Categorizing Mother Nature
This 15 year old just won $75,000 for developing a test for pancreatic cancer that’s over 90 percent accuracy, and 28 times faster, 28 times less expensive and over 100 times more sensitive than current tests.
Earth’s Siblings: Inside The Planets
Click each for a neat and informative view of the neighboring planets in our Solar System.
via SPACE
I was super super excited to reblog these and remember everything, but now I’m heavily side-eyeing re: the temperature of Uranus. :((((((((((
(THAT FEELING WHEN YOU’RE LIKE “I’M LEARNING SO MUCH” AND THEN THE THING YOU’RE READING/WATCHING TALKS ABOUT SOMETHING YOU KNOW ABOUT AND IS TOTALLY WRONG)
Take a look at this image, You see embedded spirals of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spiralsare the same color.
The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this…
On the one hand, I just spent a month learning a fair bit about the visual system. I know this is how color works.
Yet I still didn’t believe that this picture was for real until I tested it in Photoshop. .____.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
A colorful new collection of galaxies from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission reveal a spectacular menagerie of galaxies during its prolific 3-year mission that ended in Feb. 2011. The showcase, released in May 2011 by NASA, shows several galaxy types, from elegant grand design spirals to more patchy flocculent spirals, while others have roundish centers or stretched central bars.
Quadruple fluorescence image revealing the complexity of the optic fibre layer of a mouse retina. Optic nerve axons and glial cells are stained red and green, respectively while actin in the blood vessel-ensheathing endothelial cells are stained blue. DNA and RNA are in orange.
Source: Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR.
The Secret Life of Plankton
A new video from TEDEducation about the beautiful, mysterious food web at the smallest scales of marine life. This is like stepping onto an alien world! All life on Earth depends in some way on these varied, microscopic wonders. A few tablespoons of seawater holds more marine life than there are people on Earth.
There is grandeur in this tiny view of life. Prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor, and then smile.
Tea Chemistry Set by Art Lebedev
Adorned with a traditional Gzhel pattern, this ceramic chemistry set has been repurposed as a Russian tea set. The best kind of science is the type you can drink.
(via: yankodesign)
So you think you’re tough, huh? Do ya, punk? Well you don’t know who you’re dealing with!
… Someday, when I least expect it, Netflix will… put Batman: Brave and the Bold on instant.
I only hope it’s not while I’m writing my thesis.
Words Of Wisdom of the Day: Inspired by the acclaimed “Sagan Series,” Evan Schurr pieced together powerful statements made by world-renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that serve as an alarming wake up call to a nation that has stopped dreaming and underfunded tomorrow.
[reddit.]
sob
