Chemical engineer. Melbournian. Crafty. This is a scientific scrap book of sorts... a personal housing for my favorite weird and wonderful advances found on the web... My happy place. Search bar tags: chemistry, engineering, physics, space, gif, chemistry gif, materials science, 3D printing, sustainability, tech, math, biology, and medicine. If you're having problems scrolling check out the archive. PS. This was not my first blog unfortunately, so I can not follow back as Crafty.
It’s well known that electric fields can guide the movements of skin cells, nudging them towards the site of an injury for instance. In fact, the human body generates an electric field that does this naturally. So researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany set out to amplify the effect.
While it might not heal severe injuries with the speed of a Marvel superhero, it could radically reduce the time it takes for small tears and lacerations to recover.
For people with chronic wounds that take a long time to heal, such as in elderly folk, those with diabetes, or people with poor blood circulation, recovering quickly from frequent small, open cuts could be a literal lifesaver.
“Chronic wounds are a huge societal problem that we don’t hear a lot about,” says Maria Asplund, a bioelectronics scientist at the University of Freiburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
“Our discovery of a method that may heal wounds up to three times faster can be a game changer for diabetic and elderly people, among others, who often suffer greatly from wounds that won’t heal.”
The one thing that could have made them sound any more made up would have been if you said the boys have secret viper fangs that can absolutely fuck you up with venom, and they do, on their goddamn feet.
cursed platypus facts:
* five (5) X chromosomes
* only the left ovary works
* produces milk but has no nipples. the mother just kind of sweats milk out their chest. nature is beautiful
* was nearly called the “duckmole”
* swims with its weird fish eyes and ears closed, hunting entirely by electroreception
* born with teeth, but then they fall out
OP had an experience with someone in the local witch community who was taking six cups of 'anti-anxiety tea' per day and gave herself lavender poisoning because she didnt think herbal remedies could harm her.
Remember, darlings: the difference between a cure and a poison is the dosage!
Lavender is fine to take daily in small doses, but if you start feeling any of these symptoms, even if you dont think lavender is the direct cause of it, please stop for awhile and see how you feel. Consult a doctor if it persists.
Same goes for any herbal remedies- if it causes you discomfort, stop.
If you're on any prescription medication or regularly take over-the-counter medications, then you should consult with your doctor anyway before trying a new herbal remedy. Natural remedies can absolutely still have interactions with other medications.
And always, ALWAYS, do your research before trying any new herbal remedy. Get your information from a trustworthy source; if someone is selling or sponsored by someone selling the thing that they're saying is safe, then they are not trustworthy. Full stop. No exceptions.
There are a lot of herbs that have horrible side effects, many that can be poisonous if not taken a very specific way or can cause things like organ damage and abortions. There are many stores selling those things without any real warnings of the dangers, or selling herbs that were used historically but that we now know are extremely dangerous with no real benefits. The fact that you can just buy pennyroyal tea, essential oil, and extract is horrifying to me.
fivers-dream
A good way to make this make sense mentally?
Willow is what aspirin is made out of.
If you live in the right country, cola nut (Coca-Cola) is a herbal remedy.
"Ephedra" (ephedrine) is a herbal remedy.
Heroin and opiates are made from poppies.
"Chemicals" are natural things, and just because we know how to synthesize them now doesn't mean they stopped existing, or that their origin points aren't still what they always were.
if something has enough of a pharmacological effect to help you, it can also harm you. it's not magic; you're still messing with your very physical body
The sardonic, reductionist headline here could be "Scientists finally figured out why you get more colds in winter: bEcAuSe iT's CoLd!"—but the actual science involved here is both interesting, and potentially very relevant to everyday life and especially the immunocompromised:
It turns out the cold air itself damages the immune response occurring in the nose. [...] In fact, reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of virus and bacteria-fighting cells in the nostrils, according to the study published Tuesday in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
“Cold air is associated with increased viral infection because you’ve essentially lost half of your immunity just by that small drop in temperature,” said rhinologist Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Want to avoid catching or spreading respiratory viruses like CoVid-19, RSV, influenza, or a common cold? Mask up, please, but also bundle up! Wrap up in a scarf, wear a balaclava, and just generally keep your face warm. There's no single magic solution, but that's not a reason to do nothing. Rather, it's a reason to take several simple precautions that help avoid the spread of disease and protect those around you. (I can't tell you how much "this isn't 100% effective so I shouldn't do it at all" frustrates me.)
I am super against light pollution, and have been for decades
but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"
so people get the idea that light pollution can only be remedied by eliminating all night-time light, which would make being outside at night very inconvenient, instead of by making night-time light shine only on the ground where, y'know, the people who need it are
Reblogging this again cause light pollution actually have negative health affects on humans and wildlife. We weren't meant to live in a world constantly bathed in light.
Long answer: Carbon nanotubes (CNT's) are long, straight tubes of pure carbon, with the atoms arranged like rolled-up sheets of hexagonal chicken wire. Sometimes an atom or two will be misplaced, introducing a defect. The easiest kind of defect to visualize is a kink, like this:
This is an AFM (atomic force microscope) image of a nanotube on a glass wafer, placed across four gold electrodes. That sharp kink in the tube is a weak spot.
(Side note: you can tell it's an AFM image because it's got really chunky raster lines. AFM's are fun. You drag an atomically-sharp diamond needle across a surface and measure the needle deflection with a laser. You can get the resolution down to less than a nanometer, if you hold your breath. I once spent a summer internship doing nothing but poking at graphene in an AFM for two months. Very repetitive work, but I got two publications out of it!)
However, it's rarely useful to look at individual CNT's outside of pure research. I worked with nanotube yarn in large-scale production. Large, twisted bundles of tubes, similar to this:
This is an SEM (scanning electron microscope) image of high-quality nanotube yarn. Each of those thin whispy strands is probably a couple hundred nanotubes, and the entire structure is twisted smoothly together out of hundreds of thousands. At this point, you're less interested in the quality of individual tubes and more interested in the bulk properties of the yarn itself.
So, once you've verified it visually by SEM, the easiest way to characterize the strength of your nanotube yarn is to pull on it until it breaks.
This is a thick ribbon of compressed CNTs, twisted into a chunky pseudo-yarn. The graph shows that the fiber snapped at around 3.7 gigapascals of stress. That's five or six times stronger than steel, and four-ish times stronger than spider silk. Boron nitride nanotubes (BNNT) would be stronger, but that's a post for another day.
Anyway, this might seem impressive, but tbh those are rookie numbers. Twisted-ribbon "yarn" is a cheap and easy way to make strong nanotube fibers, but not nearly as good as a true yarn.
Don't tell the authors I said that.
The other point you brought up is testing for purity.
This picture is about twenty years old, back when we really had no idea what we were doing. By modern standards, this is hideously embarrassing. It's covered in blobs of leftover iron catalyst. It's an ugly garbage nanotube.
Don't tell the authors I said that.
There can be all sorts of contaminants. Bits of catalyst (usually iron or nickel) random ceramic or metal junk from your furnace, even leftover acid (chlorosulfonic acid is one of the only things that will un-stick carbon nanotubes, though it's an extremely bad chemical that hates you). It's always important to characterize how much nanotube is in your nanotubes.
Handily enough, the best way to test for purity is with the same electron microscope!
One effect of sweeping an electron beam across a target is that the target will emit x-rays as its electrons jump around. These x-rays are extremely predictable, and will have an energy that directly corresponds to the atom that produced them. So assuming that your SEM also has the right kind of x-ray sensor, you click a button and switch over the EDX mode, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.
This EDX graph shows high concentrations of iron (Fe), oxygen, and carbon in the sample (the silicon is likely from a glass mounting slide). If this were a bunch of CNT's, you'd hope to see almost entirely carbon, with maybe a little bit of iron or nickel. Uh oh!
A specialized strain of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) was developed to seek out and infiltrate cancerous tumors when injected into a patient’s body. Once the bacteria have reached the tumor, pulses of ultrasound trigger the production of anti-cancer drugs.
My favorite bits from the article include how Dr. Kariko celebrated the fact that the vaccines that used her mRNA research worked
“On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”
To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.”
They’re also chordates, like us vertebrates! Their embryos have basically the same anatomy as ours, but the notochord, the part that becomes our spinal column, just remains a notochord until they’re ready to become a jelly bag forever. Then they digest the notochord as well as their own brain because they won’t need either of them.
So fucking jealous right now these little bastards get to just live their best life meanwhile I gotta drive 40 miles to work each morning and pay taxes
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
max-vandenburg
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory.
Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet.
Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.
Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).
Most of the time, our brain receives different input from each of our ears, but we nevertheless perceive speech as unified sounds. This process takes place through synchronization of the areas of the brain involved with the help of gamma waves, neurolinguists at the University of Zurich have now discovered. Their findings may lead to new treatment approaches for tinnitus.
How come we don’t hear everything twice: After all, our ears sit on opposite sides of our head and most sounds do not reach both our ears at exactly the same time. “While this helps us determine which direction sounds are coming from, it also means that our brain has to combine the information from both ears. Otherwise, we would hear an echo,” explains Basil Preisig of the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich.
In addition, input from the right ear reaches the left brain hemisphere first, while input from the left ear reaches the right brain hemisphere first. The two hemispheres perform different tasks during speech processing: The left side is responsible for distinguishing phonemes and syllables, whereas the right side recognizes the speech prosody and rhythm. Although each hemisphere receives the information at a different time and processes different features of speech, the brain integrates what it hears into a unified speech sound.
Brain waves establish connection
The exact mechanism behind this integration process was not known until now. In earlier studies, however, Preisig had found indications that measurable oscillations elicited by the brain – known as gamma waves – played a role. Now he has managed to demonstrate that the process of integrating what we hear is directly linked to synchronization by gamma waves. Neurolinguists from UZH worked on the project alongside researchers from the Netherlands and France.
Processing ambiguous information
The study, which took place at the Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, involved 28 healthy subjects who had to repeatedly solve a listening task: An ambiguous syllable (a speech sound between ga and da) was played in their right ear while a click containing a fragment of the syllables da or ga was played unnoticed in the left ear. Depending on what was played in their left ear, the participants heard either ga or da and then had to report what sound they had heard. During the process, the researchers were tracking activity in both hemispheres of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Electric stimulation impairs synchronization
During the experiments, the researchers disrupted the natural activity pattern of gamma waves by stimulating both hemispheres of the brain with electrodes attached to the head. This manipulation affected participants’ ability to correctly identify the syllable they heard. The fMRI analysis showed that there were also changes in the activity of the neural connections between the right and the left brain hemispheres: The strength of the connection changed depending on whether the rhythm of the gamma waves was influenced by electric stimulation in the two brain hemispheres synchronously or asynchronously. This disruption also impaired the integration process. Thus, synchronization of the gamma waves seems to serve to balance the different inputs from the two hemispheres of the brain, providing a unified auditory impression.
Possible therapy for tinnitus
“Our results suggest that gamma wave-mediated synchronization between different brain areas is a fundamental mechanism for neural integration,” says Preisig. “Moreover, this research shows for the first time, using human hearing as an example, that the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain can be successfully modulated by electric stimulation,” adds Alexis Hervais-Adelman, head of neurolinguistics at the UZH Department of Psychology, who was also involved in the study.
These findings could thus also find clinical application in the near future. “Previous studies show that disturbances in the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain are associated with auditory phantom perceptions such as tinnitus and auditory verbal hallucinations,” Preisig adds. “Thus, electric brain stimulation may present a promising avenue for the development of therapeutic interventions.”
The Mauritius “underwater waterfall” is not a true waterfall but an naturally occurring optical! In the sense that that’s not water falling, it’s sand and silt shifting! Shifting down a 4000-meter-deep abyssal drop. It is in fact exactly as deep as it looks, sorry :)
I mean technically, because its a tool that can selectively add or remove genes from an organism.
There have been proposals to cure rare genetic diseases using Crispr, because of this.
But we’re still a long way off of inserting any genes that could confer abilities/increases to certain physical characteristics, as well there are some ethical issues around designer babies and the like.
A couple years ago, a set of twins (widely deemed the “CRISPR babies”) were born, and I think they’re a great example of why we can’t give humans superpowers just yet.
Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui used CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out both copies of the gene CCR5 in vitro in order to make the twins immune to HIV. He has since been sentenced to 3 years in prison for this.
The problem with using gene editing to confer ‘superpowers’ is that, in general, genes have multiple functions. Taking CCR5 and the CRISPR babies as an example: it’s possible that the twins will have enhanced cognitive abilities, as CCR5 has been found to inhibit plasticity in the cortex & hippocampal learning and memory (the paper specifically showed that reducing the amount of CCR5 activity improved the cognitive abilities of mice). On the flip side, it’s also possible that the twins will have a decreased life expectancy, as it’s been shown that people with (naturally occurring) double deletion of CCR5 tend to die before age 76.
Here’s an article featuring some rare, naturally occurring ‘human superpowers’! In theory, we can isolate the underlying genetic mutations and then deliberately replicate them. Spoiler: they come with some not-so-great side effects. One of the examples I’m most familiar with, which was also featured on an episode of House, is the inability to feel pain due to a mutation in the SCN9A gene. Sounds cool, but babies with this disorder often end up dying due to self-mutilation, accidents, etc. The “bendy man”, caused by Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, affects connective tissue in the body and typically results in joint pain and early-onset arthritis, and, in its vascular form, heart problems.
That article also proceeds to list some genes associated with potential ‘superpowers’ if their expression is increased, but I’d take that with a grain of salt considering everything else I’ve discussed here. I’m not going to take the time to look into the studied functions of each of those genes, but I’d be willing to put money on there being some unpleasant side effects of increasing their expression.
Diseases caused by a single mutation in a single gene are really good targets for CRISPR, as it just needs to go in and “cut and replace”, so to speak. Although we’re now able to use CRISPR for more complicated applications (and applications in the adult body), as well as directly editing mRNA instead of DNA. Here’s a handy article on diseases CRISPR tech might already be great for.
Whether adding or deleting genes, there will almost always be ‘off-target’ effects. The human genome is a highly efficient and precise, albeit also highly redundant, piece of code.
The current limiting factor isn’t our ability to use CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene editing tool, but rather our (lack of) understanding of the functions of each and every gene. We’re simply not at the point of being able to edit the genome to enhance humans without inevitably causing some terrible, unforeseen side effects. Will we get there? Maybe. Our understanding will, yes, though not for a number of years. But it may be the case that, ultimately, there is no single “strong man” or “bendy man” gene that can be augmented without also causing significant harm.
And, yeah, ethically it’s a nightmare. I don’t think anyone aspires toward a GATTACA future.
You know when you can’t hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there’s a deafening blast of sound? That’s basically what happened at Chernobyl.
