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(Quelle: h-e-y-lauren, via whisperingwillow-deactivated201)
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Inside Glacier Caves
Photography by Eric Guth.
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posted by weandthecolor//facebook//twitter
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Geckos…the ultimate free climbers!
Well we know about Van der Waals forces right? :) So for any of you who have forgotten it involves very weak attractive and repulsive bonds.
So what does that mean? That means geckos can walk UPSIDE DOWN ON GLASS! That is bad ass!
Here’s the Wikipedia bit:
The toes of the gecko have a special adaptation that allows them to adhere to most surfaces without the use of liquids or surface tension. The spatula tippedsetae on gecko footpads demonstrate that the attractive forces that hold geckos to surfaces are van der Waals interactions between the finely divided setae and the surfaces themselves, although a more recent study suggests that water molecules of roughly monolayer thickness (present on virtually all natural surfaces) also play a role.
These van der Waals interactions involve no fluids; in theory, a boot made of synthetic setae would adhere as easily to the surface of the International Space Station as it would to a living room wall, although adhesion varies with humidity and is dramatically reduced under water, suggesting a contribution from capillarity.The setae on the feet of geckos are also self cleaning and will usually remove any clogging dirt within a few steps.Teflon, which has very low van der Waals forces, is the only known surface to which a gecko cannot stick.
Geckos’ toes seem to be “double jointed”, but this is a misnomer. Their toes actually bend in the opposite direction from our fingers and toes. This allows them to overcome the van der Waals force by peeling their toes off surfaces from the tips inward. In essence, this peeling action alters the angle of incidence between millions of individual setae and the surface, reducing the Van der Waals force. Geckos’ toes operate well below their full attractive capabilities for most of the time. This is because there is a great margin for error depending upon the roughness of the surface, and therefore the number of setae in contact with that surface.
Use of small van der Waals attraction force requires very large surface areas: every square millimeter of a gecko’s footpad contains about 14,000 hair-like setae. Each seta has a diameter of 5 micrometers. Human hair varies from 18 to 180 micrometers, so a human hair could hold between 3 and 36 setae. Each seta is in turn tipped with between 100 and 1,000 spatulae. Each spatula is 0.2 micrometer long (one five-millionth of a meter), or just below the wavelength of visible light.
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(via portais, baubauhaus)
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The 10-meter South Pole Telescope and the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) Telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, against the night sky with the Milky Way. The red lights are used to minimize light pollution, but still enable people to see while walking to and from the facility during the six months of darkness. Both of these telescopes collect data on cosmic microwave background radiation and black matter.
(via ianbrooks)
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Contact lenses will project images directly onto your eyeballs
Researchers at the University of Washington have been working on extremely tiny and semi-transparent LEDs designed to be integrated into contact lenses. So far, they’ve managed to create red pixels and blue pixels, and when they can figure out green ones, they’ll be able to make full color displays.
Despite being millimeters from your retinas, the images created by the lenses will be in perfect focus, and when the display is turned off, everything will be transparent. Since the lenses are inside your eyelids, though, you can’t un-see anything that they decide to project, which is something that you’ll have to consider when you’re watching something especially scary or gross on them. Power will come from a beltpack that transmits electricity wirelessly to a resonating antenna in the lens itself, and data will be transmitted the same way so that you don’t have to plug HDMI cables into your eye sockets.
(more at NewScientist.)
(Quelle: scienceandstuff)
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