sugaratoms:

ANU scientists have successfully bent light beams around an object on a two dimensional metal surface, opening the door to faster and cheaper computer chips working with light.

The international team, including three members from the Research School of Physics and Engineering at ANU, have successfully demonstrated that a tiny beam of light on a flat surface can be bent around an obstacle, and course-correct itself on the other side of that obstacle. It’s the world’s first two-dimensional demonstration of so-called ‘Airy beams’. Their paper on the subject will be published in this month’s Physical Review Letters.

“Students in science class learn that light rays travel along straight trajectories and that it can’t go around corners,” said ANU team member Professor Yuri Kivshar.

“Recently it was discovered that small beams of light can be bent in a laboratory setting, diffracting much less than a regular beam. These rays of light are called ‘Airy Beams,’ and named after the English astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy, who studied light in rainbows.

“Our team has demonstrated that these beams can also be bound on the flat surface of a chip. We also observed a fascinating property of these beams – the so-called self-healing phenomenon, where the wave recovers after passing through surface defects,” he said.

Fellow ANU team member Dr Dragomir Neshev says that this demonstration offers potential in a number of areas.

“This discovery offers some exciting possible applications, particularly in the area of communications technology where it could allow us a cheap way to manipulate light on a chip,” he said.

fuckyeahneuroscience:

Neurons: Animated Cellular and Molecular Concepts

This is a really great illustrated (free!) online textbook of sorts that describes the basic neuron, from its anatomy to ion channels and neurotransmitter activity. The 8 chapters listed are:

• Anatomy of a Neuron
• Axonal Transport
• Ions and Ion Channels
• Resting Membrane Potential
• Action Potential
• Neurotransmitter Release
• Postsynaptic Mechanisms
• Removal of Neurotransmitter

Each section has illustrations and diagrams to help supplement your studies! Whether you want to start your foundation in neuroscience or give it a small refresher, definitely bookmark this resource.

(via section5)

scienceisbeauty:

On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam’s 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

Source: A Moment Frozen in Time, Mars Exploration Rover Mission, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

sugaratoms:

A scanning electron micrograph of the tapering top of a weevil’s leg shows a curved ridge that functions like the thread on a biological screw, another mechanical marvel that evolved long before humans invented it.

Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

BLDGBLOG: Aestheticizing these sorts of disasters can also have the effect of making climate change sound like an adventure. In Fifty Degrees Below, for instance, you wrote: “People are already fond of the flood… It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.” The implication is that people might actually be excited about climate change. Is there a risk that all these reports about flooded cities and lost archipelagoes and new coastlines might actually make climate change sound like some sort of survivalist adventure?

Robinson: It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

It’s easy to imagine people who are bored in the modern techno-surround, as I call it, and they’re bored because they have not fully comprehended that they’re still primates, that their brains grew over a million-year period doing a certain suite of activities, and those activities are still available. Anyone can do them; they’re simple. They have to do with basic life support and basic social activities unboosted by technological means.

And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

Because a lot of these supposed pleasures are really expensive. You pay with your life. You pay with your health. And they don’t satisfy you anyway! You end up taking various kinds of prescription or non-prescription drugs to compensate for your unhappiness and your unhealthiness – and the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true.

I’m advocating a kind of alteration of our imagined relationship to the planet. I think it’d be more fun – and also more sustainable. We’re always thinking that we’re much more powerful than we are, because we’re boosted by technological powers that exert a really, really high cost on the environment – a cost that isn’t calculated and that isn’t put into the price of things. It’s exteriorized from our fake economy. And it’s very profitable for certain elements in our society for us to continue to wander around in this dream-state and be upset about everything.

The hope that, “Oh, if only civilization were to collapse, then I could be happy” – it’s ridiculous. You can simply walk out your front door and get what you want out of that particular fantasy.

(via BLDGBLOG)

scientificillustration:

Old World Marsupial Skulls by American Museum of Natural History on Flickr.

‘Freelance artist Patricia Wynne did 20 black-and-white plates of Old World marsupial skulls for Robin Beck, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Mammalogy, to complement already published New World marsupial skulls she had done for Curator Rob Voss.’

14-billion-years-later:

Why black holes emit radiation.

The mathematical theory that black holes emit radiation has been something that has often bothered me. Surely if something can pull even light into it then how can it actually emit anything? The reason they do is because of a concept in quantum theory known as virtual particles. I’d have to say they’re one of my favorite ideas because they fill so many gaps in my understanding of the universe. Virtual particles are basically a pair of particles than pop in and out of existence in a very short amount of time. The idea is that two particles appear and then quickly interact, annihilating each other in the process. However say a pair of virtual particles come into existence on the event horizon of a black hole. There can be 3 general solutions, either both particles are pulled in, neither of the particles are pulled in (and promptly annihilate each other) or only one of the particles is pulled in. If only one of the pair is pulled into the black hole then the other somewhat ceases to be virtual and can escape the black hole as radiation.

This seems a lot easier than having to re-grow your jawbone in your abdomen, but it’s really a question of scale.

sugaratoms:

There was a time when people who lost teeth as adults were simply out of luck. When we developed dentures and dental implants, the situation improved for those who are dentally deficient. But dentures are uncomfortable, and the procedure for installing dental implants is rather barbaric. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have devised a new method for regrowing missing teeth in adults – right in their own mouths.

The technique, developed by Dr. Jeffrey Mao, involves placing a tooth “scaffolding” made of natural materials in the patient’s mouth and directing stem cells to develop into a new, healthy tooth. By growing a real tooth right in the patient’s mouth, the patient’s healing time is greatly reduced when compared to that required after dental implants, and the chance of rejection by the patient’s body is almost eliminated

scientificillustration:

Brachiopods from the genus Spirifer

From: ‘An introduction to the study of the Brachiopoda intended as a handbook for the use of students’ By James Hall and John M. Clarke. Published 1894

Oh, Texas. Never change, baby.

[quietly makes plans to move off-planet]

earthandthefinalfrontier:

Bill Nye Boo’d In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun

Bill Nye, the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.

But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

This story originally appeared in the Waco Tribune, but the newspaper has mysteriously pulled its story from the online version, presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

matthen:

I would call it The Plough, you might know it as The Big Dipper- or even The Celestial Bureaucrat. It’s a particularly helpful constellation for navigation, as it can help us folk in the northern hemisphere find Polaris, the North Star. Everyday it moves in the sky due to the spinning of the Earth, but on much longer time scales it is doing something a lot more amazing. To our very earliest ancestors, it would have looked quite different- as all the stars in our Galaxy are moving- in general spinning around the galactic spiral’s centre. A good reminder that the Universe is really a very dynamic place. [more]

(via physicsphysics)

ZOMGscience.net

Not just a funny website about science, this is possibly the funniest fucking website concerning science I’ve ever read.