Another Accidental Post - Bonus Bat For Everyone!

Another accidental post - bonus bat for everyone!

This art is for the birds! A street artist by the name of Combo created an awesome open-air art exhibition specifically for pigeons. Not only are the pieces pigeon-sized and placed at the birds’ eye level, they’re each easily recognizable pieces of well-known art that have been altered to reflect a pigeon-centric world. The pigeon version of American Gothic is probably our favourite.

[via Whitezine]

This Week in Science - May 20 - 26, 2013:

Super-capacitor phone charger here.

Salamander regeneration here.

Imaged orbital structure here.

Sweat-soaking fabric here.

Beginnings of universe experiment here.

Algorithm diagnosing leukemia here.

3d-printed splint here.

Irish potato famine cause here.

White tigers’ coats here.

Neuronal beacon here.

Spray-on lens here.

Fixing insect model here.

Why Old Books Smell Good

“Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.

—From Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: the guide

a man steals a painting from a museum and puts it in the back of his van

he drives for three miles before he inevitably slows down and gets out, credit card and empty gas container in hand

the police come up and ask him “what are you doing? this is an arrest!”

he looks at them and says

“I need more Monet to buy Degas to make this Van Gogh!”

this is the final straw im leaving tumblr

See you tomorrow

Into the Abyss: Incredible Shrinking Cups

Marine biologists and ocean scientists are somewhat of a tribe unto themselves. They spend weeks and months in cramped conditions aboard research vessels, doing science that’s a bit unlike any other science, and drinking enough to make Jack Sparrow proud. So it’s perfectly natural that their tribe would have some unique customs.

I discovered one of those today: Sending styrofoam cups to the bottom of the ocean as souvenirs. 

When exploring deep ocean trenches and thermal vents, it’s usually a robot or a high-tech manned submersible doing the dirty work. The Cayman trough (where the top cup went) is home to some of the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents. At around 5,000 meters deep, the cup experiences nearly 500 times the pressure we experience at sea level. And since styrofoam is a foam made of air pockets inside a hydrocarbon polymer, it compresses under the added weight!

The bottom cup began as a normal-sized drinking utensil. But after it went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the world’s deepest point), it returned the size of a ketchup packet. The pressure down there is about a thousand times higher than at the surface!

It reminds me of a song …

(Squashed cups via Southern Fried Science and imgur)