7x7

alltid öppet: McDonald’s franchises in Sweden (previously) install insect hotels in their signage and billboards

.xlsx: a concerning amount of scientific research contains data misinterpreted by spreadsheet software

glory to hong kong: protestors create their own anthem and rallying cry

metallic wood: researchers create a porous nickel-based matrix (see also) as strong as titanium though exceedingly light

schism: Pope Francis unafraid of conservative groups calling his leadership too progressive

k2-18β: astronomers detect water vapour in the atmosphere of a distant super earth that could harbour life as we know it

gravy train: bug-based pet food better for canine and feline companions and for the environment

unobtainium

Via Kottke, for this one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary year of the Periodic Table (previously here and here) we are directed to this comprehensive and engaging interactive article from Bloomberg magazine of the chemical elements, covering aspects from their discovery to how their availability informs geology, speculation and geopolitics. Much more to explore at the links above.

lyman-alpha forest

Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we are introduced to an interesting hypothesis that might account for some of the mysterious nature of dark matter and dark energy (previously here, here and here) by placing its existence in the Cosmos prior to the Big Bang, the rapid expansion of the Universe from a dimensionless point understood to be the genesis of at least all baryonic matter and luminous energy.
If dark matter structures were present as phantom underpinnings—unassailable yet not without some pull—it could explain the distribution of galaxies, perhaps some of the universal constants, the imbalance between matter and anti-matter plus its conspicuous lack of directly detectable evidence as a remnant of the Big Bang (evidenced only in possibly the Higgs’ boson), in the same sense as microwave background radiation. What do you think? What does it mean that the familiar Universe might have had something to grow into?  A rarity in the domain of theoretical physics (except when it’s not), there may be observations that could confirm or deny this speculation.

chryse planitia

Touching down on this day in 1976, the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Viking 1 became the second probe to successfully reach Mars after the Soviet Union’s Марс-3 five years earlier—beginning what would turn out to be a rather incredible six-year monitoring mission (sadly, the previous effort failed after seconds) with a battery of biological experiments to search for evidence of life.

Scientists were also able to use this distant beacon that’s sometimes occulted by the Sun to confirm the phenomenon of gravitational time dilation as predicted by the theory of General Relativity, the Sun’s gravity causing delays in transmission times. The Viking sent back this incredible panoramic vista (landing site in the title) shortly after its arrival.

les horrible cernettes

Sharing their initials with the future Large Hadron Collider and with office chart-topping hits such as “Antiworld,” “Mister Higgs” and “Strong Interaction” the trio, the Horrible CERN girls, became the first music group to have its image on the world wide web when this cover became one of the first images (originally as a GIF) posted there—the photograph taken on this day in 1992 and then scanned at the request of Tim Berners-Lee so he could publish them on some sort of information system he’d just invented. Sticking together for two decades before disbanding, the members got back together five years afterward for an anniversary reunion concert in Geneva in the summer of 2017.

système international d’unités

Since its inception, the metric or the SI system of weights and measures has striven to be universal for all people at all times, regardless of whether le Grand K (plus its archival cousins stored for reference around the world) was ever so slowly disintegrating.
Or whether interplanetary tradespeople were trying to reckon a payload whose gravity was a constantly changing factor, so having finally achieved shifting the definition away from some physical artefact and anchoring the weight to a natural constant is a big accomplishment.  Officially pegging the kilogram to the Planck constant—which also has redefined the meter—allows any sufficiently competent laboratory to derive the value uniformly and independently without the intervention of a governing body and occurs from today on, World Metrology Day, held on the anniversary of the signing of the Metre Convention of 1875, an international treaty with the aim of standardising measurements of length and distance.

die theorie des klanges

The ever brilliant Present /&/ Correct has unearthed a trove of cymatic diagrams (from the Greek for wave and hence the study of sound propagating through media or across a membrane) recorded by musician and acoustic pioneer Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (*1756 - †1827, previously) produced by examining the way granular materials responded to different sonic influences on vibrating plates. The resulting nodal patterns are collectively referred to as Chladni figures and his battery of research led directly to the conception of a musical instrument called a verrillion (Glasspiel) comprised of beer glasses tuned by volume of liquid and struck with mallets—inspiring a visiting Benjamin Franklin, besotted with the somber character of the sounds produced as ideal for sacred music to create his own glass harmonium.

tiny bubbles

The burst of effervescence, the formula and trial plus error that has accompanied the process of producing and perfecting fizzy drinks since the discovery of fermentation is an intersectional testament to human endeavour and appreciating the physics, cultivation and rigours of design that goes into harnessing the power and pressure of carbonation makes toasting all the more profound. 
Bubbles are a spontaneous nucleation of gas dissolved in the liquid, agitated to achieve atmospheric parity with what’s within the bottle and glass with what’s without, dithering at the surface due to what’s called the Marangoni effect, a convective property of surface tension that’s also responsible for ‘tears’ or ‘curtains’ of wine no matter how neatly a glass is poured. Visit Æon Magazine at the link above to indulge in more refreshing contemplation on matter, motion and behaviour.

pivot points

In collaboration with a construction research company, a design studio has produced a line of proof-of-concept prototype concrete elements that can be moved and arranged, despite weighing several tonnes, with ordinary human amounts of strength, through cleverly articulated rocking, rounded edges and balancing the centre of mass for each component. Once the forms are delivered, structures could be assembled in situ without heavy equipment. Watch video demonstrations at designboom at the link above.

event horizon

In a crowning achievement after two years of observations, ploughing through an incredible trove of data, using a globe-spanning network of telescopes, the team of astronomers behind the Event Horizon project (previously) have successfully imaged a composite picture of the radiant halo, the accretion disc of captured matter, around a black hole.
Data processing and transport—too much to transmit, the hard drives were collected and delivered via sneakernet, including from Antarctica, was the biggest time-consumer for this pioneering feat, which also dispels the doubts that Albert Einstein harboured for his own theoretical stellar career-path and tests Relativity bent to the extremes. The mass of six and a half billion suns has been ingested by the supermassive phenomenon at the centre of distant galaxy Messier 87, captured objects flung at nearly the speed of light before disappearing, never to escape. This silhouette of the infinite was actually the understudy, the project initially hoping to capture a snapshot of Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way, far closer but many magnitudes less massive and too faint to resolve.

kālchakra

We find ourselves indebted to Kottke once again for referring us back to this lovingly curated Wikipedia page that invites us to meditate on cosmological scales, whose events that science projects are portrayed in this excellently produced and scored video journey from John Boswell that takes us on a romp, exponentially faster, towards the end of time. Though the Earth doesn’t endure past the first three minutes do stay with the video to its conclusion and invocation.

fraunhofer-gesellschaft

Named in honour of nineteenth century entrepreneur, physicist and lens-crafter who pioneered stellar spectrometry Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer said to embody the goals and philosophy of association, the society for the advancement of applied science was founded in München on this day in 1949.
The largest research organisation in Europe, it has seventy-two campuses spread throughout Germany and an international presence with institutions in North and South America and Asia. The organisation is funded through the so-called Fraunhofer Model which sources thirty percent of its budget to state support and the rest in contracted fees for conducting research and development at the behest of industry and government commissions—notable projects including developing the mp3 file format and an algorithm to reassemble shredded documents.

mythos: an object lesson

Via Open Culture, we are treated with a series of short vignettes from animator Chris Guyot that communicate the timelessness and universality of Greek myths with no need for exposition but rather through digital geometric abstractions and a bit of resonant, billiard ball physics, recognising that memes are not only an expansive and wide-ranging format but loyal traveling companions as well. In case any of director Stephen Kelleher’s cautionary tales are not immediately familiar, there’s a helpful synopsis of each act at the link above.

equilateral-curve heptagon

As part of an ongoing series to recognise significant contributions to the sciences and humanities in UK coinage, the Royal Mint is issued a commem-orative fifty pence piece with a reverse honouring the late Professor Stephen Hawking, with the seven-sided coin depicting one of his most important formulations—aside that is from making astrophysics accessible and increasing general literacy and numeracy—that the conservation of information is not a constant and dissipates as does an aging black hole.

signal-to-noise ratio

Mathematical modelling on the part of a research team at Boston University have produced a muting, sound muffling device (really more of a function than a gadget) that deflects virtually all unwanted acoustic smog back towards its source, instead of absorbing it—the usual method of dealing with errant noises.
The sound is channelled from its source along a tube where it’s silenced on the other end by this echoing ring with no membrane to obscure the view (or non-carrier-wave flow of air) back and beyond and could be scaled up or down to make offices, apartments and other shared spaces a bit more tranquil and adjustable, perhaps even as earplugs. As much as I’d like to be able to press a mute button sometimes and relish my peace and quiet, I’m a little afraid we’d grow overly sensitive to the general din of background noise, cushioned by our filters, and we’d wither without them.

covalence

On this day (Old Style, 18 March 1869 on the Gregorian Calendar—it’s nice that this anniversary comes around again), one hundred fifty years ago, Professor Dmitri Mendeleev having previously formulated the Period Laws formally presented his Periodic Table as a way of arranging and understanding the elements to the Russian Chemical Society, titling his presentation The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights, positing that the element arranged according to their mass exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties and to expect the discovery of yet unknown elements from gaps in his schema.

micromégas

If ultimately accepted by the Paris-based International Bureau of Weights and Measures (Bureau international des poids et mesures), Marginal Revolution informs, the ronna- and the quecca- as prefixes for the outlandishly large amounts of 10²⁷ and 10³⁰ (plus their microscopic and vanishingly tiny counterparts, the ronto- and quecto-) would be their first new official unit prefixes added to the metric system since 1991.
The current upper limit of the officially recognised and scientifically sanctioned scale is the yotta- and data-storage capacity is expected to reach and quickly surpass ten to the twenty-fourth power (10²⁴, approximately the size of an individual human’s full DNA sequence, with the corollary yocto-) of bytes of information within the next decade. Though popular in common-parlance handy and a good avenue for talking about science literacy in general, the googol and related values are still vernacular and provisional.

iupac

Via Digg, the United Nations has declared 2019 to be the Year of the Periodic Table in recognition of the moment of insight that Dmitri Mendeleev had one hundred-fifty years ago in 1869 when he committed each of the sixty-nine then known distinct chemical elements on note cards and arranged them by properties in such a fashion as to predict, forecast the existence of yet unknown substances that would later fall neatly in place.
Not to discount the genius of the moment, the development of the familiar design was a lengthy process with many alternate proposals, visual cul-de-sacs (see also here, here and here) and effort that draws off the research and inspiration of many that came before and tried to communicate some essential quality about the building blocks of Nature. In addition to the symbolic chemistry that John Dalton proffered in 1803 to help limn his modern Atomic Theory, the Conversation takes a look at the other stages and versions—with some more radical deviations—that culminate with the iconic and instantly recognisable classroom model.

implosion fabrication

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a miniaturisation technique to scale, downsize any physical object to the nanoscopic level whose method and materials most laboratories already have on hand.
The process works by using a laser to etch a frame out of expanded absorbent gel at workable dimensions and then overlay this scaffold with a material skin of the engineer’s choice. After assemble, the gel is then dried out, desiccated, pulling the structure inward, effectively resizing the object. The potential applications seem rather limitless and scientists believe that we might first encounter the technique used to improve optics and to make tiny robots.

kernspaltung

Along with laboratory assistant Fritz Straßmann, chemist Otto Hahn, researcher at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, made a breakthrough on this day in 1938 that led to the understanding of the process of splitting the atom.
The results of their experiments were interpreted and explained to them by physicist Lise Meitner a few weeks later—being chemists, they interpreted the change as a chemical one—confirming that they had in fact demonstrated the previously unknown property of nuclear fission after bombarding uranium with neutrons and reducing it to barium—with attendant energy as a by-product, ushering in the Atomic Age.