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.

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.

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.

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.

6x6

that’s like comparing apples and mass shootings: idioms updated for American contemporary culture

store brand: Christmas advertisement aimed to educate the public on habitat-loss due to palm-oil plantations banned for being “too political”

across the stars: John Williams’ fresh arrangement for the Star Wars prequels—which if nothing else continued the tradition of arch and on point scores

perhaps not forty-two after all: the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything is instead one hundred and thirty-seven, the fine-structure constant that haunted Richard Feynmann and Wolfgang Pauli—via Strange Company

sacred and profane architecture: this is the church you go to when God is in the volcano forging a ring of power, a Twitter thread via Art of Darkness

bauhaus 100: the next instalment profiling Herbert Bayer who helped create a universal typographic identity for the movement

sisyphean task

The always engrossing Kottke directs our attention to a classic, low-tech solution to a very modern problem with renewable energy generation: an innovative Swiss demonstration project that illustrates the efficient storage of energy in stacking heavy blocks.
We’ve previously explored how surplus energy (the excess over and above demand when the sun is shiny or it’s windy) can be “saved” for the doldrums by converting it from kinetic to potential energy, a controlled surrender to the struggle against gravity hard won in times of plenty with other applications—including dams and the Sisyphus Train—but this proposal which involves constructing and dismantling a tower seems especially precise and calibrated to needs. In its fully-charged state, a central crane would be surrounded with a block tower it built up using excess energy and when the power supply runs low, blocks are removed one by one and descend to the ground slowly, churning out electricity with a turbine in the process.

7x7

nimby: home garden phenology is perhaps the essential first step for combating climate change and the loss of the ecosystems we all depend on

keep america great: Trump’s re-election *sighs* motto isn’t particularly original

prophet of doom: machine translation, like deep dreaming, yields some sinister prognostications with eschatological overtones, via Boing Boing

dyi or mend and make due: the global network of repair cafes has grown to more than sixteen hundred strong

found footage: television curator extraordinaire comes across a BBC engineering test and breaks it down to its component segments

octonions: the strange properties of eight dimensional numbers could potential reveal something fundamental about the nature of reality, via Marginal Revolution

closer: a 1991 real estate brokerage video’s vision of the future 

dark arts

Scientists could mine for evidence of dark matter indirectly by careful study of core samples from deep beneath the Earth’s surface and looking for glitches in the samples recovered.
By glitches, we don’t mean impurities or Golden Spikes in the ancient samples but rather some ghostly and microscopic structural flaw that might only be explained by interaction with membranes of dark matter that the Earth passes through. Anything sufficiently large and stable has an uptapped role as a cosmic detector for such phenomena.  Research might even render us the ability to conjure up dark matter by inducing the signature types of material flaws found.  Visit BLDGBLOG at the link up top for more metaphysical speculations.

relativistic astronomy

Ambitious projects like Breakthrough Starshot (previously)—which aims by means of a laser propelled solar sail to achieve a velocity of twenty percent of the light-speed and to reach the nearest star system to our own, Rigel Kentaurus, within two decades—could yield unimaginable scientific data even prior to arriving at their destination, as Universe Today reports, by demonstrating what traveling at low-warp looks like to for the vessel and payload of instruments.
In other words, the voyage itself becomes a practical exercise for the thought-experiment of imagining what a photographer finds in the scope of a camera accelerating to such speeds.  It’s difficult to say how much distortion that this so-called method of Doppler boosting might have, but the speed of the probe should result in observations that overcome—to a degree—the predominating red-shift (caused by cosmic expansion) and turn the light of distant stars bluer and to ranges easier to measure, bringing our picture of the Universe into sharper focus.  Furthermore, testing some of the tenets set forth in the theory we would be wiser for the journey, either reinforcing or causing us to revise our understanding of the Cosmos.

highlighting the remarkable

I know it’s an advertising campaign but this series, found via Swiss Miss, from German marker manufacturer Stabilo takes a highlighter to historic photographs to help call-out the overlooked contributions of women to science and governance is pretty enlightening.

There’s just a few images in this print-run but surely there’s a lot of untapped potential out there. First Lady Edith Wilson, who assumed the roles and responsibilities of the US president after her husband was debilitated with a stroke in October 1919 (prior to the Presidential Succession Act and even before universal suffrage in the US) is included, as well as the pictured Austrian- Swiss physicist Lise Meither, whose celebrated career and academic recognition is overshadowed by the failure of the Nobel Prize committee to acknowledge her essential role in the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s.

spidey-sense

For hundreds of years people have observed the phenomena of ballooning or kiting behaviour by small spiders that allow them to launch themselves and glide for hundreds of kilometres over land and sea, suspended aloft on gossamer leads.
Even the German term for “Indian summer,” Altweiber-sommer, references the season when the winds fill with errant webs, but for nearly as long as people have noticed this mode of transport, we learn via Dave Log, something has also struck naturalists as aerodynamically incomplete about the explanation that they were just haplessly bobbing along. Researchers, experimenting on past suppositions, are discovering that spiders are not only harnessing the wind but also electrostatic forces to take to the skies, steering their course by sensing and negotiating the Earth’s inchoate magnetic field and the discharge of lightning.