Building Microfluidic Circuits Is Generally A Multi-day Process, Requiring A Clean Room And Specialized

This car race involved years of training, feats of engineering, high-profile sponsorships, competitors from around the world and a racetrack made of gold.

But the high-octane competition, described as a cross between physics and motor-sports, is invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the track itself is only a fraction of the width of a human hair, and the cars themselves are each comprised of a single molecule.

The Nanocar Race, which happened over the weekend at Le centre national de la recherché scientific in Toulouse, France, was billed as the “first-ever race of molecule-cars.”

It’s meant to generate excitement about molecular machines. Research on the tiny structures won last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and they have been lauded as the “first steps into a new world,” as The Two-Way reported.

Microscopic Cars Square Off In Big Race

Image: CNRS

The Six Types of Middle-Earth Names

1. Characters whose Names are Secretly Insults: 

Samwise: means “Half-wise” or “Half-wit.” He is Stupid Gamgee

Faramir: Boromir’s name means “steadfast jewel”, but Faramir’s name just means “sufficient jewel.”

Sufficient.

Denethor took one look at baby Faramir and thought “eh I guess he exists or whatever” which is very in character

 2. Characters who Have Way Too Many Names

Examples include Aragorn son of Arathorn son of Arador heir of Isildur Elendil’s son, descendant of Numenor,  Thorongill,  Eagle of the Star,  Dúnadan, Strider,  Wingfoot, Longshanks, Elessar, Edhelharn, Elfstone, Estel (”Hope,”) The Chieftain of the Dúnedain, King of the West, High King of Gondor and Arnor, and Envinyatar the Renewer of the House of Telcontar

Wait I’m sorry did I say “examples” plural Cuz that was all one guy 3. Characters whose parents must’ve been prophets

-Frodo means “wise by experience.” His story is about becoming wise by experience -A lady named Elwing turns into a bird (geddit)

4. Characters whose families were so lazy that they copy-pasted the same first half of a name onto multiple people

Théoden/Théodred  Aragorn/Arathorn/Arador  Éomer/ Éomund/Éowyn/Éorl Elladan/Elrohir/Elrond/Elros/Elwing/Elenwë/Elendil/Eldarion (the laziest family) 

5.Characters whose Names are Expertly Designed so that Newbies can’t Remember Who is Who and Feel Sad

All the people mentioned in number 4 Celeborn, Celegorm, Celebrimbor, Celebrian All the rhyming dwarf names in the Hobbit Sauron and Saruman Arwen and Éowyn

6. Name so nice, you say it twice

Legoas Greenleaf: Legolas’s first name means “Greenleaf” in elvish. Legolas is Greenleaf Greenleaf (thranduil really likes green leaves ok) King Théoden’s name means King in Rohirric. Tolkien decided to name his king “King.” All hail King King  this is what the fanbase means when we say tolkien was a creative genius with language

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If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch, you’ve probably noticed the billowing clouds around the launch pad during lift-off. What you’re seeing is not actually the rocket’s exhaust but the result of a launch pad and vehicle protection system known in NASA parlance as the Sound Suppression Water System. Exhaust gases from a rocket typically exit at a pressure higher than the ambient atmosphere, which generates shock waves and lots of turbulent mixing between the exhaust and the air. Put differently, launch ignition is incredibly loud, loud enough to cause structural damage to the launchpad and, via reflection, the vehicle and its contents.

To mitigate this problem, launch operators use a massive water injection system that pours about 3.5 times as much water as rocket propellant per second. This significantly reduces the noise levels on the launchpad and vehicle and also helps protect the infrastructure from heat damage. The exact physical processes involved – details of the interaction of acoustic noise and turbulence with water droplets – are still murky because this problem is incredibly difficult to study experimentally or in simulation. But, at these high water flow rates, there’s enough water to significantly affect the temperature and size of the rocket’s jet exhaust. Effectively, energy that would have gone into gas motion and acoustic vibration is instead expended on moving and heating water droplets. In the case of the Space Shuttle, this reduced noise levels in the payload bay to 142 dB – about as loud as standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. (Image credits: NASA, 1, 2; research credit: M. Kandula; original question from Megan H.)

Sixty Symbols has a great new video explaining the laboratory set-up for demoing a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. You can see a close-up from the demo above. Here the pink liquid is fresh water and the blue is slightly denser salt water. When the tank holding them is tipped, the lighter fresh water flows upward while the salt water flows down. This creates a big velocity gradient and lots of shear at the interface between them. The situation is unstable, meaning that any slight waviness that forms between the two layers will grow (exponentially, in this case). Note that for several long seconds, it seems like nothing is happening. That’s when any perturbations in the system are too small for us to see. But because the instability causes those perturbations to grow at an exponential rate, we see the interface go from a slight waviness to a complete mess in only a couple of seconds. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is incredibly common in nature, appearing in clouds, ocean waves, other planets’ atmospheres, and even in galaxy clusters! (Image and video credit: Sixty Symbols)

Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

Leonid Andreyev. (via drunk-on-books)

A rare screentest of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, just after Vivien had been announced as the official actress portraying Scarlett O’hara. A Selznick employee remembers, “Gable knew this was a woman’s picture and treated her with the utmost respect.”

Bringing silicon to life: Scientists persuade nature to make silicon-carbon bonds

A new study is the first to show that living organisms can be persuaded to make silicon-carbon bonds – something only chemists had done before. Scientists at Caltech “bred” a bacterial protein to make the humanmade bonds – a finding that has applications in several industries.

Molecules with silicon-carbon, or organosilicon, compounds are found in pharmaceuticals as well as in many other products, including agricultural chemicals, paints, semiconductors, and computer and TV screens. Currently, these products are made synthetically, since the silicon-carbon bonds are not found in nature.

The new study demonstrates that biology can instead be used to manufacture these bonds in ways that are more environmentally friendly and potentially much less expensive.

“We decided to get nature to do what only chemists could do – only better,” says Frances Arnold, Caltech’s Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, and principal investigator of the new research, published in the Nov. 24 issue of the journal Science.

Read more.