That One Time My Roommate Couldn't Watch Shane's Asagao Academy Stream So I Live-texted It To Her Instead.

SEED MONEY

After the price of gold dropped in the 1980s, Fred Libby left the mines of Arizona, where he worked with precious metals, and started Treehouse Silver Inc. with his wife, Connie. The Libbys now grow small crystals of copper, gold, silver, and other minerals and sell them to more than 250 gift shops around the country. They grew this crystal by dissolving copper wire in a hot mixture of water and nitric acid. Then they dipped two copper plates into the solution, one of which had pennies attached to it. The plates are hooked up to opposite ends of a low-voltage power source with the pennies plate connected to the power source’s negative end. After about a day, copper in the solution gets reduced to copper metal and crystallizes in long, thin structures on the pennies.

Credit: Treehouse Silver Inc. 

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The Beauty of Discovery

Meet Artist Tyler Thrasher, Who Makes Dead Things Sparkle

Reverse psychology that's not in psychology. Reverse biology...?

How did you decide to do a project with RNA?

I was having a conversation with someone in our department about how useful and cheap next-gen sequencing is, and how I was considering spending out my grant on a project looking at immune gene expression in spiders. He told me flat out that I wasn’t capable of doing it, because I wouldn’t understand it enough to ever publish. So I used a kit to extract RNA, sent off the samples, read a few books in the meantime, learned to code, wrote the scripts for R and the supercomputer, then did it. I’m writing it up now, and have found some pretty cool stuff! I’m glad I learned it too, since it’s a good skill to have.

TL;DR: some asshole told me I couldn’t do it, so I decided to do it.

Purification of the “bad blood” from yesterday. 6 hrs later, the column is done and clean, and I’m in bed with Netflix and pizza after 2 looooong days in a row. Thank goodness!

Rosalind Franklin at work on the microscope.

“Conclusion: Big helix in several chains, phosphates on outside, phosphate-phosphate inter-helical bonds disrupted by water. Phosphate links available to proteins.” — Rosalind Franklin

Underlined in typewritten lecture notes, with handwritten annotations, as report (7 Feb 1952) on ‘Colloquium November 1951’. As given in Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA(1975), 128.  

positive vibes 

I just knew that my inherent mistrust of AI would save me someday

This robot led people to their doom — and they still followed it

Researchers from Georgia Tech, backed by money from the Air Force, ran a test to see if people trying to escape from a high-rise building would trust a robot to lead them. Overwhelmingly, the sheeple followed the little droid to their simulated deaths. In the video, the researchers theorize why people obliged.

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The Academy Awards won by scientists

Did you know there is another set of Oscars devoted to the scientific side of movie making?

Two weeks before the televised Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives out awards to the innovators who make blockbusters like “The Martian” or “Mad Max: Fury Road” possible. 

Combining style *AND* brains, the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony celebrates technological innovations ranging from camera rigs to software systems to inflatable green screens.  

This year’s recipients included Michael John Keesling, who developed the Image Shake, a remote-controlled lens attachment that creates a jerky, hand-held look without shaking the camera. The tool has been used in movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and the Jason Bourne films to create a gritty, “real” aesthetic seen in a lot of contemporary action thrillers.

Brian McLean and Martin Meunier won an award for pioneering the use of rapid prototyping, a process that allows animators to quickly and exponentially produce replacement puppet parts for stop-motion films like “Coraline.”

Past winners of the awards have also included academics. 

UC Santa Barbara’s computer science professor, Theodore Kim, won a technical achievement award for creating an algorithm that helps simulate realistic smoke and fire effects seen in dozens of movies, including “Super 8″ and “Avatar.”

Curious about the science behind these effects? Check out the video below: