• The International Space Station is the largest spacecraft ever built, with a main truss that is longer than a football field. It is currently home to six men (three Russians, two Americans and a Dutch astronaut) and flies 240 miles (390 kilometers) above Earth at a speed of about 17,500 mph (28,000 kph). At its brightest, the space station can outshine the planet Venus and be easily spotted with the unaided eye by skywatchers who know where to look.
David Garrett: Crossing generations and genres. Need to get your energy up? Watch violin virtuoso David Garrett as he channels AC/DC with this cover of Thunderstruck.
David made the Guinness book of world records by playing the ‘Flight of the bumble bee’ in 66 seconds. That’s 13 notes per second. He started playing when he was four, he’s 31 now.
Enter the Tailbot Watch the remarkable acrobatics of the Agama agama lizard and its faithful robot apprentice in this 2 min video. This UC Berkeley study, published in Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10710.html) used models to conclude that the Velociraptor “might have been capable of aerial acrobatics beyond even those displayed by present-day arboreal lizards”.
Thanks, Tom Lee !
Originally shared by Tom Lee
Tailbot Grows A Lizard-Like Tail, Could Help Save Lives
A team of biology and engineering undergraduates and graduates at the University of California Berkeley made an interesting discovery in lizards, which can be applied to robotics.
Researchers noticed that when lizards leap, stumble or fall, they always manage to land perfectly. This is due the they way in which lizards use their tails to perfect the landing–they swing their tails upwards, which prevents them landing head first. Enter Tailbot.
Walking Heads: Kinesin or The Little Engine That Could 🙂
Have you wondered how things (like vesicles and mitochondria) move about inside a cell? They don’t just drift aimlessly through the thick cytoplasmic soup-rather they are ferried by kinesin, a hard working molecular motor.
The kinesin highway is made of microtubules : a bundle of 13 filaments that have distinct ends (known as + and – ends). Kinesins move cargo towards the + end (from the center of the cell to the periphery) and dyneins move them in the opposite direction. Watch what happens when fluorescent microtubules are placed on a slide coated with kinesin! Kinesin-1 gliding motility assay, whole casein passivation.avi
Cargo is tethered to kinesin by a long coil. The two heads of the motor walk along the microtubule in a hand-over-hand mechanism using ATP hydrolysis as a power source. Each ATP moves the motor one 8 nanometer step. Notice that kinesin is a processive motor: once it is attached to the microtubule it takes (on average)100 steps, before it lets go.
Many, many thanks to Kevin Staff for being such a sport and converting the kinesin video into an animated gif! Special shout out to Andreas Schou who requested some ‘kinesin love’ and to Henry K.O. Norman who is working on an animated production on cellular mechanisms.
For #ScienceSunday curated by Allison Sekuler and Robby Bowles .
Celebrating Stephen Hawking. Physicist Stephen Hawking was not well enough to attend his 70th birthday celebration today. Hawking has Lou Gehrig’s or motor neuron disease, diagnosed when he was 21. Known for his work on black holes and his best selling books ( Brief History of Time , The Universe in a Nutshell ), Hawking has also made some remarkable statements through the years.
Huffington Post’s new Science section lists a few of his memorable quotes:
• People who boast about their IQ are losers.
• My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
• I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.
• I think computer viruses should count as life … I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
• We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
• We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
• What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
madame scientist's not-so-mad musings 