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Schlieren image of shock waves created by a T-38C in supersonic flight captured by using the sun’s edge as a light source and then processed using NASA-developed code.
Image Credit: NASA
Source: Supersonic Shock Waves of a T-38C Aircraft
Collectives, Cássio Vasconcellos
Seven Years of Tracking the Solar Cycle
Our sun is ever-changing, and a satellite called the Solar Dynamics Observatory has a front-row seat.
On February 11, 2010, we launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory, also known as SDO. SDO keeps a constant eye on the sun, helping us track everything from sunspots to solar flares to other types of space weather that can have an impact on Earth.
After seven years in space, SDO has had a chance to do what few other satellites have been able to do – watch the sun for the majority of a solar cycle in 11 types of light.
The sun’s activity rises and falls in a pattern that lasts about 11 years on average. This is called the solar cycle.
Solar activity can influence Earth. For instance, it’s behind one of Earth’s most dazzling natural events – the aurora.
One of the most common triggers of the aurora is a type of space weather called a coronal mass ejection, which is a billion-ton cloud of magnetic solar material expelled into space at around a million miles an hour.
When these clouds collide with Earth’s magnetic field, they can rattle it, sending particles down into the atmosphere and triggering the auroras. These events can also cause satellite damage and power grid strain in extreme cases.
The sun is in a declining activity phase, so coronal mass ejections will be less common over the next few years, as will another one of the main indicators of solar activity – sunspots.
Sunspots are created by twisted knots of magnetic field. Solar material in these tangled regions is slightly cooler than the surrounding areas, making them appear dark in visible light.
The tangled magnetic field that creates sunspots also causes most solar activity, so more sunspots means more solar activity, and vice versa. Humans have been able to track the solar cycle by counting sunspots since the 17th century.
Image: Houghton Library, Harvard University, *IC6.G1333.613ia
The peak of the sun’s activity for this cycle, called solar maximum, was in 2014.
Now, we’re heading towards the lowest solar activity for this solar cycle, also known as solar minimum. As solar activity declines, the number of sunspots decreases. We sometimes go several days without a single visible sunspot.
But there’s much more to the story than sunspots – SDO also watches the sun in a type of light called extreme ultraviolet. This type of light is invisible to human eyes and is blocked by our atmosphere, so we can only see the sun this way with satellites.
Extreme ultraviolet light reveals different layers of the sun’s atmosphere, helping scientists connect the dots between the sunspots that appear in visible light and the space weather that impacts us here on Earth.
SDO keeps an eye on the sun 24/7, and you can see near real-time images of the sun in 11 types of light at sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data.
World’s Quietest Room
Scientists at Orfield Labs have created “the world’s quietest room,” a room that has a Guinness world record-holding -9 decibels as compared to the usual 30 decibels for quiet spaces. These scientists study the effects of the room on people as well. Every area of the anechoic room absorbs sound so completely that subjects have been able to hear their own organs and even hallucinate. Most are so discomfited by the room that one person has only been able to stay in there for forty-five minutes. The room is normally used to test the sound level of products, such as lighting.
Dr. Ian Crozier survived Ebola, only to have his normally blue left eye turn green because of inflammation. Though the rest of his body, including his tears, was Ebola-free, his eye was teeming with the virus.
It turns out Ebola can hide out in eyes, testicles, the uterus, the spine.
“It presents a huge challenge, because how do we get enough antivirals into these sites?” says Ilhem Messaoudi, a viral immunologist and professor of biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside, who is studying how the virus works in the human body. “How do we eradicate those reservoirs? And why do some people end up developing these reservoirs and other people don’t?”
Read the full story here.
Image credit: Emory Eye Center
Neurogastronomy 101: The Science of Taste Perception
[…]To truly comprehend what neurogastronomy is about, it’s important to understand the basics of how we physiologically perceive taste. Not surprisingly, it all begins with our mouths and ends with our brain.
When you chew on a blueberry, enzymes in your saliva break down the fruit. Fragments of the gnawed blueberry will come in contact with your tongue’s papillae — the thousands of wart-like bumps under the mucous membrane of the tongue. Each papillae has anywhere from 50 to 100 taste buds, which have chemical receptors that identify the five basic tastes: bitter, sweet, salt, sour, and umami. The papillae also have many sensory cells that recognize and analyze the morsels in your mouth, and transmit the information to your brain by activating nerve cells.
This, on a macro level, explains how we go from popping a blueberry in our mouth to recognizing whether it is sweet or sour. The micro level is far more multifaceted, as many other parts of our body play a role in how we perceive taste, from our olfactory senses to the sensation of touch. Understanding the complex brain processes that help us grasp why, what, and how we eat is, simply put, the exploration of neurogastronomy.
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Perception is a beautiful thing
These are microscopic balls of tin, imaged under scanning electron microscope (SEM) at 2500x (about 25x more magnification than the strongest optical microscope can manage). These very cool-looking tin samples are good for looking at when you’re trying to calibrate the SEM to produce the best images possible - since the spheres come in all different sizes, you can start with the large spheres for rough calibration, since the tiny spheres are invisible if the microscope isn’t properly calibrated. In the UCSD cleanrooms we used carbon tape and specks of dust for calibration, because they’re almost always part of our sample anyways, so we don’t have to change between the calibration sample and the sample we’re interested in - usually our SEM time slots are short, and returning the system to vacuum between samples takes too much time. But I can see how the spheres would be very nice, particularly for detecting astigmatism, an effect that would stretch the spheres into little footballs. Tin Balls by FEI Company Via Flickr: Image of tin balls, which are used to calibrate scanning electron microscopes (SEMs). The image was taken at a tilt of 57 degrees. Courtesy of Mr. Daniel Oldfield , RMIT University Image Details Instrument used: Verios Magnification: 2500X Horizontal Field Width: 170um Voltage: 10kV Spot: 6.3pA Working Distance: 4.0 Detector: SE
Non-Newtonian fluids are capable of all kinds of counter-intuitive behaviors. The animations above demonstrate one of them: the tubeless or open siphon. Once the effect is triggered by removing some of the liquid, the fluid quickly pours itself out of the beaker. This is possible thanks to the polymers in the liquid. The falling liquid pulls on the fluid left behind in the beaker, which stretches the polymers in the fluid. When stretched, the polymers provide internal tension that opposes the extensional force being applied. This keeps the fluid in the beaker from simply detaching from the falling liquid. Instead, it flows up and over the side against the force of gravity, behaving rather more like a chain than a fluid! (Image credit: Ewoldt Research Group, source)
There are only 35 different types of Snowflakes!
Unlike popular belief that there exists an infinite number of shapes that snowflakes can occur in, there are only 35! Albeit no snowflake is the same from an atomic standpoint, these are the 35 shapes of snowflakes which have been documented thus far to occur in nature.
Squid Skin Is Way Weirder Than You Ever Imagined
Squid have tiny organs in their skin called chromatophores. When these organs expand, they reveal more color pigment. When they contract, the color shrinks.
Via HuffPost Science
Kiss and Tell
The image above, courtesy of Steve Schmeissner, is a wavy field of false-color fusobacterium embedded in a matrix of glycoprotein, a ubiquitous and multi-purpose type of protein that has a carbohydrate attached to it, i.e. a glycan or sugar.
More simply, it’s dental plaque.
We note this only in the context of a new study published in American Anthropologist that observes that romantic kissing isn’t something everybody does or even likes. In fact, the researchers note that in more than half of the cultures surveyed (54 percent), locking lips in romance isn’t done.
There are likely a variety of cultural reasons for why this is so, but as study author William Jankowiak wryly notes in an NPR story: “Some of these people never go to the dentist.” To wit: In an unrelated but relevant study last year, researchers found that a passionate kiss lasting more than 10 seconds exchanges about 80 million bacteria between participants.
To many people, that sounds disgusting. Take a peek at this Daily Mail story and you might agree.
On the other hand, it can’t be any worse than kissing your dog.
Robot valet parks cars in German airport
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Materials can be described as being on a spectrum from a perfectly ordered crystal to a perfectly disordered anticrystal.
“Just as a perfect crystal has very well defined properties, the anticrystal has well defined properties, and we can think of real materials as being somewhere in between the two.”
Source: Consider the ‘anticrystal’ (Phys.org)
The Science of Happiness: What data & biology reveal about our mood
While true happiness may have a different definition to each of us, science can give us a glimpse at the underlying biological factors behind happiness. From the food we eat to room temperature, there are thousands of factors that play a role in how our brains work and the moods that we are in. Understanding these factors can be helpful in achieving lasting happiness.
Infographic by Webpage FX
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