London isn’t famous for hot weather, but that may change soon, and not because of global warming: The design of a new skyscraper in the city is melting cars and setting buildings on fire.a cool article about things heating up in London
This is an example of supercooling – the process by which a very pure liquid is chilled to a temperature just below its usual freezing point without actually making the jump to its solid state. Bottled water is perfect for this, especially the kind that’s been purified via reverse osmosis, a process that strips water of all its particulates. This particulates can act as “seed crystals,” or “nuclei,” to which a liquid phase on the cusp of becoming solid can attach, and crystalize around. In this video, a seed crystal is introduced in the form of a cube of already-frozen water. As soon as it’s introduced, the liquid phase rapidly crystallizes and attaches to the solid one, kicking off a chain reaction of ice-formation.Water that freezes as it’s being poured out of the bottle also solidifies upon exposure to a seed crystal, which, in this case, is an already-frozen surface. This is similar to the effect observed when freezing rain, supercooled by its flightpath through sub-freezing layers of atmosphere, comes into contact with an object cooled to a temperature below freezing. The result is a phenomenon known as glaze-ice, which – if you live somewhere cold – you may have seen before, coating the spindly extremities of tree branches.
Just a bit of super cool (no pun intended) science
How exploding stars might well have changed the course of evolution: http://nyr.kr/117eF9g
Ah my favorite.
Scaiku!
Last week, I posted some science-inspired haiku poetry and many of you sent in your own. Thanks for all the replies, tweets and comments with great, geeky poems!
I drew up some of my favorites along with some beautiful Japanese woodblock art (click the photos to view them biggu). Don’t worry, if you don’t see yours, you can check out everyone’s submissions here.
Got any more scaiku?
This is lovely. Science inspired haiku.
The sun just released a M6.5 class flare today, a merely medium-powered burst of solar energy. While it’s the strongest flare yet this year (2013 is predicted to be a maximum in the solar activity cycle), it likely won’t affect much down here.
I just thought it was really pretty, as captured here by NASA’s SDO satellite.
(via NASA)
Seeing the Brain With New CLARITY
A new brain imaging technique called CLARITY allows neural structures to be reconstructed in three dimensions better than ever before. It does so by turning the brain “transparent”.
Truly understanding the inner workings of the brain means studying not only how individual neurons function, but also how they are wired together. Even with techniques like the beautiful “brainbow”, untangling spaghetti-like long-range connections has proven difficult.
Stanford University neuroscientists have taken a step in that direction with their new CLARITY method. Neurons and other cells are normally labeled by sticking fluorescent tags on various proteins and other molecules that a researcher wants to study. That way we can literally see where and how they function. But looking into a three-dimensional brain is like peering into murky water: the fatty cell membranes and neuron sheaths just get in the way.
The Stanford researchers immobilized these mouse brains in a gel, then washed away all the murky muck. This left all the connections and proteins in their right place, free to be labeled in a clear block of brain Jell-O.
For more: Head over to Nature News to read more, and be sure to watch their great, detailed video to find out more about how it was done. If you’re interested, here’s the research paper in this week’s Nature.
This is JJ Abrams, showing people how many times better Star Trek is than Star Wars, for all eternity.
What Makes Up the Moon
In 1992, the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft made a pass by our planet’s closest companion, the moon. This mosaic of 53 images shows the different composition of rocks on the moon’s surface. Blue and orange colors represent lava flows, bright pink areas are highlands, and light blue colors indicate recent impact material with the youngest craters showing blue rays extending away from them.
Image: NASA/JPL
