Where Your Elements Came From

“Sketching Fractals” by Music: Fractals are a treat for your eyes, but what about your ears?

Fractals are geometric constructs that exhibit similar or identical characteristics at every level of magnitude. They provide new tools for geometers to describe objects of extreme intricacy, such as clouds, ferns, snowflakes, mountain ranges, stock-market fluctuations, the human circulatory and nervous system, etc.. The geometry of Fractals brings us a new appreciation for the natural world and the beauty of mathematics. Some of the most popular examples are: The Sierpinski triangle  and the Von Koch snowflake.

Fractals are a treat for your eyes, but what about your ears?. Dmitry Kormann, a composer/keyboardist from São Paulo, Brazil, explains how he brings fractal-like patterns to the very structure of his music, to obtain beautiful results. See more at:  [http://plus.maths.org/issue55/features/Kormann]

Images: Snow winter at Datspiff on Tumblr & Snowflakes and snow crystals on Flickr.

References:

[Fractal Dimensions of Geometric Objects on Fractalfoundation.org]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal]

Modular Origami Star by Maria Sinayskaya http://flic.kr/p/dJtry6

“X-rays reveal the inner beauty of shells.” National Geographic. March 1955. 

Hubble Views The Final Frontier For Dark Matter

“This phenomenon of gravitational lensing stretches galaxies into streaks and arcs, magnifying them, and creating multiple images. It also enables us to reconstruct the mass distribution of the cluster, revealing that it’s mostly due to dark matter.”

When you look out at the distant Universe, you can see all sorts of things: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, going as far back into the distant past as our telescopes can image. But where you have the greatest concentrations of mass, an extreme phenomenon emerges: that of gravitational lensing. Any foreground objects lying behind that mass will have their light stretched, magnified and distorted by the intervening matter. Recently, as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope followed-up on galaxy cluster Abell 370, and revealed the most spectacular gravitational lensing signal ever seen in a galaxy cluster. Most importantly, it provides some very strong evidence not only for dark matter’s existence, but for its presence distinct from any galaxies at all.

Come get the full story in images, videos, and no more than 200 words on this edition of Mostly Mute Monday!

How spheres impact water has been studied for more than a century. The typical impact for a rigid sphere creates a cavity like the one on the upper left - relatively narrow and prone to pinching off at its skinny waist. If the sphere is elastic –squishy – instead, the cavity ends up looking much different. This is shown in the upper right image, taken with an elastic ball and otherwise identical conditions to the upper left image. The elastic ball deforms; it flattens as it hits the surface, creating a wider cavity. If you watch the animations in the bottom row, you can see the sphere oscillating after impact. Those changes in shape form a second cavity inside the first one. It’s this smaller second cavity that pinches off and sends a liquid jet back up to the collapsing splash curtain. 

From the top image, we can also see that the elastic sphere slows down more quickly after impact. This makes sense because part of its kinetic energy at impact has gone into the sphere’s shape changes and their interaction with the surrounding water. 

If you’d like to see more splashy stuff, be sure to check out my webcast with a couple of this paper’s authors. (Image credits: top row - C. Mabey; bottom row - R. Hurd et al., source; research credit: R. Hurd et al.)

Stuff in My Office

Dr Warhol’s Periodic Table of Microbes

From: Ernst Haeckel’s book Kunstformen der Natur (1904). This illustration is plate 23 the Bryozoa.

Manganese Dendrites on Limestone

Locality: Solnhofen, Bavaria, Germany

Double triangle sawtooth by Miguel Angel Blanco Muñoz. I have liked how time seemed to slow down, folding the grid.

Ferrofluid!