Bringing our cell phones or putting speakers on bathrooms to play music has become a trend in this age. But perhaps the past did it better — by combining a radio cabinet and a toilet paper holder into one. Get serenaded by AM radio while “communing with nature.”
The toilet paper holder/ radio cabinet is a patented creation of John F. Lewis. One fun fact is Lewis got his patent for his creation 16 days after Armstrong left footprints on the moon.
If this were resold again, would you buy one? Its dials’ edges would be a tough thing to clean, though.
FRANCE — this rock has been discovered a few years ago and up to this day no one has deciphered what the characters present in the rock mean. It is so perplexing that Plougastel, the village which holds the rock, offered a prize of €2,000 (£1,729 ; $ 2247.10) to anyone who can decipher the slab.
Among the normal French letters some are reversed or upside-down. There are also some Scandinavian-style Ø letters.
Two years are visible - 1786 and 1787 - dating the inscription to a few years before the French Revolution. There is also the image of a ship with sails and rudder, and a sacred heart - a heart surmounted by a cross.
But the writing has defied all attempts at interpretation by local academics. Some think it may be in old Breton or Basque, and that the person who wrote it may only have been semi-literate.
The letters may relate to the sounds of words as he or she heard them.
In one section the letters read: "ROC AR B … DRE AR GRIO SE EVELOH AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL".
Another reads: "OBBIIE: BRISBVILAR ... FROIK … AL".
This is the white-throated rail, a chicken-sized bird indigenous to Madagascar which, according to new research, had previously gone extinct but came to existence once again due to a rare process called “iterative evolution”.
The research, from the University of Portsmouth and Natural History Museum, found that on two occasions, separated by tens of thousands of years, a rail species was able to successfully colonise an isolated atoll called Aldabra and subsequently became flightless on both occasions. The last surviving colony of flightless rails is still found on the island today.
This is the first time that iterative evolution (the repeated evolution of similar or parallel structures from the same ancestor but at different times) has been seen in rails and one of the most significant in bird records.
The ocean never ceases to amaze me in its contribution to the development of vision. From the scallops with more than 200 eyes, we now go to this fish.
Most of us can’t see in the dark. In the pitch black darkness, we get robbed of our vision and we are left to rely on our other senses in order for us to feel the environment. Such is the case for the ancestors of the cave fish and crickets when they moved into pitch black caverns. However, this is not the case for fishes living in the great depths of the sea, who can still see well despite the absence of sunlight. An example of this is the image above — the spinyfish, who can still see clearly at the depth of 2000 meters. Their secret? They have had “an extraordinary increase in the number of genes for rod opsins, retinal proteins that detect dim light.”
The finding "really shakes up the dogma of deep-sea vision," says Megan Porter, an evolutionary biologist studying vision at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu who was not involved in the work. Researchers had observed that the deeper a fish lives, the simpler its visual system is, a trend they assumed would continue to the bottom. "That [the deepest dwellers] have all these opsins means there's a lot more complexity in the interplay between light and evolution in the deep sea than we realized," Porter says.
At a depth of 1000 meters, the last glimmer of sunlight is gone. But over the past 15 years, researchers have realized that the depths are pervaded by a faint bioluminescence from flashing shrimp, octopus, bacteria, and even fish. Most vertebrate eyes could barely detect this subtle shimmer. To learn how fish can see it, a team led by evolutionary biologist Walter Salzburger from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied deep-sea fishes' opsin proteins. Variation in the opsins' amino acid sequences changes the wavelength of light detected, so multiple opsins make color vision possible. One opsin, RH1, works well in low light. Found in the eye's rod cells, it enables humans to see in the dark—but only in black and white.
More information of this amazing discovery at the Science Magazine.
(Image Credit: Pavel Riha/ University of South Bohemia)
This is superionic ice. It is a highly electrically conductive material that may perhaps be the newest variety of ice discovered. This ice came into existence “at pressures between one and four million times that at sea level and temperatures half as hot as the surface of the sun”.
“Yes, we’re talking about ice,” says study leader Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “But the sample is at several thousand degrees.”
Normally unachievable here on Earth because certain conditions have to be met, this type of ice may exist on the planets Neptune and Uranus as these conditions are present in those planets. This might be able to explain how these distant planets mentioned work and what the origins of their unusual magnetic fields are.
Scientists already know of 17 varieties of crystalline ice… And more than 30 years ago, physicists predicted that crushing pressure should squeeze water into superionic forms.
Superionic materials are dual beasts, part solid and part liquid, that on a microscopic level consist of a crystal lattice permeated by free floating atomic nuclei that can carry electrical charge. In water—aka H2O—the oxygen atoms would crunch into a solidified crystal while the hydrogen’s protons would zip around like a liquid.
“It’s quite an exotic state of matter,” says coauthor Federica Coppari, also of the Livermore lab.
Last year, Millot, Coppari, and their colleagues found the first evidence for superionic ice, using diamond anvils and laser-induced shock waves to compress liquid water so much that it turned to solid ice for a few billionths of a second. The team’s measurements showed that the water ice briefly became hundreds of times more electrically conductive than it had previously been, a strong hint that it had gone superionic.
In their latest tests, the researchers used six giant laser beams to generate a sequence of shockwaves that crunched a thin layer of liquid water into solidified ice at millions of times Earth’s surface pressure and between 3,000 and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Precisely timed x-ray flashes probed the configuration, which again only lasted for a few billionths of a second, and revealed that the oxygen atoms had indeed taken on a crystalline form.
Scientists have proposed to calling this new form of ice “Ice XVIII.” The name is not that catchy for me.
(Image Credit: Millot, Coppari, Hamel, Krauss (LLNL). Artist rendition.)
Pagodas have been an icon of the traditional Chinese architecture. Up to this day, very little to no changes have been made to its design, while other architectural styles changed and evolved much over time. A Shanghai-based architect named Amey Kandalgaonkar, creates a fictional re-interpretation of these pagodas.
The designer comments: ‘while the entire world was swept by the modernist movement, china was largely untouched by modernism. so when I visited various ancient chinese monuments, I couldn’t help wonder how a modernist mind would interpret traditional chinese architecture.’
The result is this image. I admit, this really looks incredibly realistic. What are your thoughts on this? Would you want to see a future with this kind of pagoda?
Most of us only know that scallops are just one of the delicacies the sea can offer us. But did you know that these scallops have eyes? They have up to 200 eyes, to be exact, and these eyes function like telescopes. A new study has revealed that these eyes, like ours, dilate and contract in response to light.
“It's just surprising how much we're finding out about how complex and how functional these scallop eyes are,” says Todd Oakley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The optics of scallop eyes are set up very differently than our own ocular organs. As light enters into the scallop eye, it passes through the pupil, a lens, two retinas (distal and proximal), and then reaches a mirror made of crystals of guanine at the back of the eye. The curved mirror reflects the light onto the interior surface of the retinas, where neural signals are generated and sent to a small visceral ganglion, or a cluster of nerve cells, whose main job is to control the scallop's gut and adductor muscle. The structure of a scallop's eye is similar to the optics systems found in advanced telescopes.
For many years, the physics and optics of the scallop eye posed a perplexing problem. "The main retina in the eye gets almost completely unfocused light because it's too close to the mirror," says Dan Speiser, a vision scientist at the University of South Carolina and the senior author of the new study. In other words, any image on the proximal retina would be blurry and out of focus. “That just seems so unreasonable to me,” Speiser says.
The new study sheds some light on this mystery. The researchers found that the scallop pupils are able to open and contract, though their pupillary responses aren’t as quick as our own. A scallop pupil's diameter changes by about 50 percent at most, and the dilation or contraction can take several minutes. Their eyes don’t have irises like our eyes do, and instead, the cells in the cornea change shape by going from thin and flat to tall and long. These contractions can change the curvature of the cornea itself, opening the possibility that the scallop eye might change shape and respond to light in a way that makes it possible to form crisper images on the proximal retina.
The scallops’ many eyes tell us a lot about the evolution of eyes in organisms, and the scallop is not the only sea creature that have weird eyes.
In the year 2007, a farmer came across a very interesting fossil. Fast forward to 2015, this fossil was discovered to be a dinosaur who can climb really well, and it also had some kind of wing similar to flying squirrels, and named it Yi qi (meaning, “strange wing”).
In 2017, in the village of Wubaiding, northeastern China, another farmer stumbled across another fossil. When Min Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences saw this, he became sure of one thing: this was another bat-winged dinosaur.
Studying the beautifully preserved and nigh-complete skeleton, Wang took note of the creature’s sparrow-size body, the quill-like feathers on its neck, and its stubby tail. But when he looked more closely at the left arm, he saw a thin bone coming down from its wrist—a rod as long as the entire forearm, but not jointed like a finger. “I shouted, and my heartbeat elevated,” he says.
Hold your arm out to the side, palm facing forward. Imagine a bony rod extending downward from your wrist. Now imagine that rod supports a membrane that stretches from your fingertips to your side. That’s how Wang saw his new dinosaur—a feathered animal with a pair of bat-like wings. He named it Ambopteryx longibranchium, from the Latin for “both wings, long upper arm.”
Green. Round. Crispy shells. Yum. These are some of the things to appreciate of fresh peas. But when used in cooking, there are a lot of variables to be considered to make a fresh pea tasty. Frozen peas, on the other hand, are frozen at the peak of their ripeness, and you only need to defrost before you cook them. They are more dependable in the kitchen. At least, this is what Anna Stockwell stated.
There are too many variables that have to be just right in order for a fresh pea to actually taste good, and often they're just starchy and mealy and not sweet.
I recently tried to make a spring chowder with fresh English peas in it, and the soup was a weird, mushy mess until I switched to frozen sweet peas. My first go at this braised leeks and peas dish for Easter was a disaster because I tried to be fancy and use fresh peas—and again once I switched to frozen peas, everything was better.
I've been disappointed by fresh peas so many times, in fact, that I've decided to go ahead and declare my loyalty to Team Frozen Peas henceforth. Frozen peas, which are always picked and flash-frozen at the exact peak moment of ripeness, will never let you down. A bag of frozen peas (here's a list of our favorite ones) can sit in your freezer for months and still taste delicious, crisp, and sweet when you defrost them.
Unfortunately, Anna does not evaluate the third contender for the best type of peas: canned peas.
Anyway, which do you think is better? Let’s keep the discussion peas-ful.
What? There are other designs of the periodic table? Yes, you’ve heard me correctly. There are other designs of the periodic table, and I admit, I was surprised to see these. The only periodic table that I know of is Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, and I would assume that you’re only familiar with him, too. But, as it turns out, Mendeleev’s table is not the only periodic table in the world.
Here are some of them. Check their respective functions at Science Alert.
(Image Credit: Offnfopt/ Wikimedia/ Public Domain)
Bocholt, Germany — It was a peaceful February afternoon when suddenly a pigeon flew down a residential street at a speed of 45km/hr (28mph) — faster than the established speed limit of 30 km/hr. Now THAT’s fast.
Upon facing the horrors of documenting the genocide that happened in Rwanda, East Africa, 25 years ago, photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado returns to Brazil only to find another horrifying sight. Minas Gerais, a region he remembered as a thriving rainforest became a barren land. At that time, only half a percent (0.5%) of trees remained in the land and all the wildlife was gone.
“The land,” he tells The Guardian, “was as sick as I was.”
Then, his wife Lélia had an idea: they should replant the forest. In order to support this seemingly impossible cause, the couple set up the Instituto Terra, an “environmental organization dedicated to the sustainable development of the Valley of the River Doce,” in 1998. Over the next several years, the Salgados and the Instituto Terra team slowly but surely rebuilt the 1,754-acre forest, transforming it from a barren plot of land to a tropical paradise.
Now a Private Natural Heritage Reserve, hundreds of species of flora and fauna call the former cattle ranch home. In addition to 293 species of trees, the land now teems with 172 species of birds, 33 species of mammals, and 15 species of amphibians and reptiles—many of which are endangered. As expected, this rejuvenation has also had a huge impact on the ecosystem and climate. On top of reintroducing plants and animals to the area, the project has rejuvenated several once dried-up springs in the drought-prone area, and has even positively affected local temperatures.
As the wildlife of the land returned, Salgado also felt reborn himself and considers that to be the most important moment.
See the amazing photos of the now-restored forest at My Modern Met.
Like Liam Charles, I like Twix chocolate bars (though Toblerone’s still the best for me). However, it still really is one chocolate bar you will never forget for the rest of your life.
Inspired by the his favorite chocolate bar, Liam Charles makes his ultimate chocolate bar, but unlike the 3-layered Twix bar, he makes it four layers. He states that “as soon as you take a bite, you’ll know what it’s meant to be.”
Like with all recipes, this takes a lot of ingredients, patience, and time.
This is the Hubble Legacy Field — an image comprised of 265,000 galaxies which took NASA 16 years to put together. This composite consisted of approximately 7,500 exposures. Some of the galaxies shown here are already 13.3 billion years to 500 million years ago.
This latest Hubble mosaic consists of around 30 times as many galaxies as previous deep fields did. For example, the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) which was put together in 2012 and is included in the Hubble Legacy Field, contains 5,500 galaxies.
“The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see,” NASA said in its statement.
The findings from 31 different Hubble programs came together in order to assemble this image. According to NASA, no image will surpass the Hubble Legacy Field until the next generation of space telescopes are launched.
In the year 2004, it was discovered that you can take graphenes, intact sheets of carbon atoms, could be obtained from a block of graphite using a very common house object — a Scotch tape. This discovery won a Nobel Prize.
2018. Another big discovery has been made 14 years after the Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero announced that his lab at MIT had discovered superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene. (I know, I know. It’s too much physics.) Basically, this is all about superconductivity.
The observation of superconductivity has created an unexpected playground for physicists. The practical goals are obvious: to illuminate a path to higher-temperature superconductivity, to inspire new types of devices that might revolutionize electronics, or perhaps even to hasten the arrival of quantum computers. But more subtly, and perhaps more important, the discovery has given scientists a relatively simple platform for exploring exotic quantum effects. “There’s an almost frustrating abundance of riches for studying novel physics in the magic-angle platform,” said Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University who was among the first to duplicate the research.
All this has left Jarillo-Herrero struggling to keep up with the demands of suddenly being out in front of a red-hot field that has already garnered its own name—“twistronics.” “Probably more than 30 groups are starting to work on it,” he said. “In three years it will be a hundred. The field is literally exploding.” Well, maybe not literally, but in every other way, it seems. He’s so swamped with requests to share his techniques and give talks that nearly tripling his speaking schedule has barely made a dent in the flow of invites. Even his students are turning down speaking offers. At the American Physical Society annual meeting in March it was standing room only at his session, leaving a crowd outside the doors hoping to catch snatches of the talk.
To tease out the startling observation, his group had to nail down a precise and dauntingly elusive twist in the layers of almost exactly 1.1 degrees. That “magic” angle had long been suspected to be of special interest in twisted bilayer graphene. But no one had predicted it would be that interesting. “It would have been crazy to predict superconductivity based on what we knew,” said Antonio Castro Neto, a physicist at the National University of Singapore. “But science moves forward not when we understand something, it’s when something totally unexpected happens in experiment.”
Does this make your brain hurt? I’m quite sure it will. Science might be brain-stretching, but its discoveries really make you amazed of the world.
Head over to Wired for more details about this study.
