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They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.

lynnafred

They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.

So its that easy huh

Of course it is

Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.

Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)

Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).

What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….

Nobody else has any excuse.

#materials science

alibrariangoestoikea

I was working with an item today that just utterly flabbergasted a part of me (the other was deeply frustrated with the catalogue record AS SOMEONE APPARENTLY THOUGHT IT WAS PRINTED ON SILK, coming back to that in a minute) … but ANYWAYS … said item is a replica of a medieval manuscript prayer book THAT IS ENTIRELY WOVEN out of grey and black silk … WOVEN … text, images, intricate grey scale, WOVEN … NOT PRINTED …

And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …

Anyways …

alibrariangoestoikea

OKS I’ve since calmed down and found out that the reason they used “printed” is because it is essentially printed by a computer … in a weird way; when I import the record, I’m just gonna take that note out …

BUT this is the item btw

WOVEN! WOVEN ON A LOOM using f*ckin’ punch cards!

vinceaddams

This portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard was also woven with punch cards in 1839!

sepdet

Every once in a while someone rediscovers that the relationship between Jacquard Looms and modern computers, an intuitive leap originally made by mathematician Ada Lovelace while writing an extensive discussion of Babbage’s calculating machine.

“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

– Ada Lovelace, 1843

Babbage was using it to add numbers. Lovelace went further and suggested that anything one could represented by numbers, such as music, could then be manipulated, transformed and generated (“woven”) according to equations, algorithms and steps programmed in by punchcards in the same way the looms made repeating patterns.

!20 years later, the computers in the Apollo spacecraft that took astronauts to the moon were given “rope-core memory”: fabric-like networks of wire hand-woven by women recruited from textile factories, because it was the most information-dense and durable way they had to store information and computer instructions (far higher density than transistors) at the time.

it was never used again, but it’s a nice link back to the technology which made that book, eh?

#computing

materialsscienceandengineering

Engineers develop salty gel that could harvest water from desert air

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions. As the material absorbs water vapor, it can swell to make room for more moisture. Even in very dry conditions, with 30% relative humidity, the material can pull vapor from the air and hold in the moisture without leaking. The water could then be heated and condensed, then collected as ultra-pure water. The transparent, rubbery material is made from hydrogel, a naturally absorbent material that is also used in disposable diapers. The team enhanced the hydrogel's absorbency by infusing it with lithium chloride—a type of salt that is known to be a powerful dessicant. The researchers found they could infuse the hydrogel with more salt than was possible in previous studies. As a result, they observed that the salt-loaded gel absorbed and retained an unprecedented amount of moisture, across a range of humidity levels, including very dry conditions that have limited other material designs.

mindblowingscience

Scientists have developed a specially engineered biochip that uses electricity to heal wounds up to three times faster than normal.

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.”

#biology #medicine

babyanimalgifs

This cute platypus

(via)

big-ass-magnet

I fully understand why westerners thought the platypus was a hoax at first. I’m looking at a real live one moving around and it STILL looks fake.

bogleech

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.

special-lucky-chosen-one

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

mariaalenkoshepard

That beak looks fucking glued on

crystaltoa

AND it glows in the dark now too.

( well, ok glows under UV light but STILL. It has no reason to)

#biology

libraford

I will never stop saying this:

Natural remedies have side effects, too.

They are not less dangerous because they are natural.

You still need to consider dosage.

You still need to consider interactions with medications and other things you're taking.

Some of them will not work for you.

You HAVE to treat them with the SAME caution as you would a prescription.

libraford

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!

libraford

Yall asking.

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.

zhooniyaa-waagosh

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.

squeeful

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

assassinationtipsforladies

St. John's Wort interacts with...... Honestly it seems like everything. Always check drug interactions, but especially check St. John's Wort

#even water is a poison if you drink enough of it #chemistry

vaguegrant

A new scientific finding has uncovered why we get more viral colds, flu and Covid in winter and during cold snaps.

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.)

Oh, and #knitblr? This is your time to shine.

katiekeysburg

This is tragic news because it means my mother was RIGHT

WEAR A SCARF

#biology #medicine

dollsahoy

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

lydiardbell

The mildest example of what OP's talking about in Dunedin, Aotearoa:

This is just with the streetlamp equivalent of using lampshades. Imagine what truly directional city lights could achieve?

buzzcut-butch-deactivated202403

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.

#light polution #astronomy #energy

literallymechanical

How do you test the purity/look for structural defects in CNTs? SEM?

Short answer: Yes, among other things.

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:

(Source)

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:

(Source)

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.

(Source: High-strength carbon nanotube fibers by twist-induced self-strengthening)

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.

(source)

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.

(source)

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!

Happily, this isn't nanotubes.

(source)

It's Rimicaris exoculata, a deep-sea shrimp that lives on hydrothermal vents and builds itself a little shell of iron oxide. Isn't that fun?

#chemistry #nanotech

Since its inception, chemotherapy has proven to be a valuable tool in treating many kinds of cancers, but it has a significant drawback. In

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.

#biology #medicine #cancer #biotechnology

academicssay

‪The importance of stupidity in scientific research | http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771‬

anyskin

“Mikiphone” - portable pocket gramophone. Swiss made 1924

exquisitedoom

Watch a black hole tear a star to bits in epic new animation

#gif #astronomy

soy-celeste-deactivated20230905

Her name is Katalin Karikó. Hungarian. Daughter of a butcher. Her thesis work became the basis of the mRNA vaccine technology. Read the article here.

rat-tail-butch

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.”

jheselbraum

Everyone say thank you to Doctor Kariko since she literally saved all our lives

fierceawakening

Thank you, Dr. Kariko, and also you are adorable.

#medicine #vaccines

injuries-in-dust

Source: Instagram

pissbunn

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bogleech

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.

totallynotagentphilcoulson

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

melodyofthevoid

artimu5-is-odd

eldritchscholar

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.

benegesserwitch

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.

darkersolstice

@we-are-threadmage

systlin

Someone port Doom to a blanket

rolypolywardrobe

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

isnerdy-deactivated20190101

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.

dollsahoy

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

butts-for-days

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

costumersupportdept

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)

synebluetoo

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.

moiraecrochet

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.

the-fibre-stuff

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.

swords-n-spindles

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

iplaywithstring

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).

#programming

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