Dr. Hinke Osinga and Professor Bernd Krauskopf crocheted this magnificent Lorenz manifold, "the two dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system".
The final result consists of 25,511 crochet stitches and took Osinga about 85 hours to complete. However, this wasn't just done for fun. Their work gives insight into how chaos arises and is organised in systems as diverse as chemical reactions, biological networks and even your kitchen mixer.
Link - there's even an instruction on how to do it, if crotchet & math are your things. (Thanks Jen!)
Did you know that Benjamin Franklin made a "Plan", kind of like commandments for more righteous living and kept it until his death? He even made a form to keep track ...
For example:
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
More than 60 years after the end of WWII, a distributed computing project called M4 Project cracked an Enigma message by brute force.
The message? It was sent by a submarine saying how it was forced to submerge during an attack.
According to the organizers of M4, their open-source message-breaking application managed to crack one of the three messages early last week.
The translation of the message is as follows:
Radio signal 1851/19/252: "F T 1132/19 contents: Forced to submerge during attack. Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h AJ 9863, (course]) 220 degrees, (speed) 8 knots. (I am) following (the enemy). (Barometer) falls 14 mb, (wind) nor-nor-east, (force) 4, visibility 10 (nautical miles)."
Birmingham News published a collection of never-before-seen photos of the civil rights movement in Alabama, forgotten for decades in an equipment closet:
The section is the result of research by Alexander Cohn, a 30-year-old former photo intern at The News. In November 2004, Cohn went through an equipment closet at the newspaper in search of a lens and saw a cardboard box full of negatives marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."
The caption of the photo above:
March 1965: Thousands of marchers walk 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery to bring attention to the low numbers of black registered voters in the South. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers had been trying to register more voters.
In their new book Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution, Donna Hart and Robert Sussman argue that early humans are often dinner for wild dogs and cats, hyenas, eagles, and crocodiles.
... the scientists analyzed primate fossils and determined that 9-10 percent show evidence of death from predation. This evidence includes teeth marks on bones, claw marks on skulls and, most dramatically, holes in an early human head into which sabertooth cat fangs fit.
Like the salad served at the Pizza Hut but dislike the idea that it’s expensive and you are not allowed to take more than once? Here is a guide on how you can maximize your return of investment, invented by some creative Taiwanese students.
The owner of this Korean fish started to notice that its face have begun to look more and more human over the last couple of years. (via Underwater Times)
Ben Lee of the University of Puget Sound and biologists Dan Shain and Paula Hartzell of Rutgers University went "worming" to Mount Rainier to find out more about ice worms.
Polar bears weather the cold with thick insulation and the ability to generate their own heat. Antarctic cod have blood laced with antifreeze. Ice worms don't have any of these defenses.
Instead, they have the remarkable ability to boost their cells' energy production when the temperature drops, Shain discovered. "It's equivalent to putting more gasoline in your tank," he said.
The worms also possess cell membranes and enzymes that function and stay flexible in temperatures where most animals' cellular processes creak to a halt.
The downside is extreme sensitivity to heat. At about 40 degrees F, the worms' membranes melt and their enzymes go haywire.
The following illustrations were originally published in Chanteclair, a Parisian artistic and medical revue. The magazine issued twice monthly beginning in 1905 and lasted until around 1935, its circulation mostly confined to the medical profession. In eight pages, Chanteclair intersperses poetry and engravings with feuilletons and expository articles lauding its publisher and sole advertiser, the cure-all Carnine Lefrancq, "pur suc de viande de bœuf CRUE CONCENTRÉ" -- pure concentrated raw beef juice -- a potential treatment for anorexia, chlorosis, consumption, neurasthenia, and other diseases. In addition, each issue spotlighted a contemporary surgeon, offering a capsule biography to accompany a typically allegorical caricature.
