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POPSArtforms of Nature The nineteen century German biologist Ernst Haeckel is famous for his fantastically illustrated book Artforms of Nature. The copyright for this book from 1904 has now expired and thanks to Wikimedia Commons it is available for everyone to appreciate. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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POPS Design and Mathematics in Nature The findings of math among nature are endless; the possibilities for future innovations prove to be the same! http://www.abc.net.au/science/photos/mathsinnature/
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POPSDown the throat of a dying star "Nebulae like this look like gigantic solid objects, but in fact a dense one would still be considered a hard vacuum in the laboratory. There might be something like 10,000 or even 100,000 atoms in a cubic centimeter of nebular gas, but compare that to the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in air at sea level!"
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POPSRare Two-Toned Lobster Caught This is a fascinating example of a rarely-seen genetic mutation affecting pigmentation occurring during the first or second cell-division of the zygote's development, where bilateral symmetry is determined. The aquarium has received only three two-toned lobsters in 35 years, they note, and the odds of finding one that's exactly half and half is about 1 in 50 million.
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POPSPhysicists investigate how time moves forward This provides an orientation, or arrow of time, and it is generally believed that all other time asymmetries, such as our sense that future and past are different, are a direct consequence of this thermodynamic arrow.” In their study, Feng and Crooks have developed a method to accurately measure “time asymmetry” (which refers to our intuitive concept of time, that the past differs from the future, in contrast with time symmetry, where there is no distinction between past and future). They began by investigating the increase in energy dissipation, or entropy, in various arrangements. While time blatantly moves forward in the macroscopic world, the direction of time becomes confusing on the scale of a single molecule
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POPSHigh-speed rail: Can it work in the US? I am all for ditching vehicles and going with rail, especially high-speed rail. Turn the roadways into bike paths, put trainis in the mix and those that want cars, use the ZipCar or carsharing model. Low-cost rentals are another option. Raise taxes very high on autos that are not electric or other renewable energy. Not only can new jobs be created across the contry, but a whole different style of living. Greener earth as we drop all the carbon emmissons from vehicles, vehicle building, etc. This will of course never work totally, since you will have all the car manufacturerer, car insurance companies and the list of others who's lively hoods depend on the vehicle.
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POPSbreaking symmetry in the strong force the supercomputer at the High Energy Accelerator Research Org. (KEK) in Tsukuba- was used to verify the small mass of the pion within the fundamental theory of quantum chromodynamics
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POPSA Sight To Behold "They whisper the names together, they laugh together, two girls, one team, running with such symmetry it eventually becomes impossible to tell who is guiding whom."
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POPSThe Biology Of Beauty Looking Good Is A Universal Human Obsession. How Do We Perceive Physical Beauty, And Why Do We Place So Much Stock In It? Scientists Are Now Taking Those Questions Seriously, And Gaining Surprising Insights
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POPSA beautiful theory of everything You won't understand this TED video but I guarantee you will enjoy it. The beauty of the pictorial symmetry legitimizes the fantastic theory. If you have got twenty minutes to spare click on the ted URL
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POPS248-Dimensional Mathematical Map Calculated "The calculation was known to be possible in principle, but it was thought to be hopeless in practice," says Adams. "But four years ago a group of us said let's really try to do it. We're pretty sure we've got it right, but it's hard to be 100% sure." "It's probably one of the most complicated pure mathematical calculations anyone's ever done," says Stewart. "Each entry is difficult to calculate — it's amazing they managed to do this."
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POPSDiscovery Of 'Broken Symmetry' At Subatomic Level Earns 2008 Nobel Prize In Physics
It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The Model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory. The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied, differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics expe
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POPS"Bees Can Count" continues: Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe. Next, they mixed things up on the bees: they varied the spacing of the stripes, and even replaced stripes with unfamiliar markers. The insects consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former reward site, demonstrating that they could count, up to four. The studies burnish the impressive list of honeybees' known cognitive abilities, all achieved with a brain the size of a sand grain. The studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition.
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