When A Feather And A Bowling Ball Are Dropped In A Vacuum, They Hit The Ground At The Same Time. This

Chain Reaction.

Everyone knows that a line of standing dominos creates a fun chain reaction when you knock the first one over; but did you know you can use increasingly larger dominos and get the same result? 

The setup.

Professor Stephen Morris knocks over a 1-meter tall domino that weighs over 100 pounds by starting with a 5mm high by 1mm thick domino.He uses a size ratio of 1.5, meaning each domino is one and a half times larger than the last one. This is the generally accepted maximum ratio that dominos can have to successfully knock each other over.

Hans Van Leeuwen of Leiden University in the Netherlands, published a paper online showing that, theoretically, you could have a size ratio of up to two. But that’s in an ideal (and probably unrealistic) situation.

Fun fact.

There are 13 dominoes in this sequence. If Professor Morris used 29 dominoes in total, with the next one always being 1.5x larger, the last domino would be the height of the Empire State Building.

Source: Physics Buzz.

Olga of Kiev burnt down villages using pigeons, buried her enemies alive, and was generally no saint – except she was, because she was literally anointed a saint for her efforts. Her title? “Equal to the apostles.”

She died on this day in 969.

I cover her story in the RP book. :)

28.05.17 // new week, new window 💭

The dollhouses of death that changed forensic science. 

Harvard University offers a completely free online course on the Fundamentals of Neuroscience that you can get a certificate for successfully completing and which requires nothing other than basic knowledge in Biology and Chemistry. This excites me! Here’s the website

There’s an app described as a “Shazam for plants” that lets you take a picture of any plant and then utilizes user data and Google reverse image searching to tell you what species you’re looking at. Source

Crow parent waiting patiently for some snacks, teenage crow waiting not so patiently.

The Arrival of Summer (Grand Indoor Gardens)

1.  The University of Dundee Botanic Garden, Dundee, Scotland

2.  Yumenoshima Tropical Greenhouse, Tokyo Japan

3. Oman Botanical Gardens, Oman

4.  David Welch Winter Garden, Duthie Park in Aberdeen, Scotland

5.  Castle Ashby Orangery, Northamptonshire, England, UK

6.  Royal Botanical Gardens, London, England

7.  Sherman Library and Gardens, Corona Del Mar, Newport Beach, California

8.  Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, Copenhagen,Denmark

9. Atocha Station, Madrid, Spain

10. Siam Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand

“Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, Teach Yourself Italian (via kxowledge)