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Sascha Mehlhase built a model of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider out of LEGO bricks! It contains around 9,500 bricks and took 33 hours to assemble, in addition to 48 total hours of work just designing it. Read more about and see more pictures at his site. Link -via reddit
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Ok, maybe it’s not able to solve the cube, but I’m just impressed that it is willing to try. I wonder if octopus and mantis shrimp would have fun playing with Rubik’s cubes together.
From spiders who can live underwater for a whole day at a time to underwater rivers with their own wave systems, it’s simply amazing what can happen below the surface.
If you like your art metaphysical, trippy and full of science fiction style then you’ll love this gallery of retro cover art from Yugoslavian science mag Galaksija. Flickr user Yugodrom has a huge gallery for you to peruse at the link below. They’ll take your mind on a wild ride, no controlled substances required.
Does your tree need a little more intelligence? If so, you might benefit from one (or all) of these great ornaments featuring some of the most famous women from science history.
Link Via The Mary Sue
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From diamond patches to genetic modifications, these might sound like they are merely sci-fi ideas, but they are real. Check out some of the most futuristic cancer cures being tested right now over at Cracked.
Six famous thought experiments explained humorously in a minute each, by David Mitchell of the BBC’s That Mitchell and Webb Look. Produced by The Open University. -via The Daily What
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Wired magazine has an article full of tips for making your life better with science, from untangling your earbuds to dunking cookies in milk. The Muppets are there to lend a little levity, but the science behind these things is all real. This includes the physics of splattering spaghetti sauce on your shirt.
One of the occupational hazards of eating pasta is the way it slings sauce on everything around you—shirts, jacket … dates. Physicists creatively named this the spaghetti effect, the tendency of long flexible strands (like spaghetti) to whip side to side when pulled into a container (like your mouth). It’s a mild annoyance at dinner but a real danger in industrial settings where ropes or chains are rapidly pulled to and fro—or at home, when your metal tape measure goes feral. Fortunately, you can tame the noodle. —Judy Dutton
Instructions for better spaghetti-slurping follow. Link
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You know how when you cut a worm in half you’ll get two worms and how mice love cheese? If you said yes, then actually you don’t know much about these creatures. Cracked recently took a look at common animal myths that are actually totally bogus. How many of these did you still believe before you read the article?
I don’t know about you guys, but I love sour candy. As it turns out though, some of it, especially the WarHeads Sour Spray, is almost as bad for your teeth as pure battery acid. All things in moderation, but if you want your enamel to hang around, you’d better lay off the Spree and sour gummies.
Link Via BoingBoing
If you’ve ever wished your makeup could better incorporate scientific principles, then you might want to check out Sephora’s newest nail polish, one that creates cool 3D effects once you put a magnet over it while it is drying. I’m not big on nail polish, but I’d love to play with this formula. How about you other geek ladies?
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In 2007, science writer Carl Zimmer wondered how common science tattoos were. He said this on his blog, and the response was massive and ongoing. That grew into a completely new blog, and Zimmer became known as the guy who collected science tattoos. Now he has a book of science tattoos called Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. The New York Times has a slide show featuring some awesome examples from the book. The tattoo shown belongs to a Princeton graduate student in molecular biology. Link -via The Loom
(Image credit: Science Ink by Carl Zimmer/Sterling Publishing)
Everyone knows that kids who play video games all day don’t have time to exercise and thus, often weigh more than kids who do spend time outside. But scientists only recently discovered that gaming teens are more likely to be heavy for another reason as well -those that spend an hour gaming typically eat more afterward than those that don’t.
What the study found is that the teenagers who were playing games eat, on average, 163 calories more than the teenagers who were doing something else. On top of that, the gamers didn’t actually burn any more calories than the control group, so the increased calorie intake wasn’t replaced by the energy spent on all that thumb movement or anything. There were also no biological indicators of stress in these gamers, so that couldn’t explain it either.
What do you guys think the reason for the increased caloric intake was? Do you tend to eat more while gaming?
Link Via Geekosystem
The International Space Station (ISS) occasionally has to boost itself into a higher altitude to counteract the effects of microgravity drag. Recently, the ISS boosted itself about two miles up, and video cameras caught what happened inside to Commander Mike Fossum and Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa and Sergei Volkov. The physics of the process are explained at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -Thanks, Phil!
Scientists sometimes have an experiment in mind that would be unethical, or more likely too dangerous, to ask volunteers to submit to. If the scientist wants to know the answer badly enough, he (these six are all men) may just use himself as the experimental subject, no matter what the danger. You’d have to be pretty curious to inject yourself with a deadly disease like cholera.
Pettenkofer was a late 19th century medical researcher and public health advocate who developed the very first large-scale pure-water system in Munich, Germany. And even though that’s probably very impressive, from now until the day you die, if you remember anything about Pettenkofer, it will be this: Max Josef von Pettenkofer drank a steaming cup of cholera bacteria that he cultured from a patient’s diarrhea bombs.
Yeah, he got sick. But he didn’t get sick enough to die, and Pettenkofer considered that proof of his theory that the cholera bacterium needed a victim who practiced poor sanitation. Of course, one could argue that without poor sanitation, the bacterium wouldn’t be spread, outside of scientists who ingested it on purpose. Anyway, read about Pettenkofer and five other scientists at Cracked. Link
It's a time-honored practice for politicians and educators to wring their hands over how American students have fallen behind in science and technology. Many have pointed out how large class sizes, lackluster teachers, and non-challenging curriculum in elementary and high schools are shortchanging our students and (gasp!) the country's future global competitiveness.
But who's really at fault here? Could the problem actually be on the shoulders of the vaunted American colleges and universities?
Christopher Drew wrote an intriguing article for The New York Times that examine how more and more students are turned off by science at the college level:
... it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
It's all a matter of the lack of preparation from high school, you say? Actually those who are better students are more likely to drop out of science:
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] degree.”
When it comes to parents on Halloween, there are those that let the kids gorge, those that parcel the candy out, and the parents who steal most of their kid’s candy. If you’re wondering which one dentists suggest, you might be surprised. They suggest it’s better to let the kids go crazy on Halloween night and then cut back their candy consumption rather than letting them eat a couple pieces every day after Halloween. Dentists warn:
Slowly snacking on Halloween candy every few hours, day after day, keeps your teeth bathed in enamel-corroding acid, the byproduct of bacteria feeding on sugar and other carbohydrates in your mouth. This leads to dental caries, or cavities.
So I guess even if you’re a candy stealer, it’s still better to steal it all in one night than stretch your thievery out.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Parasites are raising an army of zombie wasp queens to do their bidding, and it’s a good thing that these parasites aren’t more ambitious, because they’d probably be well on their way to taking over the world by now!
The parasites cause common wasps to believe that they are queens, rejecting their normal caste and acting as self serving loners in wasp society:
Infected P. dominulus — better known as common European paper wasps — reject their genetically preordained roles, abandon their hives and embark on a long, macabre journey during which a few live for a time as queens, albeit murderous queens.
Read on about this fascinating example of parasitic mind control at the Wired link below, and pray these little critters don’t develop a taste for human blood!
Hermit crab homelessness is reaching critical levels, leaving many of these fine clawed fellows without a shell of their own.
Now, thanks to 3d printers and our tireless search for new things to print out, there’s a solution: custom printed hermit crab shells! The printed shells will last longer, look cooler and are sure to stir up feelings of jealousy among other hermit crabs. If only we could print houses for homeless humans!
These specimens in jars look pretty nasty, and the labels make them seem even worse. But believe it or not, they are all not only edible, but tasty! They contain unfamiliar fruits, or foods cut into odd shapes. Your Halloween guests will be delighted, if they can get over the willies and try them out. Get the recipes at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Link -via Buzzfeed
Sometimes it’s nice to be able to say a lot in only a few geeky words. If you need a little help getting your message across, try one of these designs by Illustrator Nicole Martinez, as seen over on Mental Floss.
Link Via Mental Floss
In the October issue of Discover magazine, LeeAundra Keany tells us that a bonfire is “basically a tree running in reverse,” and other interesting facts.
1 Fire is an event, not a thing. Heating wood or other fuel releases volatile vapors that can rapidly combust with oxygen in the air; the resulting incandescent bloom of gas further heats the fuel, releasing more vapors and perpetuating the cycle.
2 Most of the fuels we use derive their energy from trapped solar rays. In photosynthesis, sunlight and heat make chemical energy (in the form of wood or fossil fuel); fire uses chemical energy to produce light and heat.
3 So a bonfire is basically a tree running in reverse.
4 Assuming stable fuel, heat, and oxygen levels, a typical house fire will double in size every minute.
Read the rest at Discover. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
No, I’m not making a lame joke about the band Counting Crows. As it turns out, crows can recognize symbols used as numbers.
A new study suggests that crows can recognize symbols that represent quantities of items. At Japan’s Utsunomiya University, crows were shown two containers. Only the container marked with five symbols contained the food. The researchers trained the crows to identify the food container 70% of the time.
There were only eight crows involved, so it’s not really conclusive, but it’s still interesting.
Link Via BoingBoing
Image Via malfet [Flickr]
Notice anything strange about the apple pie pictured here? If you noticed there were no apples at all, you are right. That because the picture comes from The Awl’s recipe for an appleless apple pie that uses chemicals to trick your tastebuds. The most important ingredient? Cream of Tartar.
While you won’t win any cooking contests with this recipe, you’ll certainly be able to impress your chemist friends at your next dinner party.
Link Via BoingBoing
Watch scientists, researchers, and assorted geeks get down! McGill University in Montreal gathered scientists, students, and volunteers to make this dance and lipdub video. Their sponsor, Medicom, is making a donation to the Goodman Cancer Research Centre for each view the video gets. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Our friends at Improbable Research awarded the annual Ig Nobel Prizes last night at Harvard’s Sanders Theater for research that makes you laugh, and then think. This is the 21st year for the awards. Ten prizes were awarded in different disciplines; here are some of the more notable:
BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.
Pictured are researchers Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz accepting their prize for biology. See the complete list of winners at Improbable Research. Link
Watch the entire ceremony on video. Link
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by Michael Reidy
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom
America’s taste for bean soup appears to be unrelenting, and the World Wide Web offers more than a quarter of a million references to the subject. Multiple-bean soups are particularly in vogue. A methodical check on a leading search engine produced the following results which I record here for future historians of early twenty-first century food. Unexpectedly, this research also thrown up food for thought for mathematicians.
The methodology for researching multiple-bean soup was thus: The phrase “2 bean soup” was entered into the search engine, and the result recorded. Next, the phase “two bean soup” was entered. The search term producing the largest number was recorded as the most accurate number. This method was repeated until the number of beans in soup failed to produce relevant returns, thus, “Page 34, beans are the flavor of the month for soup…” was not considered a valid return for ‘34 bean soup.’
The chart (see Figure 2) plots the number of pages returned for each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23. No soups were found using in excess of 23 varieties of bean.
Figure 2. A graph of the data. This depicts the number of World Wide Web pages the author found that pertain to each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23.
Taking the pulse of bean soup is less straight forward than originally supposed. I had reckoned to encounter a normal bell curve with a peak around 16 beans, as the diversity of recipes for bean soup would at first sight seem to be a random event.
more …
You know what they say… if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS. From the YouTube page:
In 1970 three American researchers, John E. Ware, Donald H. Naftulin and Frank A. Donnelly, designed an experiment to find out whether a brilliant delivery technique of a talk could so completely bamboozle a group of experts that they overlooked the fact that the content was nonsense. The result was the hilarious Dr Fox Lecture and the answer was: yes! The experts didn’t notice a thing.
An actor named Michael Fox was recruited to play the lecturer. Fox didn’t understand the material he was going to present, and he was concerned that someone in the audience would recognize him from his many TV appearances. But he needn’t have worried. Read the full story at Weird Experiments. Link -via Cynical-C
The question is, I hope, theoretical: if you were to leap out the sixth-story window of a building, how much bubble wrap would be required to ensure your survival? Rhett Allain tackled the problem with graphs, math, physics, and experiments. You should be aware that he used the British idea that the first floor is the one above the ground floor, which we Americans would call the second floor. The answer is ….at the Wired science blog Dot.Physics. Link
Chalk up another example of science finding inspiration in nature. The slipperiest substance in nature appears to be the lip of a deadly (to insects) pitcher plant. And a scientist has copied it.
The pitcher plant kills and eats animals. Some of its leaves are shaped like deep pitchers, and their rims, known as peristomes, are exceptionally slippery. Insects that explore the rim, looking for nectar, soon lose their footholds and fall in. They soon drown, and are broken down by the pitcher’s digestive fluids. (There are some exceptions – see slideshow at the bottom).
Under the microscope, the secret to the peristome’s slipperiness is clear. It is lined with cells that overlap one another, creating a series of step-like ridges and troughs. The plant secretes nectar onto this uneven surface. The troughs collect the nectar, and the ridges hold it in place, preventing it from draining away. The result is an extremely smooth, stable and slippery surface that repels the oils on the feet of insects. Any bug that walks on this frictionless zone falls to its doom.
Tak-Sing Wong of Harvard University recreated this scheme using synthetic materials to build a surface that is slipperier than anything ever made. See the nuts-and-bolts of how he did it at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link -via reddit
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