Hexup
It’s that time again. glorious things are happening in science and tech, though this week it’s mostly science. Science!
You know you’re old when…
You start outliving dinosaurs. The dinosaurs of my youth are fading away. First they took brontosaurus. Now it seems triceratops is on the chopping block. They never really existed, they’re just juvenile torosaurs. Torosaurs are being reclassified as triceratops, but it’s just not the same.
No more jiggling the handle
Sometimes your toilet gets stuck. Or your Mars rover, like Spirit did in 2009. No amount of remote shifting and jiggling will free it. But never again! Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed a model that accurately simulates the terrain of Mars so we can maneuver them around the quicksand. Maybe one day we’ll send a rover to dig out Spirit.
Sometimes you just dump your toybox
Stand back, I’m about to do science!
(Credit: Birgitte Svennevig/SDU)
We learn all kinds of things from new molecules, so chemists are always interested in making more. Scientists at the University of Southern Denmark have figured out a great strategy. Put things in the room with hydrogen cyanide (one of the most reactive substances known) and see what happens. Sometimes you get cool amino acids. Sometimes nothing. Science!
It’s been weeks…
Since we talked about 3d printing. Researchers at the University of Leicester have reassembled some 16th century Tudor sculptures using 3d scanning and printing. These reconstructions are pieced together from fragments of monuments and manuscripts collected from all over England. Now we just need to print some arms for the Venus de Milo.
The anniversary does’t shift
But tectonic plates do. It’s been fifty years since the publication of the seminal paper on tectonic theory, that went on to put to bed the notion of a static earth. Sometimes it’s strange to think of how much more we understand about our planet and the universe than we did so short a time ago.
Livin’ in the fridge
Photographer Antoine Bridier-Nahmias like to take pictures of mold. Wonderful pictures.
(Credit: Antoine Bridier-Nahmias)
