@ultrainfinitequest

Learn Everything You Need To Know About Chemicals In Your Food in 4 Easy Steps!

Step One

Obtain High School level Chemistry textbook. 

Step Two 

Open the book to chapter one, section one. 

Step Three

Locate and identify the goals of chapter one: basic definition of chemistry. 

Step Four

Discover that EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS. 

Whew. That was pretty scary, wasn’t it? Education is hard. Learning about scary chemicals is a big adventure. But aren’t you glad you pulled through? I’m glad we had this talk. 

PUMPKIN-SPICED FLUORESCENCE

Inside a pumpkin, seeds don’t need much chlorophyll—the molecule that helps plants convert light into food—because there isn’t a lot of light deep inside the fruit’s flesh. Instead of chlorophyll, the green seeds are chock-full of protochlorophyllide, a highly fluorescent molecule that glows orange-red under ultraviolet light and can be converted into chlorophyll a by an enzyme in the seeds. The enzyme reduces protochlorophyllide to produce chlorophyll when the enzyme encounters light, which occurs only after the seed has left the pumpkin and therefore needs to start producing its own food so it can grow. Helmut Brandl, a science communicator and professor at ETH Zurich, extracted this protochlorophyllide by grinding up pumpkin seeds and mixing them with nail polish remover (bottom row).

Submitted by Helmut Brandl

Enter our photo contest here!

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A little friendly fire for @yo-yo-yoshiko. Don’t expect any more of these, I want points dammit!

[ Find me on Art Fight! ]

Despite its appearance, there is order in the chaos of turbulence. These snapshots from a turbulent channel flow simulation outline these coherent structures in black. The top photo shows a top view looking down on the channel and the bottom image shows a side view of the channel. It is thought that studying these coherent structures may help shed light on turbulence and its formation, which remains one of the great open questions of classical physics. (Photo credit: M. Green)

B.o.B. WROTE A DISS TRACK TO PROVE TO NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON THAT THE EARTH IS ACTUALLY FLAT

It’s hard to argue with logic that is just words strung together, so maybe B.o.B. just made the smartest move of all.

‘BLOOD LAMP’ Mike Thompson, an artist based in Amsterdam, wanted to design a piece that forced people to think about the cost of the power they use. So he made a lamp lit with the user’s blood. His “Blood Lamp” glows thanks to a reaction with luminol, a molecule used in police forensics that gives off electric blue light when exposed to an iron-rich protein in blood called hemoglobin. Iron atoms catalyze the oxidation of luminol, creating a high-energy, unstable peroxide molecule that releases energy as blue light as it relaxes to its low-energy ground state. After the user adds blood and the reaction consumes all of the luminol, the light fades, and the lamp can never be used again.

Credit: Mike Thompson

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What is the shape of a falling raindrop? Surface tension keeps only the smallest drops spherical as they fall; larger drops will tend to flatten. The very largest drops stretch and inflate with air as they fall, as shown in the image above. This shape is known as a bag and consists of a thin shell of water with a thicker rim at the bottom. As the bag grows, its shell thins until it ruptures, just like a soap bubble. The rim left behind destabilizes due to the surface-tension-driven Plateau-Rayleigh instability and eventually breaks up into smaller droplets. This bag instability limits the size of raindrops and breaks large drops into a multitude of smaller ones. The initial size of the drop in the image was 12 mm, falling with a velocity of 7.5 m/s. The interval between each image is 1 ms. (Photo credit: E. Reyssat et al.)