Don’t Let Anyone Tell You That Physics Isn’t Poetry; The Only Difference Is That For Us, The Universe

. Photo by @d.arkhipov The tribe of Mundari people. Thousands of years they live on their land of South Sudan with theirs cows. All their life they move along the White Nile in search of new pastures and they have to defend the cows against other tribes with the arm. #wild #nature #sudan #cow #wildlife #animals #africa #tribe #people #igs_africa #wildeyesa #earthcapture #southsudan #earthofficial #awesomeearth https://www.instagram.com/p/B9MvKDDAcFU/?igshid=18u5b82hqa05l

How can isotopes help in the hunt for life, both on Earth, and on other planets? The first of our five ‪#‎RealTimeChem‬ week competition winners, Dr. Chelsea Sutcliffe, explains here: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-1tZ

Hit me with a cool fact of the brain!(short if possible?I have duslexia)Thanks!✨

Ok from where you’re sitting right now I want you to try and slowly scan the room from left to right in one smooth motion. It’s not possible- instead, your eyes move along in little jumps called saccades. Now I want you to lift your pointer finger up and move it along from left to right, following it with your eyes. You’ll now notice your eyes no longer move in saccades but follow your finger in a swift motion known as a “smooth pursuit”. This movement allows our eyes to closely follow a moving object and evolved to aid us in catching prey or keep away from predators. Autistic people, abuse victims and those under the influence of alcohol or drugs often show a lack or defecit of smooth pursuit.

This Facial Reconstruction of Henri IV King of France by French artist Philippe Froesch is Mindblowing!

This was all done digitally through a combination of programs like Cinema4d and Zbrush. Traditional methods are still used in his digital reconstructions as you can see in the bottom left picture. The dots poking out from the skull are facial tissue depth markers. They tell the reconstruction artist how thick the tissues should be at certain points on the skull  based on large collections of data. 

Today marks the birthday of Alfred Nier (1911-1994), a pioneer in the field of mass spectrometry. Here’s a brief mass spectrometry introduction! PDF here: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-1bw

Structural differences between DNA and RNA. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is like a blueprint of biological guidelines that a living organism must follow to exist and remain functional. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, helps carry out this blueprint’s guidelines. Of the two, RNA is more versatile than DNA, capable of performing numerous, diverse tasks in an organism, but DNA is more stable and holds more complex information for longer periods of time.

Strange Weather

The Field Museum’s Economic Botany collection contains everything from a seed bank (literally vials upon vials of organized seeds), to hats made out of various grasses and straw material, musical instruments and shoes made from certain trees and barks, stalks of wheat, cobs of corn, bags of tea, dyes, medicines. Some of the items are decades old, and a large portion date back to the 1893 World’s Fair, when the trade and sale of such products was essential to industry growth.

This is a collection about the relationship between people and plants, documenting our use and interactions with items we’ve grown and harvested. It’s botanical as much as it is anthropological: the variety of uses for plants that people have discovered and created over thousands of years is staggering and astounding. As we continue to move towards automated agriculture and become less removed from the direct sources for our food and raw materials, I am grateful and intrigued that we may look into a jar of cherry syrup from the 1890′s and gain a bit more knowledge about the way we used to live. 

Pictures: 

A jar of cherry syrup from Guyana, 1893

A variety of pasta products, presented by the National Macaroni Association, 1920′s

Tortillas from Mexico, 1901 

Sugars from Egypt, 1904 

Maize from Brazil, 1948-1949

See more about the Economic Botanical Collection on The Brain Scoop!

The quest to crystallize time

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see ‘How to create a time crystal’). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty’ diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It’s less weird than the first idea, but it’s still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.

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