Csmsdust

stop trying to find yourself and start creating yourself!!!!!!!!!!!!

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, from ‘Mythopoeia’

Crowd Vortices

The Feast of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain draws crowds of thousands. Scientists recently published an analysis of the crowd motion in these dense gatherings. The team filmed the crowds at the festival from balconies overlooking the plaza in 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Analyzing the footage, they discovered that at crowd densities above 4 people per square meter, the crowd begins to move in almost imperceptible eddies. (Image credit: still - San Fermín, animation - Bartolo Lab; research credit: F. Gu et al.; via Nature) Read the full article

No artist tolerates reality

- Nietzsche

The incredibly stunning Port Jackson Shark, which lives on coastal reefs in Australia

Though it can be solitary it prefers to stay in small groups and explore the sea floor with its friends

What I love most about this shark is how surreal it looks due to the patterns of its skin

It is friendly and curious of people

An oviparous shark, it lays spiral eggs to keep the current from dragging babies into the open ocean

Probably the coolest shark jaw I’ve ever seen, most of its teeth are round and flat in order to crush clams and mollusks

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Unusual antibiotic killing mechanism we just published in Nature

Our study about the unusual molecular mechanism behind the antibiotic activity of teixobactin can be read open access here: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05019-y

Figure: The target of teixobactin are bacteria-specific molecules (e.g. they do not exist in human cells) in outer membranes of bacteria. Teixobactin sits on the membrane and aggregates into fibrils, damaging the bacterial membrane and hindering its functions. We got these images by atomic force microscopy that has nanometer resolution. We can see individual teixobactin molecules coming to the bacterial membrane and forming the aggregate.

This is the first star from my research on antibiotics that I started at my postdoc in the Netherlands. More are coming out soon! The very first star was published in Nature, the most read journal in life sciences. I am in scientific heaven!

Retracing