Most Underappreciated Starter

Brine is your friend 

*gags then googles how to get rid of an emulsion*

PUMPKIN-SPICED FLUORESCENCE

Inside a pumpkin, seeds don’t need much chlorophyll—the molecule that helps plants convert light into food—because there isn’t a lot of light deep inside the fruit’s flesh. Instead of chlorophyll, the green seeds are chock-full of protochlorophyllide, a highly fluorescent molecule that glows orange-red under ultraviolet light and can be converted into chlorophyll a by an enzyme in the seeds. The enzyme reduces protochlorophyllide to produce chlorophyll when the enzyme encounters light, which occurs only after the seed has left the pumpkin and therefore needs to start producing its own food so it can grow. Helmut Brandl, a science communicator and professor at ETH Zurich, extracted this protochlorophyllide by grinding up pumpkin seeds and mixing them with nail polish remover (bottom row).

Submitted by Helmut Brandl

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just saying carrying around beakers of acid to splash on people is nowhere close to proper PPE

which STEM students you should fight

chemistry: it’s not that STEM students aren’t all nerds, it’s that some of those students carry around beakers of acid. even if you actually manage to punch them, they’ll spill their chemicals on you. also something about constantly drawing hexagons makes people scarily organized. don’t fight chemistry students.

biology: depends. some of them can poison you. but if they’re pre-med, they’ll probably thank you for fighting them, they’re so goddamn stressed. on the other hand, avoid fighting the neuro students. they’ll just set their lab rats on you.

physics: do you know how unnecessarily sidetracked they get? they wouldn’t even fight you. they would just attach you to a spring and calculate your natural frequency as you bounce back and forth until you vomit and don’t want to fight them anymore. 

astronomy: yeah you can totally fight them if you can find them. they’re probably in one of those creepy observing domes so if you feel like going out of your way to get attacked by an axe murderer, sure.

geology: they will hit you over the head with rocks and dump your body into a volcano. do not fight the geologists.  

math: you can fight the math majors, but there would be no fun in it. they wouldn’t put up much of a fight, their heads are so far in the clouds. they probably wouldn’t even notice getting beaten up if they’re in the middle of a problem. 

engineering: look do you want to get hit with a wrench and/or electrocuted

computer science: yes. do it. fight the CS students. every time you’ve ever gotten pissed at a computer, put that rage into your strikes. plus they’ve got such mouths, it’ll be really satisfying. fight them!

Earth as seen from Saturn.

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Space For All Species Mural

Charley Harper’s first ever mural ‘Space For All Species’ is located in the John Weld Peck Federal Building at 550 Main St. in downtown Cincinnati. Completed in 1964 the design is comprised of two 18×10½ ft panels that feature over 100 species of North American Animals. The tiles were made by Cambridge Tile Company in Cincinnati, OH. more…

The cellular structure of wood as seen through a Victorian microscope. (via)

Louise Langgaard | See more work

What is the shape of a falling raindrop? Surface tension keeps only the smallest drops spherical as they fall; larger drops will tend to flatten. The very largest drops stretch and inflate with air as they fall, as shown in the image above. This shape is known as a bag and consists of a thin shell of water with a thicker rim at the bottom. As the bag grows, its shell thins until it ruptures, just like a soap bubble. The rim left behind destabilizes due to the surface-tension-driven Plateau-Rayleigh instability and eventually breaks up into smaller droplets. This bag instability limits the size of raindrops and breaks large drops into a multitude of smaller ones. The initial size of the drop in the image was 12 mm, falling with a velocity of 7.5 m/s. The interval between each image is 1 ms. (Photo credit: E. Reyssat et al.)

The cutest little handful of baby nudibranches you ever did see… (Source: http://ift.tt/1JGTKao)

In ‘Wild Design,’ Vintage Illustrations Expose the Patterns and Shapes Behind All Life on Earth