@payslipgig / payslipgig.tumblr.com
The world’s largest solar panel image, a horse, was constructed in the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, China starting in 2017. This massive pattern was built with 196,320 solar panels and covers nearly 1.4 square kilometers (0.54 square miles). It is part of a larger photovoltaic generation base with an annual output of 4 billion kilowatt hours.
40.295360°, 109.670942°
Source imagery: Google Timelapse / Planet
hey, don't cry. humpback whales photographed having gay sex, ok?
The autoclave is designed to kill schmucks I think
It’s a 24yo Tomy SS-325 if it helps, it beeps once when it finishes counting down and beeps again when it finishes depressurizing, the steam is about 90-100c by then iirc
#top loading autoclave??? how do you get your trays out without toughing the sides?
With its basket! It comes with two of them
What's an autoclave?
Are those ink markers?
It's essentially a superpowered pressure cooker designed to get hot and high pressure enough to kill EVERYTHING. Including mold spores. They're used to sterilise equipment.
Those aren't markers, they're tubes of fluid that OP wants to be sterile. It's common practice to autoclave things like nutrient broth before inoculating them with bacteria, to kill off any contamination and make sure that you only grow whatever you put in there to grow.
Fun fact: you can totally sterilize equipment with an instant pot in a pinch. I know this because my lab lives in a psych department so there's no goddamn autoclave in our building, so we were using an instant pot for some time until EHS decided they were not comfortable with it and were willing to cough up for an actual autoclave.
You want to use a biomarker to verify obviously but that's good practice anyway.
Instant Pot doesn't let you open it until it's depressurized why does Elderly Tommy the Murder Autoclave omit this feature.
Home cooks are important, scientists are disposeable
Australian researchers have located what is believed to be the largest plant on Earth—and they estimate it’s at least 4,500 years old.
The ancient and incredibly resilient seagrass stretching across 180km was located by researchers from The University of Western Australia and Flinders University.
The discovery of the single plant or “clone” of the seagrass Posidonia australis in the shallow, sun-drenched waters of the World Heritage Area of Shark Bay in WA is detailed in a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
[…]
UWA student researcher Jane Edgeloe, lead author of the study, says the team sampled seagrass shoots from across Shark Bay’s variable environments and generated a “fingerprint” using 18,000 genetic markers.
“The answer blew us away—there was just one.” Ms. Edgeloe said. “That’s it, just one plant has expanded over 180km in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on Earth.
“The existing 200 km2 of ribbon weed meadows appear to have expanded from a single, colonizing seedling.”
NATIVE CARBON DIOXIDE FOUND ON JUPITER’S MOON EUROPA
HOLY SHIT, IT'S HAPPENING! EVERYBODY STAY CALM!
For those confused, this combined with liquid water being there makes this the strongest evidence of alien life to date.
These are conditions shockingly similar to earth.
For anyone wondering, the reason Europa (as well as Saturn's Enceladus) is warm enough to have oceans is because of the tidal friction from the large gas giant right next to it. (Also why Io is constantly erupting, it's so close to Jupiter it can't stop) Any life on these moons could resemble the life we have in geothermal vents and sunless depths of our own ocean.
ok!
EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????
IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN
IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"
AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS
LIKE READ THIS SHIT
WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE
I went to find the article. It's fascinating.
Good news! It gets worse!
I think it's the galactic orbit thing that really did me in
The experiments conducted by this year’s Nobel laureates demonstrated that attosecond pulses could be observed and measured, and that they could also be used in new experiments. An attosecond is to one second as one second is to the age of the universe. Now that the attosecond world has become accessible, these short bursts of light can be used to study the movements of electrons. It is now possible to produce pulses down to just a few dozen attoseconds, and this technology is developing all the time. These pulses have been used to explore the detailed physics of atoms and molecules, and they have potential applications in areas from electronics to medicine. Attosecond pulses can also be used to identify different molecules, such as in medical diagnostics.
mushroom chat just dropped
I want to log on to the mushroom chat so bad
What would you even say?
"Had a cute frog sit on me today. Win."
Wait, beneath the sea floor?
OUGHGH??
OIUOHGHHVOIH!!!!!
"Decrease the increase" is actually a completely reasonable thing to say, but it feels like it shouldn't be.
this makes me think about how 'rate of change' stats are inherently infinitely nested
hold on i promise this is interesting
so, you have position. that's where you are. we figured that one out early by being places.
then you have velocity, which is how fast you go from where you are to somewhere else. we figured that one out too the first time somebody had to run away from a bear.
the rate of change of velocity is acceleration, which is a thing that presumably got coined the first time somebody stumbled upon the bear from a standing start still and suddenly it matters a lot how fast they could get fast.
everyone knows this.
but what about the rate of change of acceleration? this was something that didn't matter for the majority of human history, because the rate was never really fast enough in any situation where somebody was going to sit down and do math about it. wagons and trains can get by knowing just their acceleration rate. most situations where rate of change of acceleration mattered were usually terminal, i.e. falling off a thing and very suddenly experiencing deceleration at the bottom.
but then we invented planes, and planes go fast and turn fast. so fast than when you rapidly change direction, it emulates the effects of gravity and pulls the blood in your body in unexpected ways. World War 1 pilots (as in, canvas biplanes with motorcycle engine motherfuckers, people who rarely broke 200 kilometres an hour) started noticing that if they held a hard turn for a while at speed, they'd started to get dizzy. if they pulled hard out of a dive and their wings stayed on, their vision would start to go grey. and if they nosed down quickly, it fucking sucked 1
through the interwar period, we learned a bunch of stuff about acceleration and the effects on the human body. using this cool information, we invented things like autopilots that pull people out of dives that might knock them out (through GLOC, g-induced-loss-of-consciousness caused by the blood flowing into your feet when you pull up super hard) or masks that use air pressure to make it easier to breathe when you weigh eight times more than you should.
That all makes sense and is cool.
then planes started to get real fast, and some fucking asshole invented the jet fighter. during and after WW2 we started doing a bunch of very, very detailed testing into g-forces because now a pilot can literally kill themselves if they pull the stick too hard.
it doesn't take long before somebody points out that how quickly the onset of gs occur is important to the survival of pilots; slow gs are way different than fast gs. so you need a stat for the rate of change. so we coined 'jerk', the rate of change of acceleration. physicists knew about it as a concept, but had never really needed to care about it before this
then, when we started doing rocketry and fucking around with ejection seats, which subject the pilot to tremendous forces in the course of yeeting the pilot out of the plane with a barely controlled explosion, somebody in the big science lab presumably asked
'hey boss, what do i call the rate of change of jerk?'
so after sighing and probably pinching the bridge of their nose in frustration, the king of science or whatever was like, okay we're doing this, that's snap now. then, some smartass asked what the rate of change of snap is. and some even smarter ass went "its crackle. and before you ask, the rate of change of crackle is called pop."
so, to recap, pop is the rate of change of crackle which is the rate of change of snap which is the rate of change of jerk which is the rate of change of acceleration which is the rate of change of velocity which is the rate of change of position
we have not yet formerly defined what the rate of change of pop is, presumably because whenever somebody tries all the physicists and engineers get together to draw and quarter them 1 yes this post has footnotes. this distinction is positive gs (blood going to your feet) and negative gs (blood going to your head). human beings can handle shocking amounts of positive gs before passing out from lack of blood (and thus, tasty oxygen) in the thinking zone. by contrast, a very small amount of negative gs can just mcfucking kill you as the blood pressure in your brain spikes and all the delicate tissue take issue with that
ever stand up too fast and get dizzy? positive gs. wonder why being upside down for too long kinda sucks a lot? negative gs.
this is why planes always roll over onto one wing and turn 'up' into turns. turning 'down' into turns with any real force can literally make your eyeballs explode.
if you enjoyed learning about this distinction you will love reading my roleplaying games because its basically the only thing i ever talk about
A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.
damn that shit is light lmfao
Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!
Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.
Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful
I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons
In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”
Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.
Ah to be a sailor in 1890 who has to turn to his fellow men and ask "is it just me or are the lighthouses flashing faster?"
They had been slowly getting faster for decades.
It mattered for optics reasons.
Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.
The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.
This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.
What’s a little Madness, in the face of Progress?
Okay, I was just going to reblog this without commentary, but I can't keep this to myself. I'm a PhD student in environmental science and this is my fucking highway.
The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.
Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.
Just in case anyone thought that climate change was a "recent fad" in research.
Wait, beneath the sea floor?
OUGHGH??
OIUOHGHHVOIH!!!!!
Jller by Benjamin Maus and Prokop Bartonicek - a kinetic artwork that sorts thousands of random river stones by age
they made an autistic robot
And they gave it enrichment
The 1,4000,000-volt X-ray machine at the high voltage laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, ca, 1940s.
is the sun more dangerous to humans outside of earth (on the moon, for example ;)) because of the lack of an ozone layer? what exactly would long-term sun exposer without an ozone do, if you know!
IT SURE IS. the moon reflects the sun to shine oh-so-bright for us, after all!
the solar rays that hit the moon are unfiltered and SUPER dangerous actually, and are one of the reasons Neil and his buddies needed basically a complete suit of armor with a face shield built in:
solar rays on the moon FAR surpass those on earth in both intensity and the spectrum of radiation they carry. these rays are capable of destroying solar panels by overloading them, and every piece of optical equipment (including cameras!) ever used up there had to be specially designed to be shielded from all that junk.
if you had a telescope good enough to give you a 4k view of the lunar surface, you could see the long-term effects of these ultrarays yourself- all those flags we left all over the moon in fits of hyper-nationalistic pride?
yeah, they're almost certainly just piles of sun-bleached white rags, if not actual dust at this point.
and don't get brilliant ideas about going up there to commit moon grand theft auto on the lunar rover, either- all the equipment that's been sitting in the sun for 50 years is probably no longer in working order, even if it is in one piece. (UTMOST TRAGEDY)
and now you know!
