These photographs document several of the various types of mould which can be found growing on your average loaf of bread, given enough time and neglect. I am interested in the inherent contradiction of finding aesthetic beauty in something almost universally perceived as disgusting. I was also fascinated by the extraordinary structure and microscopic nature of these life forms, something that those of us not involved in the biological sciences are probably only vaguely aware of.

 

(Source: scienceyoucanlove)

Plants ‘Talk’ via Funghi To Warn About Impending Dangers

A study has found that plants talk to one another when under attack via the symbiotic funghi mycorrhizae.

Networks of mycorrhizae cover the roots of most plants, using their larger underground surface area to gather up more water and nutrients that the plant roots could possibly gather alone. They also improve surrounding soil quality, sending out root threads to separate clay platelets and get air and water to the main roots. Now, a team of biologists has proven that the funghi is even more vital to species survival than previously thought.

“Here, we show that mycorrhizal mycelia can also act as a conduit for signalling between plants, acting as an early warning system for herbivore attack,” write the authors in a study published in Ecology Letters.

When under attack by aphids, certain plants release chemicals that trigger a scent that repels aphids and attracts predators that will help rid the plant of aphids. These chemicals, known as volatiles, also travel through the air and tell neighbouring plants to start releasing their own volatiles.

A joint team from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted Research set out to discover what would happen if plants under attack could not communicate via the air, but were only linked up by the funghi.

Bean plants, which release an aphid-repelling and wasp-attracting chemical, were grown in groups of five, with three connected by the funghi and two without the funghal links. Each plant was covered with a bag, so that no communication could occur via the air. When one plant was purposefully infested with aphids, those joined to it began releasing the same chemical. Those unconnected, failed to release the chemical.

“Connected plants that weren’t infested by the aphids behaved as though they were,” David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen said in a statement. “We don’t quite know the mechanism of communication, but it’s likely to be a chemical signal.”

The find is a key step in finding natural ways to protect crops from predators. Rothamsted Research is already looking to engineer a type of wheat that releases the (E)-β-farnesene odour released by 400 plants in nature, an odour that repels aphids and attracts aphid-attackers, in this instance ladybirds. The idea is to use nature as inspiration for genetically modifying crops, so that damaging fertilisers become defunct. Better still, if natural funghal networks that already exist in crops — such as rice, barley and wheat — can be employed in the aphid-battle.

“Aphids affect all higher-latitude agricultural regions, including the UK, the EU, North America, and North East Asiam” said coauthor John Pickett of Rothamsted Research. “This research could provide a new, sustainable and natural intervention. In a field of plants that have some inducible resistance to aphids, we could use a plant that’s susceptible to aphid attack to ‘switch on’ the defence mechanism through the natural underground connection. There’s the potential to deal with other pests and diseases, in other regions, in a similar way.”

Essentially, one plant would be sacrificed for the sake of all others.

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Stay Curious! Learn more about mutualism, mimicry and the biodiversity of plants and animals in “Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers” by Sharman Apt Russell.

In Anatomy of a Rose, Sharman Apt Russell eloquently unveils the “inner life” of flowers, showing them to be more individual, more enterprising, and more responsive than we ever imagined. From their diverse fragrances to their nasty deceptions, Russell proves that, where nature is concerned, “wonder is not only our starting point; it can also be our destination.” Throughout this botanical journey, she reveals that the science behind these intelligent plants—how they evolved, how they survive, how they heal—is even more awe-inspiring than their fleeting beauty. Russell helps us imagine what a field of snapdragons looks like to a honeybee; she introduces us to flowers that regulate their own temperature, attract pollinating bats, even smell like a rotting corpse.In this poetic rumination, which combines graceful writing with a scientist’s clarity, Russell brings together the work of botanists around the globe, and illuminates a world at once familiar and exotic. [x]

Astronauts, Space Walks and The ‘Overview Effect’

Nearly everyone is familiar with EVA’s (Extra-Vehicular Activities) or “Space Walks” - activities/tasks performed outside of a space craft by astronauts. However, since watching The Overview Effect when it first premiered, I haven’t come across a segment of interviews such as this.

This is a great tribute to the men and women who have actually stepped out into space and seen the Earth with their own eyes, only a thin sheet of protective material between their organic lenses and the natural beauty of our planet and universe.

Expect more of this. As humans progress above our atmosphere and further out into space, the psychological/neurological effects will become more widespread and unique to each individual, united by awe and humility. I encourage all of you to watch this 20-minute documentary, The Overview Effect, which truly exposes the cosmic perspective for what it is, which is solitary and distinctive to the human species. No one else in history has been able to grasp and articulate this perspective from the height of over 250 miles up from our planet’s surface.

We’ve speculated and verbally interpreted this viewpoint philosophically, psychologically, spiritually, historically and scientifically, but we now are able to share and partake in this human journey - via our ever-advancing technology - with other humans across the globe through multiple media forms; granting others such an experience, which, even for a moment, consumes our consciousness and peels back the layers of our biological, chemical, atomically-interwoven connectivity with all life on this planet and most probably, others.

Also, if you’re unfamiliar with entrepreneur/video game developer Richard Garriott, he is lesser-known as being the son of an astronaut. His father, Owen Garriott, lived on NASA’s Skylab/Spacelab-1 LEO facilities in the 70’s and 80’s. Richard Garriott’s lifelong dream was to follow in his father’s “bootsteps” and journey to space. Garriott underwent astronaut training in Star City where, with his Russian counterparts, he learned Russian (required as he flew abord the Soyuz craft) and via Space Adventures, became the first private citizen to venture into space and perform science experiments on board the International Space Station.

Since then, Richard Garriott has become the Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors for Space Adventures and trustee of the X-Prize Foundation, which we are all familiar with. The film not only excites with gorgeous photography/cinematography, but also educates, revealing the cultural significance and processes by which Russian astro/cosmonauts partake and endure along their journey to space.

His mission, from beginning to end, was documented and produced into a film, aptly entitled, “Man On A Mission.” Free up some time to watch this and share it with others. The more humans that venture into space, the more humans we will have returning to Earth (or not) sharing their experience and the importance of spaceflight upon our civilization and our psyche.

Ad Astra Per Aspera.

(Source: jereblog, via invaderxan)

I know beauty, even though I do not know what to do with my knowledge. I do not know what to do with my feelings.

The conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote:

The physics of beauty is one department of natural science still in the Dark Ages. Not even the manipulators of bent space have tried to solve its equations. Everyone knows that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.

Subtract flowers from the world and the whole world is dead from a human point of view. The nonflowering plants on earth include the mosses, liverworts, conifers, cycads, ferns, and gingko trees. Almost every other plant, everything we and other animals eat, requires a flower for reproduction.

We know that flowers are beautiful. We forget that they are also essential.

We are beginning to explore the physics of beauty. Philosophers and scientists have come together to name certain universal themes.

The universe tends toward complexity.
The universe is a web of relationship.
The universe tends toward symmetry.
The universe is rhythmic.
The universe tends toward self-organizing systems.
The universe depends on feedback and response.
Thus, the universe is “free” and unpredictable.

The themes of the universe may be the elements of beauty. Certainly they are the elements of flowers.

Sharman Apt Russell; Anatomy Of A Rose: Exploring The Secret Life Of Flowers

*Expect more published excerpts from this book….it’s absolutely amazing and I encourage all of you to check it out. It’s a quick read but nearly too quick; I didn’t want it to end. Photos (courtesy: me) from the past few days around my neighborhood in East York. Stay curious*

Isotope Titanium Lume Ring

The Isotope is all about contrast. The brilliant glow of the lume, and the sharp lines of the titanium create a visual moment that refuses to be ignored.

The special lume material in the Isotope ring soaks up both natural and artificial light and will glow bright green as soon as it is in a low-light environment. Wear it to bed and it will still be glowing when you get up for that 3am visit to the bathroom!

Moonglow Material:

Moonglow is a ultra-high output photoluminesent polycarbonate. It soaks up both natural and artificial light and will glow bright green for hours once it is in a low-light environment. It also a passive-lume material, meaning it absorbs light. It does not generate its own light as radioactive materials such as tritium do.

(Source: thewavespectra, via invaderxan)

“These three images are snapshots of a spark-ignited expanding flame in different environments of the same hydrogen-air mixture. The top flame shows the ideal, reference case of a stable, smooth flame surface in a quiescent environment at atmospheric pressure. The middle flame is taken under elevated pressure simulating that within an internal combustion engine. The bottom flame is taken in a highly turbulent environment simulating another aspect of the engine interior. All images were taken at 8000 frames per second, using schlieren photography. The radius of the top flame is 11.4 millimeters.”  C.K. Law, Swetaprovo Chaudhuri, and Fujia Wu (Princeton University).

(Source: freshphotons)

Weird Places: Blood Falls

In our continuing series on Earth’s weirdest places, Hank describes the crazy place in Antarctica known as Blood Falls in all its scientifically strange majesty.

(Source: scishow)

New Steel Production Method Cuts Out Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Material chemists at MIT have developed a way to produce steel without carbon dioxide as a side product, potentially heralding a way to eliminate one of the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

Steel production has steadily risen for years, driven by countries like China and India that have been undergoing rapid and intensive industrialisation. According to the World Steel Association, even with the worldwide economic slump, steel production still rose 1.2 percent between 2011 and 2012 to 1,547 million tonnes. The production of steel — from extracting the iron ore to smelting the steel itself — accounts for more than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions by some estimates.

To make steel, iron oxide is heated with carbon — the carbon and iron alloy is the steel, while excess carbon reacts with the oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Every tonne of steel creates almost two tonnes of carbon dioxide. Unexpectedly, a way to create steel without the problematic carbon dioxide waste product came about as a result of research into lunar bases.

Antoine Allanore, Lana Yin and Donald Sadoway, material chemists at MIT, received a grant from Nasa to look into ways to produce oxygen cheaply and easily on the Moon, a key precursor to being able to establish permanent lunar bases. Moon dust is rich in iron oxide, and in the course of their research they looked at a process called molten oxide electrolysis. The process, which electrolyses molten metal ores into their constituent elements, proved capable of extracting pure oxygen from Moon dust — with steel as a byproduct.

This was not unexpected, but the breakthrough now is that the team has found a way to make the method economical back on Earth. The original electrolysis used an iridium anode, but iridium is extremely expensive. The new method instead uses an alloy of chromiun and iron, which, when exposed to air, oxidises enough to be protected from significant oxidation, but still thin enough to allow current to flow through it. The team tested its Earth-based adaptation using lunar-like soil from Meteor Crater in Arizona.

According to Sadoway, this method has several advantages over conventional steel production beyond the avoidance of carbon dioxide emissions. The metal is reportedly extremely pure, and the same process could theoretically be adapted to the production of other metals, such as nickel or titanium.

However, the economical advantages are yet to be explored. It’s not easy to create steel normally, as a factory must produce millions of tonnes each year to be considered profitable, and while the team claims that this process would be economical on the scale of only hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year, there’s no evidence yet to back that up.

Furthermore, the temperatures required limit the materials that can be used as ovens. The same problem applies to molten oxide electrolysis — it has to be kept at a temperature of 1,600 degrees Celsius throughout, “a really challenging environment” Sadoway said. “The melt is extremely aggressive. Oxygen is quick to attack the metal.”

The research has been published in Nature.

Edith Widder: Glowing Life In An Underwater World | TED

Why You Should Listen To Her:
A specialist in bioluminescence, Edith Widder helps design and invent new submersible instruments and equipment to study bioluminescence and enable unobtrusive observation of deep-sea environments. Her innovative tools for exploration have produced footage of rare and wonderful bioluminescent displays and never-before-seen denizens of the deep, including, most recently, the first video ever recorded of the giant squid, Architeuthis, in its natural habitat.

In 2005 she founded the Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA), which is dedicated to protecting aquatic ecosystems and the species they sustain through the development of innovative technologies and science-based conservation action.; In an effort to protect and revitalize the ocean she loves she has been focusing on developing tools for finding and tracking pollution — a major threat to all of our water ecosystems and ultimately to human health. She was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2006.

In 2012, Widder was among the team that filmed the giant squid (Architeuthis) for the first time in its home ocean.

“In the ocean, [bioluminescence] is the rule rather than the exception.” - Edith Widder

(Source: spaceplasma)

Exploding star remnants found in fossilized bacteria

Thousands of metres below the sea, trapped in the fossilized remains of ancient bacteria, exists the iron remnants of a supernova explosion that happened millions of years ago. An imprint, here on Earth, of a dying star.

Iron-60, an isotope of iron created only in supernovae, has been found in fossilised seabed bacteria. The preliminary findings, announced by Shawn Bishop of the Technical University of Munich at a 14 April meeting of the American Physical Society in Colorado, may be the first time that a specific star’s debris has been found in our fossil record. 

Iron-60’s half-life is relatively short when compared to the age of our solar system, so traces of the isotope on Earth suggests a direct interaction with a supernova in the planet’s history. The researchers searched for the isotope in fossils from seabed samples between 1.7 million to 3.3 million years old. They likely found traces of the isotope in fossils around 2.2 million years old.

The bacteria containing the Iron-60 are magnetotactic; they are strange organisms live in the seabed and align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field. They extract iron from the water and sediment around them and create iron oxide crystals that are then preserved in the fossil record.

“For me, philosophically, the charm is that this is sitting in the fossil record of our planet,” said Bishop in a  Nature.com report. The isotope had previously been discovered in seabed samples, but not in the fossil record.

“We are all, as Carl Sagan put it, stardust,” Bishop told Wired.co.uk. “[We have now] likely discovered, within crystal nano-fossils left behind by primitive bacteria, […] still-live radioactive atoms that can only have been synthesized within the same kind of nuclear furnace — an exploding star — that forged the elements from which all live on Earth is made. The cycle comes full-circle.”

It has been estimated that the supernova happened around 2.2 million years ago, and that the stream of cosmic rays would have had an effect on the Earth’s atmosphere by increasing cloud cover. The supernova responsible for depositing the iron-60 has not yet been found, but possible suspects have been identified in the nearby Scorpius-Centarus association.

This isn’t the first time that distant astronomical events have made an impact on Earth. In 2012, researchers found a surplus of radioactive atoms in Japanese trees, hinting at a violent cosmic event around 1,200 years ago.

(Source: spaceplasma)

Stellar Archaeology Traces Milky Way’s History

Unfortunately, stars don’t have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star’s age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. But Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Astrophysical Sciences, both in Baltimore, Md., has found the next best thing to a star’s birth certificate.

Using a new technique, Kalirai probed the burned-out relics of Sun-like stars, called white dwarfs, in the inner region of our Milky Way galaxy’s halo. The halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding our galaxy’s disk. Those stars, his study reveals, are 11.5 billion years old, younger than the first generation of Milky Way stars. They formed more than 2 billion years after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Previous age estimates, based on analyzing normal stars in the inner halo, ranged from 10 billion to 14 billion years. Kalirai’s study reinforces the emerging view that our galaxy’s halo is composed of a layer-cake structure that formed in stages over billions of years.

White dwarf stars have remarkable properties, yet they are very simple. These stripped cores of normal hydrogen-burning stars are about 1 million times denser than matter on Earth. This means that a tablespoon of material from a white dwarf’s surface would weigh as much as a school bus on Earth. White dwarfs also have no fuel to generate energy, and most of their atmospheres contain a single atom, hydrogen.

The second figure illustrates the spectral features of a white dwarf, in comparison to the Sun and a blue giant. The white dwarf spectrum is simple, containing only absorption lines from the hydrogen atom. But, unlike the same lines in the blue giant spectrum (a bloated star with a low density), the features in the white dwarf are broadened due to the intense pressure on the surface of the star (essentially, the energy levels of the atom are being perturbed). This broadening of the lines, as well as their depth, is directly related to the mass and temperature of the star. Unlike for most stars, astronomers can therefore reliably establish fundamental properties for white dwarfs from their spectra.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild and J. Kalirai (STScI)

(Source: stellar-indulgence)

(Source: arockettopigfarts, via understandingtheuniverse)