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Happy national periodic table day!

Modified Leaves: Insect Traps

Carnivorous plants are plants that derive some or most of their nutrients (not energy) from trapping and consuming animals, typically insects. Carnivorous plants have adapted to grow in places where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic bogs and rock outcroppings. These carnivorous plants have modified leaves that help to trap and digest prey.

The carnivorous plant in the first picture is a Venus flytrap that belongs to the genus Dionaea. The Venus flytrap has small trigger hairs on the inside of its leaf that cause the trap to close around its prey. The carnivorous plant in the middle picture is a sundew that belongs to the Drosera. Sundews have small tentacles, topped with sticky secretions, that cover the leaves.  Sundews are able to move their tentacles towards the center of the leaf to bring the insect into contact with as many stalked glands as possible. The carnivorous plant in the bottom picture is a  species of North American pitcher plants that are commonly called trumpet pitchers. Insects fall into the pitcher plant and cannot climb out. Meanwhile, digestive enzymes in the pitcher leaf break down the prey.

Modified Leaves Part:   1    2     3     4     5     6

The five ingredients of a particle accelerator

Did you know there are over 30,000 particle accelerators in the world? The design of particle accelerators is a creative process. Often it starts with just one person and their concept, but they all tend to have 5 key ingredients.

1 - Particles - where do you get them, how do you make them? Accelerators might use atoms with electrons split off, called ions, or the particles inside atoms themselves: electrons or protons.

2 - Energy - you need an acceleration mechanism, some way of giving the particles a push. Typically this uses electric fields.

3 - Control - once your particles are moving, you need to control them, to move them and focus them where they’re needed. This is generally done with magnetic fields.

4 - Collision - not all particle accelerators are ‘colliders’ in the traditional sense. They don’t all collide beams together like at the LHC. But in almost every case you do need to collide your beam of accelerated particles into something - this might be a fixed target to investigate a sample, or even directly into a person’s body, such as during medical treatments.

5 - Detection - there’s normally not much point doing all of this work unless you can then detect the outcome and learn from it. You need to measure what happens to the beam of particles when they collide with their target.

Find out more in our animation about how to design a particle accelerator.

Wormholes

Also known as Einstein-Rosen Bridges are theoretically possible going by Einstein’s theory, and equations of general relativity. Basically wormholes take advantage of our 3 dimensional space and are able to “bend” it. Picture a sheet of paper; now put two circular holes on each end of that sheet of paper. Normally the quickest way to join one point to the other would be to draw a straight line between them. Now instead, you could fold the piece of paper so each hole is touching meaning that there is no longer any distance between them. This is an analogy of how a wormhole works except instead of a circular hole on a 2D plane, the entry and exit points of an Einstein-Rosen bridge can be visualised as spheres in a 3D space.

While the theory of general relativity allows the existence of wormholes, we have not yet found physical evidence. The first wormhole solution discovered was the Schwarzschild wormhole presented in the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole. However this is not stable enough and would collapse before anything could cross from one end to the other. Traversable wormholes could exist of there was a form of exotic matter with a negative energy to stabilise them.

The Casmir effect shows that quantum field theory allows the energy density in some space to be relatively lower than the ordinary vacuum of space. A lot of physicists (like Stephen Hawking) use this to argue that it is possible to stabilise a traversable wormhole. However there are no known natural processes that would cause a traversable wormhole to stabilise.

The quantum foam hypothesis can be used to suggest the spontaneous appearance of tiny black holes at the Planck scale. Stable versions of these tiny wormholes have been suggested as dark matter candidates. It is also possible that one of these wormholes opened into a previously empty space from another universe, held open by a cosmic string (1D string) with a negative mass then it could be inflated to a macroscopic size by cosmic inflation. Is it possible this happened at the start of the Big Bang?

A particle here can affect one on the other side of the universe, instantaneously

When an electron meets its antimatter twin, a positron, the two are annihilated in a tiny flash of energy. Two photons fly away from the blast.

Subatomic particles like photons and quarks have a quality known as “spin”. It’s not that they’re really spinning – it’s not clear that would even mean anything at that level – but they behave as if they do. When two are created simultaneously the direction of their spin has to cancel each other out: one doing the opposite of the other.

Due to the unpredictability of quantum behaviour, it is impossible to say in advance which will go “anticlockwise” and the other “clockwise”. More than that, until the spin of one is observed, they are both doing both.

It gets weirder, however. When you do observe one, it will suddenly be going clockwise or anticlockwise. And whichever way it is going, its twin will start spinning the other way, instantly, even if it is on the other side of the universe. This has actually been shown to happen in experiment (albeit on the other side of a laboratory, not a universe).

Video of Gallium reacting with water.

Source: Scienmag

End to the universe ends your ideas of infinite

If the big rip or vacuum decay takes place then numbers can’t be infinite, infinity to finite