Science Hack Day is coming to your city! And I need your help: http://arielwaldman.com/2013/03/21/science-hack-day-is-coming-to-your-city/ .
Let’s get excited and make future-y science-y things together!
My what a lovely Space Oddity you are. Artist Jenn Mann makes these awesome LED Space Helmets. She made the first one as part of a Major Tom costume for a David-Bowie-themed party. And now she makes them for other aspiring astronauts:
This astronaut helmet has a visor that opens and closes all the way so you can talk to other people or say “brb, going into space.” LEDs are arranged around the inside back of the helmet so it glows from the inside. The back of the helmet is painted solid white.
The visor pivots (they hold the visor to the helmet) are custom-designed and can be printed in one of several different day-glo colors! Currently available are fluorescent yellow, fluorescent green, and fluorescent orange. They’re UV-reactive, so they actually fluoresce when the LEDs are blue. The acrylic helmet is lightweight, but comes with a bit of padding for contact points on your shoulders and the back of your head.
LEDs on the inside light up in 16 different colors. Includes a remote control to change LED color. Comes with a 12V battery pack that lasts for hours and hours (more than 8h in my experience).
The helmets are available on a made-to-order basis via Jenn’s Etsy shop, SimpleAsPi.
[via Technabob]
(via itsfullofstars)
This photographer was attacked by a polar bear while shooting a documentary for the BBC in Norway!
Fortunately, he was in a pod that let him see out.
You can now add polar bear selfie to your photo bucket list.
Photographer Captures What a Polar Bear Attack Looks Like
via Reddit
Earthworms that shit quantum technology!
“When things get small–like millionths-of-an-inch small–they get very interesting. The ordinary rules of physics we’re used to fade back as the oddness of quantum physics looms large. Engineers have taken advantage of this fact by fashioning tiny bits of matter, known as quantum dots, that behave in all sorts of useful ways. For example, quantum dots made from cadmium telluride will respond to ultraviolet light by giving off a flash of visible light–the color depending on their size. If you attach certain molecules to cadmium telluride quantum dots, they will latch onto certain targets, making it possible to detect trace amounts of substances ranging from pesticides to cancer cells.”
“As versatile as cadmium telluride quantum dots are, however, they’re not easy to make. It’s especially tedious to fashion them so that they’re not toxic to living cells, since both cadmium and tellurium are nasty metals. In the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, a group of scientists at Kings College London offer a remarkably easy way to make them. In earthworms.”
(Read more: The Quantum Earthworm – Phenomena)
BILLIONS of years ago, a tiny cyanobacterium cracked open a water molecule - and let loose a poison that wrought death and destruction on an epic scale. The microbe had just perfected photosynthesis, a process that freed the oxygen trapped inside water and killed early Earth’s anaerobic inhabitants.
Now, for the first time, geologists have found evidence of the crucial evolutionary stage just before cyanobacteria split water. The find offers a unique snapshot of the moment that made the modern world. With the advent of photosynthesis came an atmosphere dominated by oxygen and, ultimately, the diversity of life forms that we know today.
“This was the biggest change that ever occurred in the biosphere,” says Kevin Redding at Arizona State University in Tempe. “The extinction caused by oxygen was probably the largest ever seen, but at the same time animal life wouldn’t be possible without oxygen.”
Image source.
(via Captured: the moment photosynthesis changed the world)
(via scinerds)
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
