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Explore Density with your kids!
#Science #ScienceSunday #ScienceExperiment #Homeschool #Learning #Education
#Science #ScienceSunday #ScienceExperiment #Homeschool #Learning #Education
The Rainbow Jar Experiment - Blooming Brilliant
bloomingbrilliant.net
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So cool
Some Microbial Art for your #ScienceSunday amusement!
[curated by +Allison Sekuler and +Robby Bowles]
The artist that created them is Professor +Eshel Ben-Jacob, from the Tel-Aviv University. From his website* you can get the following statement about the meaning and importance of his research and artwork:
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE ART
These images are part of a series of remarkable patterns that bacteria form when grown in a petri dish. While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication. These selfsame strategies are used by the bacteria in their struggle to defeat our best antibiotics. Thus, if we understand the mechanisms behind the patterns, we can learn how to outsmart the bacteria - for example, by tampering with their communication - in our ongoing battle for our health.
The images come from the laboratory of Prof Eshel Ben-Jacob, of the Tel-Aviv University (http://star.tau.ac.il/~inon/baccyber0.html.) as part of a collaboration with Prof. Herbert Levine of UCSDs National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (http://ctbp.ucsd.edu). The goal of this research is to unravel the adaptation secrets enabling bacterial survival against all odds. Their efforts build upon progress in two disparate fields - pattern formation in complex dynamical systems and the molecular biology and biophysics of bacteria.
In a sense, the strikingly beautiful organization of the pattern reflects the underlying social intelligence of the bacteria. The once controversial idea that bacteria cooperate to solve challenges has become commonplace, with the discovery of specific channels of communication between the cells and specific mechanisms facilitating the exchange of genetic information.
Retrospectively, these capabilities should not have been seen as so surprising, as bacteria set the stage for all life on Earth and indeed invented most of the processes of biology. As we try to stay ahead of the disease-causing varieties of these versatile creatures, we must use our own intelligence to understand them.
These images remind us never to underestimate our opponent.
*here: http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/gallery.html
Images taken from here: http://www.microbialart.com/galleries/ben-jacob/#full-screen
[curated by +Allison Sekuler and +Robby Bowles]
The artist that created them is Professor +Eshel Ben-Jacob, from the Tel-Aviv University. From his website* you can get the following statement about the meaning and importance of his research and artwork:
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE ART
These images are part of a series of remarkable patterns that bacteria form when grown in a petri dish. While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication. These selfsame strategies are used by the bacteria in their struggle to defeat our best antibiotics. Thus, if we understand the mechanisms behind the patterns, we can learn how to outsmart the bacteria - for example, by tampering with their communication - in our ongoing battle for our health.
The images come from the laboratory of Prof Eshel Ben-Jacob, of the Tel-Aviv University (http://star.tau.ac.il/~inon/baccyber0.html.) as part of a collaboration with Prof. Herbert Levine of UCSDs National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (http://ctbp.ucsd.edu). The goal of this research is to unravel the adaptation secrets enabling bacterial survival against all odds. Their efforts build upon progress in two disparate fields - pattern formation in complex dynamical systems and the molecular biology and biophysics of bacteria.
In a sense, the strikingly beautiful organization of the pattern reflects the underlying social intelligence of the bacteria. The once controversial idea that bacteria cooperate to solve challenges has become commonplace, with the discovery of specific channels of communication between the cells and specific mechanisms facilitating the exchange of genetic information.
Retrospectively, these capabilities should not have been seen as so surprising, as bacteria set the stage for all life on Earth and indeed invented most of the processes of biology. As we try to stay ahead of the disease-causing varieties of these versatile creatures, we must use our own intelligence to understand them.
These images remind us never to underestimate our opponent.
*here: http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/gallery.html
Images taken from here: http://www.microbialart.com/galleries/ben-jacob/#full-screen
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›
2012-02-05 (11 photos)
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The Expanding Universe.. and some embarrassing calculations! : This is a beautifully written article in Ars Technica, which explains the role of the cosmological constant, and more particularly how physicists are at a loss to explain absurd results when taking this as a constant. More particularly, it's a really excellent exposition on the basics.
Article Extract: The vacuum of space isn't actually "empty"; it teems with particles that pop in and out of existence, giving the vacuum an energy of its own. But here's an embarrassing fact about that energy: it predicts that the cosmological constant (which provides a measure of the rate of the expansion of the Universe) should be 10^120 times larger than we think it actually is.
When Einstein was first formulating a new theory of gravity, his solutions predicted that the Universe was expanding. At the time, the Universe was widely regarded to be static, so Einstein added a constant that counteracted the expansion and kept the Universe unchanging. Everyone rejoiced—electromagnetism, space, time, and gravity could all live together in harmony. Later, Edwin Hubble took advantage of a new generation of telescopes to measure the speed at which distant galaxies were moving. He found that the further away a galaxy was, the faster away from us it was moving. The conclusion was inescapable: the Universe was expanding. Everyone chuckled over Einstein's big goof.
Scientists now can measure the rate at which the Universe expands. Turns out it's not a constant; every day, the Universe expands a bit faster than it did the day before. Inflation, it seems, is a physical as well as an economic universal, and Einstein's cosmological constant was back (albeit in altered form).
Funnily enough, it wouldn't have mattered whether the new cosmological constant was positive, negative, or zero—problems were going to arise. This is because Einstein's work had also established that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin. Since mass causes space and time to warp, so too should energy. So why doesn't the vacuum energy bend space and time? When physicists bolt the quantum vacuum energy on to general relativity, they get absurd results unless some kind of correction factor (to the tune of 10^120) is carefully added to counteract the vacuum. This fine-tuning bothers people because there is simply no way to obtain these numbers naturally.
Enter the new work by Nemanja Kaloper (UC-Davis) and Antonio Padilla (University of Nottingham), who have proposed a modification to general relativity that naturally generates a small cosmological constant. According to the researchers, the cosmological constant should be treated as the average of the vacuum contribution over all space and time. When this happens, the local vacuum energy contributions appear twice in the equations with opposite signs. No matter what energy the vacuum has right now, it can't bend space and time—think of it as pushing with one hand and pulling with the other.
Article Link: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/getting-the-math-of-the-universe-to-cancel-out/
Research paper: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.091304
More about Vacuum state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_state
The cosmological constant: http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-biggest-blunder-turns.html
Wikipedia link on the Cosmological constant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant
NASA link: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_accel.html
Pics courtesy and detail: Pic on right: from http://complex.elte.hu/astro.html ( The best 3 dimensional map of the Universe. The above animation is based on the cca. 5 million galaxies in the SDSS Early Data Release. There is no visible structure in the distribution of the most distant quasars (white dots) but galaxies (yellow and green dots) are clustered on a foam-like structure. The slices are not physical, they are caused by the survey geometry ) Pic on left: From main article in http://arstechnica.com (Jim Brau, University of Oregon).
#science #sciencesunday #scienceeveryday #inflation
Article Extract: The vacuum of space isn't actually "empty"; it teems with particles that pop in and out of existence, giving the vacuum an energy of its own. But here's an embarrassing fact about that energy: it predicts that the cosmological constant (which provides a measure of the rate of the expansion of the Universe) should be 10^120 times larger than we think it actually is.
When Einstein was first formulating a new theory of gravity, his solutions predicted that the Universe was expanding. At the time, the Universe was widely regarded to be static, so Einstein added a constant that counteracted the expansion and kept the Universe unchanging. Everyone rejoiced—electromagnetism, space, time, and gravity could all live together in harmony. Later, Edwin Hubble took advantage of a new generation of telescopes to measure the speed at which distant galaxies were moving. He found that the further away a galaxy was, the faster away from us it was moving. The conclusion was inescapable: the Universe was expanding. Everyone chuckled over Einstein's big goof.
Scientists now can measure the rate at which the Universe expands. Turns out it's not a constant; every day, the Universe expands a bit faster than it did the day before. Inflation, it seems, is a physical as well as an economic universal, and Einstein's cosmological constant was back (albeit in altered form).
Funnily enough, it wouldn't have mattered whether the new cosmological constant was positive, negative, or zero—problems were going to arise. This is because Einstein's work had also established that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin. Since mass causes space and time to warp, so too should energy. So why doesn't the vacuum energy bend space and time? When physicists bolt the quantum vacuum energy on to general relativity, they get absurd results unless some kind of correction factor (to the tune of 10^120) is carefully added to counteract the vacuum. This fine-tuning bothers people because there is simply no way to obtain these numbers naturally.
Enter the new work by Nemanja Kaloper (UC-Davis) and Antonio Padilla (University of Nottingham), who have proposed a modification to general relativity that naturally generates a small cosmological constant. According to the researchers, the cosmological constant should be treated as the average of the vacuum contribution over all space and time. When this happens, the local vacuum energy contributions appear twice in the equations with opposite signs. No matter what energy the vacuum has right now, it can't bend space and time—think of it as pushing with one hand and pulling with the other.
Article Link: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/getting-the-math-of-the-universe-to-cancel-out/
Research paper: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.091304
More about Vacuum state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_state
The cosmological constant: http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-biggest-blunder-turns.html
Wikipedia link on the Cosmological constant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant
NASA link: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_accel.html
Pics courtesy and detail: Pic on right: from http://complex.elte.hu/astro.html ( The best 3 dimensional map of the Universe. The above animation is based on the cca. 5 million galaxies in the SDSS Early Data Release. There is no visible structure in the distribution of the most distant quasars (white dots) but galaxies (yellow and green dots) are clustered on a foam-like structure. The slices are not physical, they are caused by the survey geometry ) Pic on left: From main article in http://arstechnica.com (Jim Brau, University of Oregon).
#science #sciencesunday #scienceeveryday #inflation
2014-03-22
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Art or Science?
Are these pastel fractals the creation of an avant garde artist from some postmodern cubism movement? You may be surprised to learn that these are high resolution images of bacterial populations growing on a petri dish!
◈ Bacterial Art: First, the familiar E. coli bacteria were genetically marked with differently colored fluorescent proteins before mixing together on an agar plate. Each rod-shaped bacterium grows by division to give a single file of cells that is sensitive to small mechanical forces from neighboring cells pushing and jostling against each other. The line of cells buckles in a way that is predicted by fractal mathematics. As the bacteria grow to form a confluent film, jagged boundaries emerge between differently colored clonal lines. Zooming in, the patterns are self-similar, repeating at scales from millimeters to micrometers! Mutant bacteria that form spherical cells don't produce these fractal patterns.
◈ Form and Function: What do these beautiful images teach us? They help us understand how patterning happens on a nanoscale. In synthetic biology the goal is to engineer populations of cells to produce spatial patterns, synchronized signals and predictable behavior that can be simulated using simple, mathematically coded rules.
◈ Life Imitates Art? Oscar Wilde reversed the conventional when he claimed that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. What do you think he meant by this? It seems to me that this bacterial fractal "art" perfectly illustrates John Berger's definition of Cubism: "The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: The diagram being a visible symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures."
Reference (and more beautiful images): http://data.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/Haseloff/resources/LabPapers/Rudge2013.pdf
#ScienceSunday
Are these pastel fractals the creation of an avant garde artist from some postmodern cubism movement? You may be surprised to learn that these are high resolution images of bacterial populations growing on a petri dish!
◈ Bacterial Art: First, the familiar E. coli bacteria were genetically marked with differently colored fluorescent proteins before mixing together on an agar plate. Each rod-shaped bacterium grows by division to give a single file of cells that is sensitive to small mechanical forces from neighboring cells pushing and jostling against each other. The line of cells buckles in a way that is predicted by fractal mathematics. As the bacteria grow to form a confluent film, jagged boundaries emerge between differently colored clonal lines. Zooming in, the patterns are self-similar, repeating at scales from millimeters to micrometers! Mutant bacteria that form spherical cells don't produce these fractal patterns.
◈ Form and Function: What do these beautiful images teach us? They help us understand how patterning happens on a nanoscale. In synthetic biology the goal is to engineer populations of cells to produce spatial patterns, synchronized signals and predictable behavior that can be simulated using simple, mathematically coded rules.
◈ Life Imitates Art? Oscar Wilde reversed the conventional when he claimed that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. What do you think he meant by this? It seems to me that this bacterial fractal "art" perfectly illustrates John Berger's definition of Cubism: "The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: The diagram being a visible symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures."
Reference (and more beautiful images): http://data.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/Haseloff/resources/LabPapers/Rudge2013.pdf
#ScienceSunday
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I’m over here pondering any connection between biomimicry & psychology. Mhm.
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“We’ve already seen an explosion in the relationship between understanding biology using information sciences and then developing ideas in information sciences based on biological insight,” he says. “I think there’s still a lot of room there to play with computer science and biology by learning from biological systems.”
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“We’ve already seen an explosion in the relationship between understanding biology using information sciences and then developing ideas in information sciences based on biological insight,” he says. “I think there’s still a lot of room there to play with computer science and biology by learning from biological systems.”
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The power of the swarm
While this article does not specifically speak about it, swarm intelligence is a fascinating study of how bees decide to carry out tasks.
Ants and bees aren’t just informing energy grids. “Some of the early successes in biomimicry already have come from millions of dollars saved by mimicking how an ant communicates information and translating that into how you send server packets over the Web or how you pick a route for your trucks to drive or something like that,” McGee says.
There’s plenty more to learn; researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a computer network security system based on the swarm intelligence ants use to defend their hills, and going all the way back to 2007 researchers inspired by honeybee communications built a system that lets networks optimize performance by taking advantage of idle servers during periods of high demand. But McGee thinks we’ve just scratched the surface of what biology can do for IT.
“We’ve already seen an explosion in the relationship between understanding biology using information sciences and then developing ideas in information sciences based on biological insight,” he says. “I think there’s still a lot of room there to play with computer science and biology by learning from biological systems.”
#biomimicry #science #scienceeveryday #sciencesunday
While this article does not specifically speak about it, swarm intelligence is a fascinating study of how bees decide to carry out tasks.
Ants and bees aren’t just informing energy grids. “Some of the early successes in biomimicry already have come from millions of dollars saved by mimicking how an ant communicates information and translating that into how you send server packets over the Web or how you pick a route for your trucks to drive or something like that,” McGee says.
There’s plenty more to learn; researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a computer network security system based on the swarm intelligence ants use to defend their hills, and going all the way back to 2007 researchers inspired by honeybee communications built a system that lets networks optimize performance by taking advantage of idle servers during periods of high demand. But McGee thinks we’ve just scratched the surface of what biology can do for IT.
“We’ve already seen an explosion in the relationship between understanding biology using information sciences and then developing ideas in information sciences based on biological insight,” he says. “I think there’s still a lot of room there to play with computer science and biology by learning from biological systems.”
#biomimicry #science #scienceeveryday #sciencesunday
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