Arts and Smarts

odditiesoflife: Horseshoe Bend, Arizona Located on the Colorado...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:10:38 -0400

Horseshoe Bend, Arizona

Located on the Colorado River, Horseshoe Bend is a geological marvel. Here is where the Colorado River, cutting through rock over the course of millions of years, created a wide sweep around this sandstone escarpment. It created a 270° horseshoe-shaped bend in the canyon. This beautiful spot is only 7 miles north of the Grand Canyon.

visitheworld: Sleeping angel at Highgate Cemetery in London,...

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:30:46 -0400

visitheworld:

Sleeping angel at Highgate Cemetery in London, England (by Ada and John).

jtotheizzoe: Wringing out a Washcloth on the ISS Space Canadian...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:20:53 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

Wringing out a Washcloth on the ISS

Space Canadian Chris Hadfield continues his quest for interplanetary internet dominance with this incredible experiment submitted by two Nova Scotia high school students: Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner

They wanted to know what would happen if you wrung out a washcloth on the ISS? I won’t spoil the ending for you, but suffice to say it’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

I love how he doesn’t even have to hold the mic. Great job, Kendra and Meredith! For science!

youcanbeheroes: http://youcanbeheroes.tumblr.com

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:30:45 -0400

youcanbeheroes:

http://youcanbeheroes.tumblr.com

artchipel: Códice Tuna | on Tumblr - Pierce my heart “Thus, the...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:30:37 -0400

artchipel:

Códice Tuna | on Tumblr - Pierce my heart

“Thus, the deepest thoughts of many hearts will be revealed and a sword will pierce your very soul!” – Luke 2:35

blue-voids: Wang Wusheng

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:50:36 -0400

blue-voids:

Wang Wusheng

leslieseuffert: Ruslan Bobak

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:10:28 -0400

leslieseuffert:

Ruslan Bobak

adapto: Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany (11 May 1990)

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:20:40 -0400

adapto:

Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany (11 May 1990)

estimfalos: Nature Aquarium Style: 2010’s layout contest

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:30:35 -0400

estimfalos:

Nature Aquarium Style: 2010’s layout contest

ohscience: Reasons why octopuses in general are really...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:40:40 -0400

ohscience:

Reasons why octopuses in general are really weird:

some have three hearts

and venomous saliva

and a hidden parrot-like beak

they can change the color and texture of their skin with incredible ease and speed (they are much better at it than chameleons)

they have “intelligent arms” that don’t seem to need instructions from the brain to perform certain actions

(this is a giant pacific octopus.)

Photo

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 03:50:35 -0400

wolyboly: The Helicoprion was a shark-like fish that arose in...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:10:20 -0400

wolyboly:

The Helicoprion was a shark-like fish that arose in the oceans of the late Carboniferous 280 million years ago, and eventually went extinct during the early Triassic some 225 million years ago.

The Helicoprion kept growing new teeth throughout its life, but they did not fall out. Instead, the teeth grew in spiral fashion, with new, larger ones being added.

Photo

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:20:48 -0400

scinerds: Punch Leaves Man With Star-Shaped Cataract A man...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:30:55 -0400

scinerds:

Punch Leaves Man With Star-Shaped Cataract

A man in Austria developed a cataract shaped like a star in his eye after he was punched, according to a report of his case.

The 55-year-old went to his doctor because his vision in that eye had progressively worsened over the previous six months, according to doctors who treated the man.

The patient said he’d been punched nine months earlier, the doctors wrote in their report.

Talk about seeing stars, sheesh.

lesmaili: (Photo courtesy of Science Photo Library) A colored...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 07:40:35 -0400

lesmaili:

(Photo courtesy of Science Photo Library)

A colored scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a sweat gland pore (red), opening into the surface of human skin.

jtotheizzoe: Frozen Glass I was pretty shocked to find out just...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:50:32 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

Frozen Glass

I was pretty shocked to find out just how little liquid fresh water Earth contains, like we saw in this post. But I was equally shocked to find out that as much as one-fifth of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in the beauty above: Lake Baikal.

Siberia’s Lake Baikal, not only the world’s oldest lake at ~25 million years of age, is the largest single fresh water source on the planet. The water is so deep and so pure that when it freezes it becomes a sort of cold, turquoise glass, giving an observer a lens that can see over 100 feet straight down.

There’s more pictures not to miss at My Modern Met.

scinerds: Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:10:24 -0400

scinerds:

Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of Matter

Why can you stand on a glacier but not the ocean?

The answer seems simple enough: Liquids flow. Solids don’t. The atoms in liquids can slosh around. In solids, they fall lockstep into a crystal lattice. A crystal’s endlessly repeating pattern is so stable that it takes a considerable infusion of energy to make the atoms break rank. Or so physics textbooks say.

But this long-accepted explanation for the rigidity of solids fails to account for quasicrystals — bizarre solids first discovered in the lab in 1982 and found in nature in 2009. Atoms in quasicrystals are arranged in patterns that never repeat, but the material is nonetheless rigid. So is glass, an amorphous mass of stationary atoms that behaves like a solid but, upon closer inspection, looks more like a liquid frozen in time.

“Glasses have been around for thousands of years,” said Daniel Stein, a professor of physics and mathematics at New York University. “Chemists understand them. Engineers understand them. From the point of view of physics, we don’t understand them. Why are they rigid?”

Even crystalline solids such as glaciers resist categorization, as their atoms can flow, albeit very slowly. And sometimes the reverse also seems true: The ocean feels rigid if you jump onto it from a tall enough glacier. What, then, is the difference between a liquid and a solid?

Physicists in France and the United States are proposing new answers to this fundamental question. As outlined in a March article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, the researchers have identified two characteristics of materials that dramatically change form at the intersections of temperature and pressure where liquids turn solid. These characteristics, the physicists say, could define the difference between the two states of matter.

Charles Radin, a mathematical physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his former student, David Aristoff, now a mathematician at the University of Minnesota, argue that the main difference between liquids and solids is the way they respond to shear, or twisting forces. Liquids barely resist shear and can easily be sloshed, whereas solids — regardless of whether they are crystals, quasicrystals or glass — resist attempts to change their shape.

The liquid-solid phase transition, Radin and Aristoff reason, should therefore be marked by the “shear response” of a material jumping from zero to a positive value. And they observed just such a jump for a two-dimensional model material, in which atoms are represented by disks: At low densities corresponding to the material’s liquid phase, it showed no response to shear, but when the disks were densely packed, like the atoms in a solid, shear caused the material to expand. “The crossover where it shows this effect is exactly the density where the system becomes crystalline,” Radin said. “We propose this as a different way of understanding what a solid is.”

Full Article

Photo

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:20:39 -0400

fearthephantoms: “British artist Keira Rathbone uses...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:30:38 -0400

fearthephantoms:

“British artist Keira Rathbone uses typewriters, instead of brushes and pencils, to create amazing portraits and drawings.”

holy goodness.

gasstation: Edward Poynter - The сave of the storm Nymphs

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 07:40:47 -0400

gasstation:

Edward Poynter - The сave of the storm Nymphs