1.    279

     

    reblogged: knowledgethroughscience

    knowledgethroughscience: Attention stargazers - Mercury, Jupiter and Venus appear very close together in the sky, May 24-26, 2013. Three planets are coming together in the evening sky at the moment, putting on a celestial show that won’t be seen again for more than a decade. “The view should be best about 30 to 45 minutes after sunset,” said Alan MacRobert, a senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. Find out how to spot Jupiter, Venus and Mercury.

    knowledgethroughscience:

    Attention stargazers - Mercury, Jupiter and Venus appear very close together in the sky, May 24-26, 2013.

    Three planets are coming together in the evening sky at the moment, putting on a celestial show that won’t be seen again for more than a decade.

    “The view should be best about 30 to 45 minutes after sunset,” said Alan MacRobert, a senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. Find out how to spot Jupiter, Venus and Mercury.

     
    2. May 24th, 2013     scienceastronomyspacestargazingplanet-gazing?JupiterVenusMercury
    Comments

  2.    116

     

    reblogged: txchnologist

    Stressing Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger

    txchnologist:

    image

    by Sophie Bushwick, Inside Science

    Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens.

    Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid. In typical crystalline materials, molecules assemble into a set structure over the span of the entire material as the substance solidifies from a disordered liquid form. Glass, on the other hand, retains a liquid-like disorder even after it hardens.

    Without a set architecture, these disordered molecules are particularly vulnerable to outside forces. If you push or pull on a substance, you create internal forces, or stress, in the material itself. Once you remove that force, you’d expect the molecules to return to equilibrium, removing the stresses. But glassy materials “remember” the long-gone force. 

    Read More

    Oh, look! It’s one of mine…

     
    3. May 22nd, 2013     oh lookmy worksciencephysicsstressmaterials science
    Comments

  3. Micro-flowers How do you build flowers that are only a few microns high, like the ones pictured above? Researchers have a new process for crafting complex structures on an incredibly tiny scale. Their “reaction-diffusion system” will be able to produce other shapes as well. To do so, scientists put compounds in a solution, which form crystals. The structure of the crystals depend on the pH of the reaction.  By tweaking the reaction, the researchers have built a variety of different micro-flowers, as shown in these false-color SEM images. They’re an impressive example of rationally designed structures on the micro-scale. You can read more about the process behind their construction in the paper “Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures,” in the journal Science.

    Micro-flowers

    How do you build flowers that are only a few microns high, like the ones pictured above? Researchers have a new process for crafting complex structures on an incredibly tiny scale.

    Their “reaction-diffusion system” will be able to produce other shapes as well. To do so, scientists put compounds in a solution, which form crystals. The structure of the crystals depend on the pH of the reaction. 

    By tweaking the reaction, the researchers have built a variety of different micro-flowers, as shown in these false-color SEM images. They’re an impressive example of rationally designed structures on the micro-scale.

    You can read more about the process behind their construction in the paper “Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures,” in the journal Science.

     
    4. May 21st, 2013     sciencechemistrymicrostructurecarbon dioxidereaction-diffusionmicroscale
    Comments

  4.    635

     

    reblogged: spaceplasma

    spaceplasma: A Burning Candle In Zero-Gravity The results of a Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS) experiment demonstrates that in zero-gravity—where heat doesn’t rise—a flame burns in a uniform oval. Credit: Col. Chris Hadfield

    spaceplasma:

    A Burning Candle In Zero-Gravity

    The results of a Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS) experiment demonstrates that in zero-gravity—where heat doesn’t rise—a flame burns in a uniform oval.

    Credit: Col. Chris Hadfield
     
    5. May 20th, 2013     sciencephysicschemistrygravityspaceastronphysics
    Comments

  5.    94

     

    reblogged: freshphotons

    freshphotons:

    “Modeling the physics of foams and foamlike materials, such as soapy froths, fire retardants, and lightweight crash-absorbent structures, presents challenges, because of the vastly different time and space scales involved. By separating and coupling these disparate scales, we have designed a multiscale framework to model dry foam dynamics. This leads to a predictive and flexible computational methodology linking, with a few simplifying assumptions, foam drainage, rupture, and topological rearrangement, to coupled interface-fluid motion under surface tension, gravity, and incompressible fluid dynamics.” Via.

     
    6. May 17th, 2013     sciencebubblesfoamphysicsfluid dynamics
    Comments

  6.    33

     

    reblogged: kqedscience

    kqedscience: Kepler scientist: “A beautiful instrument has died”“One of NASA’s most popular and successful missions has hit a disabling technical snag, the agency announced Wednesday. A reaction wheel on the Kepler spacecraft has become stuck, say NASA engineers. Without it, scientists can’t aim the telescope as precisely as they need to.”Read more from KQED Science reporter Amy Standen.

    kqedscience:

    Kepler scientist: “A beautiful instrument has died”

    “One of NASA’s most popular and successful missions has hit a disabling technical snag, the agency announced Wednesday. A reaction wheel on the Kepler spacecraft has become stuck, say NASA engineers. Without it, scientists can’t aim the telescope as precisely as they need to.”

    Read more from KQED Science reporter Amy Standen.

     
    7. May 16th, 2013     sciencespacekeplernasasad face
    Comments

  7.    114

     

    reblogged: homo-medicus

    homo-medicus: Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea Floor In the middle of the South Atlantic, there’s a patch of sea almost devoid of life. There are no birds, few fish, not even much plankton. But researchers report that they’ve found buried treasure under the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in the muck of the sea floor, which lies 5000 meters below the waves. The DNA, from tiny, one-celled sea creatures that lived up to 32,500 years ago, is the first to be recovered from the abyssal plains, the deep-sea bottoms that cover huge stretches of Earth. In a separate finding published this week, another research team reports teasing out plankton DNA that’s up to 11,400 years old from the floor of the much shallower Black Sea. The researchers say that the ability to retrieve such old DNA from such large stretches of the planet’s surface could help reveal everything from ancient climate to the evolutionary ecology of the seas.

    homo-medicus:

    Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea Floor

    In the middle of the South Atlantic, there’s a patch of sea almost devoid of life. There are no birds, few fish, not even much plankton. But researchers report that they’ve found buried treasure under the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in the muck of the sea floor, which lies 5000 meters below the waves.

    The DNA, from tiny, one-celled sea creatures that lived up to 32,500 years ago, is the first to be recovered from the abyssal plains, the deep-sea bottoms that cover huge stretches of Earth. In a separate finding published this week, another research team reports teasing out plankton DNA that’s up to 11,400 years old from the floor of the much shallower Black Sea. The researchers say that the ability to retrieve such old DNA from such large stretches of the planet’s surface could help reveal everything from ancient climate to the evolutionary ecology of the seas.

     
    8. May 15th, 2013     sciencebiologyDNAsingle celled organismsoceansea floor
    Comments

  8.    1484

     

    reblogged: thescienceofreality

    thescienceofreality:

    ISS Astronauts Returned Safely to Earth.

    “After inspiring all of us on Earth, Commander Chris Hadfield and crew have finally re-joined us here. The Soyuz space capsule landed safely at 10:31 PM EDT in Kazakhstan. Hadfield had spent 144 days on the ISS, 2,336 orbits around the planet and totaled up around 62 million miles. That’s a lot of miles!

    The Soyuz capsule landed vertically, which is the preferred position. The crew, which includes Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, are back on Earth and reportedly all feeling good as they re-adjust to the gravity. Marshburn was one of the astronauts who performed the awe-inspiring emergency spacewalk to fix the leak of ammonia coolant two days ago.

    The landing of the capsule comes a little over three hours since the capsule undocked from the ISS. It marks the end of the ISS’ Expedition 35 Crew in space. The crew will head over to the medical tent to get all properly tested and fixed for normal Earth life. Or as normal life can be in the eyes of men who were in space.” via Gizmodo

    “On Sunday, Hadfield handed over command of the space station to Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov.

    As part of his personal farewell to the space station, Hadfield released a video of his version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, which NASA said is the first music video made in space.” via CBC

     
    9. May 14th, 2013     sciencespaceISSchris hadfield
    Comments

  9.    1076

     

    reblogged: thatscienceguy

    thatscienceguy:

    The Alkaline Metals simply added to water. (last gif features Cesium, and unfortunately i could not find any with Francium which is the most explosive)

     
    10. May 13th, 2013     sciencechemistryalkaline metals
    Comments

  10.    4897

     

    reblogged: wnycradiolab

    wnycradiolab: atlasobscura: Delivering a dinosaur to the Boston Museum of Science - Arthur Pollock -  1984 It kills me that I didn’t get to witness this.

    wnycradiolab:

    atlasobscura:

    Delivering a dinosaur to the Boston Museum of Science - Arthur Pollock -  1984

    It kills me that I didn’t get to witness this.

     
    11. May 10th, 2013     sciencemuseumdinosaurBoston Museum of Science
    Comments