Coaxing bees into making honeycomb sculpture
“I knew they were ordered and regimented,” the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. “I had an intuition that I’d be able to organize that, architecturally.”
Please listen carefully to these options, as our menu has recently changed
No it hasn’t.
I suspect this behavior shows up somewhere on the list of ways you can manipulate people, in this case, trying to get me to listen to all the options instead of choosing the first convenient (and wrong) one or hitting “0.” Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
(I haven’t read the whole list, but am confident that by mentioning and linking to it, someone will read it and confirm that the behavior is indeed there. And that there are ways to persuade people to do your research for you, too, like checking to see if an item is on a list)
Periodic table gets a new element
More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of the element, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery.
The team, led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research, must propose a name for their find, before it can be formally added to the table.
The researchers used computer simulations and analytical calculations to show that a simplified model of a protein is attracted to DNA until it gets within a half-nanometer or so. At this short range, the protein is repelled, so it can slide freely until it finds its target sequence and binds more tightly. The results provide a more complete physical picture of this critical biological process.
Mentos and cola in UltraSlo motion @7000FPS. Seven-frikkin’-thousand!
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now*
Experts at the Royal Meteorological Society are now attempting to make it official by naming it ‘Asperatus’ after the Latin word for ‘rough’.
If they are successful, it would be the first variety of cloud formation to be given a new label in over half a century
Also being pushed by the Charades Society to fill the empty “sounds like asparagus” clue niche.
*(written by Joni Mitchell, covered by many.)
Anyone want to try and guess why blowing on frikkin’ molten Aluminum (or slapping it with a glove) didn’t put the fire out? Bueller?
An interesting graph of life expectancy vs per-capita income, for a bunch of different countries around the world. What is so trés cool is that you can animate it to run it from 1800 to the present. France does a meteoric rise very early on with no change in income, war participants take hits in life expectancy, and basically the whole world does the Time Warp (it’s just a jump to the left) in 1929.
One of the questions I was asked in my most recent adoption was what I would do if I were not a physicist. I’m pretty sure I would do something in science, and I have an interest in evolution and paleontology. The stumbling block to going in that direction was the squishy part of biology — when I was in school, I was pretty sure animal dissection would start by making me weak-in-the-knees, followed by me throwing up, and I had no desire to test that prediction. Consequently, I haven’t studied a whole lot of biology, including entomology.
But dragonflies are pretty fascinating. They don’t fall under the “bugs to be avoided” category — not gross house-invaders, nor do they want to sting me. I had no idea that they flap their sets of wings out of phase, though it makes sense (if it were in phase, why not just have a bigger wing?) But I have some shots where it looks like maybe the two sets are at slight different frequencies, so the phase changes. I also didn’t realize how much they glide when they fly. And the flapping is low enough in frequency that it shows up well on a high-speed camera — a much lower pitch than many other insects.
It’s also really hard to pan a camera to follow them. I think I saw six distinct species; these were the biggest and flew high, while a few others tended to hug the ground, and yet others I only saw in the woods.
You get three ants together, they can’t do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral.
William BlakeAnnie Savoy, Bull Durham
Look at what 6 – 7 billion people can do.
Time-Lapse Videos of Massive Change on Earth
Over the past decade, the number of people on Earth shot up by more than 13 percent, to nearly 6.8 billion people. To make room for all the hungry, breeding, CO2-emitting bodies on our small planet, we’ve ravaged Earth’s surface with staggering feats of deforestation, irrigation and urbanization — and NASA satellites have captured it all. Here are a few videos, compiled from images posted on NASA’s Earth Observatory, of some of the most impressive conquests of man over environment.