blua:
Asobi by Yasutoki Kariya
“Asobi” was created by art student Yasutoki Kariya for his senior thesis exhibition. Meaning “play,” the installation is comprised of 11 computer-programmed incandescent light bulbs hung from strings. They playfully re-enact Newton’s Cradle, visualizing the transfer of kinetic energy in the form of light. (via Spoon & Tamago)
The woman who made your Wifi working.
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born American actress. Max Reinhardt called her the “most beautiful woman in Europe” due to her “strikingly dark exotic looks”.
Mathematically talented, Lamarr came up with an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary for wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day.
Egyptian Aisha Mustafa, 19, has dazzled the physics world with a new invention that could launch spacecraft off the Earth’s surface and soaring through space without any fuel. Space is filled with a billowing sea of quantum particles that jump in and out of existence, and Aisha Mustafa proposes using thin silicon panels, spaced closely together, to trap these particles and then move against them, creating a propelling force. This innovation would make space exploration lighter, safer and cheaper than the traditional “blast off” method. Mustafa still has some design work to do, but unfortunately her research is currently limited by lack of state funding for space science departments at the university level, though her school’s science club did help fund her application for a patent.
npr:
Researchers say they have “sonified” the data from the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, making it possible to “hear” the newly discovered Higgs Boson-like particle, dubbed the “God particle” by Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman.
Photo: Score of the sonification. The bump corresponding to the new particle is represented by a F note which is two octaves above the preceding F note, a C which is the most acute note in the music, representing the peak of the Higgs, and a E note. Credit: Domenico Vicinanza
— tanya b.
This is the Indian Pipe plant, an eerie-looking plant, in my opinion. Monotropa uniflora is a heterotroph. That means that it doesn’t photosynthesize. Instead, it’s a parasitic plant that relies on mycorrhizal fungi for its nutrients.
Why is it white? No chlorophyll, no green.
It’s also known as the Ghost Plant, and the Corpse Plant.
