Psci Magazine

thescienceofreality: Get ready for the transit of Venus!“Scientists and amateur astronomers around the world are preparing to observe the rare occurrence of Venus crossing the face of the Sun on 5-6 June, an event that will not be seen again for over a hundred years.The occasion also celebrates the first transit while there is a spacecraft orbiting the planet – ESA’s Venus Express.ESA will be reporting live from the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, where the Venus Express science team will be discussing the latest scientific results from the mission while enjoying a unique view of the 2012 transit under the ’midnight Sun’.A transit of Venus occurs only when Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth. Since the orbital plane of Venus is not exactly aligned with that of Earth, transits occur very rarely, in pairs eight years apart but separated by more than a century.The last transit was enjoyed in June 2004 but the next will not be seen until 2117. ” Don’t forget to where protective eyeglasses! Get your telescopes & cameras ready, skywatchers! This will be a show you surely won’t want to miss. You can read more about this historical event here, here, here, here, and here.  You can read about and see images from the last transit of Venus in 2004 here. [For more information : http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMLSGZWD2H_index_0.html  ]

the-star-stuff: A virus that creates electricity A virus called simply M13 has the power (literally) to change the world. A team of scientists at the Berkeley Lab have genetically engineered M13 viruses to emit enough electricity to power a small LED screen. M13 poses no threat to humans — it can only infect bacteria — but it could one day serve humanity by powering your laptop, or even your city. Illustration by Iaroslav Neliubov via Shutterstock

jtotheizzoe: PREACH, Dex.

monotask: A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure. The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering. http://vimeo.com/41160704 A web of tubes and electric cords is interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood. Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape. The interpretation of anatomy with a mechanical vocabulary reflects strongly on the Western perception of the body. Defining the body as a machine - where dysfunctional parts can be replaced by mechanics - speaks of how we understand life. These objects encompass social debates about the ethics of euthanasia, the quantification of both the value and quality of life, making physical a poetic desire to conquer our own mortality. The medical machine - whether in use or not - is an object which transcends its materiality. Designed and created to perform a single, most meaningful function, we never subject these devices to a critical investigation as industrial products within the context of material culture. This work aims to explore the nature of these devices as objects of our times, liberated from their restrained purpose while still charged with its resonance. By exploring the medical instruments while detached from the human body and functioning as an independent being, each electronic body part accentuate the distance between the organic and the artificial. Through the visibility of motors, electronic circuits, fluid pumps, audio-visual signals and particularly the scale and electric exhaustion of the work, we are confronted with the stark contrasts that lie in the primitive functions of precision hardware. The Immortal is occupied with the compelling and discomforting nature of these objects,  the products of our attempts to conquer biology with engineering. The absence of the body only underlines that the machines filling the room are inherently biological. Original Article

npr: Ooooo. jtotheizzoe: Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way? First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of. If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here). With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones. This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!   (via Discover Magazine)

mothernaturenetwork: Solar eclipse: How to see the ‘ring of fire’ on May 20Annular eclipses take a long time to happen, giving plenty of time for amateur astronomers to catch a glimpse.

» Two Little-Known Facts About The Large Hadron Collider

jtotheizzoe:

  1. If the beam went off course, it carries enough energy to burn through six feet of solid copper.
  2. The amount of energy in a single LHC beam is still less than the energy present in the amount of chocolate that two Swiss people eat every year.

More facts about how much power is at the LHC here. And to answer that question you’re asking, here’s some opinions on what would happen if you stuck your hand in it. A Soviet engineer actually did that once, only he used his head.

npr: Dark Matter Study: A Disturbance In The Force? There are theories with a small “t” and theories with a capital “T.” For the last two decades the concept that most stuff in the universe comes in an invisible form called Dark Matter has grown into the second kind. It’s a Theory or a paradigm with lots of overlapping strands of evidence coming together to form a tightly woven fabric. Much of modern astronomy relies on the fabric of Dark Matter for a coherent account of the universe and its history. It’s not easy to overturn Theories because their reach is so wide. It does happen however and, when it does, there are usually key experiments that get the ball rolling. For Dark Matter, it just may be possible that one of those experiments has made its first public appearance. This week a team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) released a study of stellar motions in the local volume of the Milky Way, our galaxy. Based on the way these stars moved (the way gravity pulled them into motion), the scientists hoped to infer the presence of Dark Matter. They did not find any. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. -Adam Frank (Photo credit: L. Calçada/ESO)

start-a-fire: fyeah-seacreatures: Immortal Jellyfish. By: h16nakaji Turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish, is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage. It does this through the cell development process of trans-differentiation. Cell transdifferentiation is when the jellyfish “alters the differentiated state of the cell and transforms it into a new cell”. In this process the medusa of the immortal jellyfish is transformed into the polyps of a new polyp colony. First, the umbrella reverts itself and then the tentacles and mesoglea get resorbed. The reverted medusa then attaches itself to the substrate by the end that had been at the opposite end of the umbrella and starts giving rise to new polyps to form the new colony. Theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal.  Someone was telling me about this once and their explanation was horrifying and struck a terrible fear of jellyfish in me.

snarkinthewater: Adam Savage dipping his fingers into a pot of molten lead. Immediately prior to submerging his fingers in the lead, he wet them with water, which will form a thin protective layer of water vapor on contact with the lead, which was heated to 850 degrees Fahrenheit. This is known as the Leidenfrost effect.

quantumaniac: Everyday Physics