchi)

jtotheizzoe:

scienceandfooducla:

The Flavor Network

Physicist Albert-László Barabási likes making connections. By studying networks, Barabási and his Northeastern University research group improve our understanding of everything from the internet to human disease.

Now Barabási and colleagues are using networks to learn more about the way we eat. Read more…

This is what everything tastes like. Very cool work.

itscolossal:

This is what happens when you run water through a 24hz sine wave.

(via shiisa)

teratomarty:

earth-phenomenon:

Moray – The Incan Agricultural Laboratory

It is believed that the Incas used Moray as an agricultural laboratory. By using their knowledge of the sun, wind, altitude, and irrigation, each step, about 3m/10ft tall, represents a temperature change of about 0.5 degrees Celcius/1 degree Fahrenheit.In the end, there can be about a 15C/27F degree temperature change between the bottom step and the top step at the site.The Incas used this to mix different seeds and plants together to find the optimal growing conditions for certain plants. And it succeeded as during the Inca times there were about twice as many varieties of corn and potatoes as there are today.

This is amazing!  I knew that the Inca had species of corn and potato that would grow in every nook & cranny of the Andes, but I had naively assumed that they just kind of evolved like that.  Apparently not.

This information is still relevant today, as it happens.  The potato famine in Ireland occurred because the entire population was dependent upon one strain of potato, which happened to be susceptible to blight.  Other strains were not vulnerable; the wholesale loss of life could have been prevented if the Irish had had access to just a few more samples of Incan innovation.  This is why biodiversity, much touted as a buzzword, is actually important.  Some agribusiness genetic engineers, like Monsanto for instance, are trying to establish monocultural monopolies on staple crops like corn, wheat and soy.  The ancient Inca say not to let them.  

(Source: frenchtwist, via mizoguchi)

(Source: cymascope.com, via jtotheizzoe)

al-monitor: 

“Tired of darkness” from the country’s frequent power outages,a team of teenage girls has developed solar-powered appliances and now sells them across Yemen, writes Nafeesa Syeed for Al-Monitor:

“In Yemen, we have abundant sun,” says Reem Rashed, 16, who works in the company’s human resources section. “We need to exploit solar power because it’s a favorable, free energy and it does no damage to Yemeni society.”

Pictured above: Wafa Al-Rimi, the 16-year-old CEO of the student-run company, Creative Generation in Yemen. 

(via shiisa)

jtotheizzoe:

Higgs Papercraft

To accompany a cover story about the discovery of the Higgs boson, French magazine Le Monde turned to a non-traditional artform: Paper. The studio Zim & Zou constructed these paper designs to represent the CERN particle collisions that allowed “Le Boson de Higgs” to be detected, the “missing puzzle piece” of physics that the Higgs represented, and the relationship of how the Higgs field (the balloons) give things mass in the first place. (via)

Refresh your Higgs knowledge with MinutePhysics’ awesome explainers on the subject: Part I, Part II and Part III.

Previously: Quilled paper anatomical cross-sections by Lisa Nilsson.

Art by David S Goodsell

This work was created as a commissioned project for Biosite. This view shows DNA being replicated in the nucleus. DNA polymerase is shown at the center in purple, with a DNA strand entering from the bottom and exiting as two strands towards the top. The new strands are shown in white. Chromatin fibers are shown at either site of the replication fork. 

(Source: artandsciencejournal, via jtotheizzoe)

sciencecenter:

Cargo Cults and Creationists

Cargo cults are one of my favorite anthropological phenomena. They arose on tiny isolated Pacific Islands during World War II, when the Japanese and American militaries used the islands as landing strips and supply caches. All of a sudden, the islanders, who had been using primitive tools and technology, were confronted with an industrial culture and military. The islanders were given food and trinkets which seemed to magically appear from the sky as ‘cargo.’ Given their previous total isolation, they had no way of comprehending the situation. Many islanders believed the visitors and the goods were gifts from their gods. As suddenly as the foreigners appeared, however, they disappeared when the war was over, and the islanders were left without the excitement - and more importantly, without the foreign riches. Thinking they had fallen out of favor with the gods, the islanders decided to mimic exactly the foreigners, who were clearly blessed by the gods, in hopes of bringing the cargo back. And so they did - they took up marching, with sticks instead of guns, and they built elaborate replicas of things like radios - not with metal and silicon, but with materials from the island. They believed that these material objects and demonstrations were the source of American power - missing, of course, the true sources of American and Japanese wealth.

So what’s the relevance? I was reminded of cargo cults this week when I read about a controversy surrounding a leading creationist organization, the Discovery Institute (DI). They released a video criticizing population genetics, narrated by their developmental biologist standing in front of her lab. Or so we’re led to believe. In fact, the ‘scientist’ was standing in front of a green screen, and the lab was a stock image from Shutterstock. The fraud was pointed out by a number of science bloggers, and the defiant DI responded by releasing an actual picture of Ann Gauger in her lab, complete with a petri dish, some parafilm, reagent bottles, and even a small hood. 

They’re completely missing the point. The real joke wasn’t that the creationists used a green screen when they had an ‘actual lab’ (although that’s pretty funny in its own right). The joke is that the DI thought showing off a fancy lab was going to grant them scientific legitimacy. It might have impressed some science-illiterate yokels, but it’s not fooling a single academic. The pictures of squirt bottles and jars in a lab are the equivalent of the cargo cult’s palm frond version of a fighter jet. This controversy shows the creationists want to look like scientists in lieue of acting like scientists. Doing science doesn’t mean having expensive or flashy equipment; you can do science with just a curtain and your hands. So clearly science is not the sum of your lab stockroom. To do real science, the DI would need to collect evidence and then proceed to a hypothesis to explain the pattern, instead of starting with a belief and then seeking the evidence to prove it; conduct actual research, instead of putting forward untestable predictions; and address all relevant evidence, instead of only picking out facts they can distort to support their worldview. 

For some reason, though, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more cargo cult science than journal articles coming from the DI in the future.

(Source: damninteresting.com, via jtotheizzoe)

jtotheizzoe:

Oh Rayleigh?!

So the sky is blue because short wavelengths of light coming from the Sun (blue, etc.) are scattered more than long ones (yellow, red, etc.), reflecting the short wavelength light into our eyes instead of it passing through the atmosphere as part of white light. Sunsets are red for the opposite reason … but yeah, why isn’t it violet?

Violet has an even shorter wavelength than blue light. So does indigo, whatever that is. There’s a good logical case for a purple sky, right?

Want to know the answer? Why the sky isn’t violet?

Do ya? 

The truth is that the sky is both violet and blue. But the color receptors in our eyes don’t see violet very well, so we get the (incorrect) impression that the sky is just blue. Some birds actually see well into the violet and ultraviolet, so the sky must look trippy as hell to them.

(via xkcd)

(via jtotheizzoe)