Sleepysneezeydopeydoc-blog - Physics Nerd

Modified Stems: Thorn

Thorns are modified branches or stems. Thorns and spines are derived from shoots and leaves respectively, and have vascular bundles inside, whereas prickles (like rose prickles) do not have vascular bundles inside. The tree shown in the picture above is called the honey locust tree, also known as the thorny locust. Just look at those thorns!

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Ultra-high resolution images of butterfly wing crystals offer clues to how nano-scale structures form

An international team of researchers has taken another step toward understanding the process by which butterfly wing scales develop crystals that result in bright, vivid colors. In their paper published in the open-access site Science Advances, the group describes the methods they used to study the wing scale crystals of the hairstreak butterfly—a black and bright blue native of parts of Colorado and northern Mexico—and what they found.

People of all backgrounds are captivated by butterflies—their bright colors and lackadaisical lifestyle of flitting from flower to flower tend to elicit smiles and warm feelings. And while a general understanding of the physical structure of the butterfly’s wings has been well documented, the process by which they arrive at their coloring has never been discovered—this is because it happens over the course of several days inside of their cocoons, where tiny cameras would not really work. In this new effort, the researchers report taking another step in the discovery process.

Prior research has shown that butterfly wings are covered in scales with chitin crystals called gyroids on their surfaces—the gyroids reflect light in certain ways, creating the perception of colors. But how the gyroids develop to display colors is still unclear. In this new effort, the researchers took the closest ever look at the scales and gyroids using several imaging techniques, and report finding something new.

Read more.

What you see is a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex which creates happiness. Happiness. You’re looking at happiness.

M-theory

Membrane theory is a relatively new theory in the world of physics. It has been backed by Stephen Hawking as being the only candidate for the complete theory of the universe.

M-theory has been growing very popular in recent years. This is because it ties together the existing string theories into one relatively simple (mathematically) depiction of the universe. The true origins start with the older string theories that came about in the 80’s. This outlined how all the different forms of energy in the universe could be constructed out of hypothetical one dimensional “strings”. The current M-theory now believes in an 11 dimensional space (this was previously 10 in earlier versions of string theories but the introduction of supergravity increased the count to 11). Now we live in a 3D space with a total of four observable dimensions meaning that there are another 5 we cannot detect. Now in string theory, it was hypothesised that depending on how the strings vibrate the might be seen in 3 dimensions as matter, light or gravity. The problem with string theory was that different equations used to describe the vibrations of the strings kept coming out and they all appeared to be correct. Then what happened was M-theory which said that it’s possible that all the equations are describing the same thing but from a different perspective.

My current understanding of M-theory is that there are lots of 2D membranes which are in an 11D space. These two dimensional branes are not fixed in this eleven dimensional space and move around. When they collide a new 2D brane is created and it is thought that when this happens it is similar to a Big Bang. So it’s entirely possible that out universe is really a 2D membrane in an 11D space.

The first image is a Calabi-Yau manifold. It’s a multi-dimensional mathematic structure and is very significant to M-theory, all they have to do is find the “right” one.

So you like chemistry puns...

Fluid

Interactive webtoy by David Li is a fun fluid dynamics simulator which lets you play around with various parameters - here is a video of it in action:

Fluid simulation is a GPU implementation of the FLIP method (with various additions). Particle rendering uses spherical ambient occlusion volumes. 

You can find out more and try it out for yourself here

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?

Minimalist Posters of Great Mathematicians.