BMW Kinetic Sculpture

I generally like abstract sculptures, but kinetic abstract sculptures are even better. Its also nice to see a company that puts a lot of effort into engineering put some effort into art. Art and science/engineering are really not all that different, though the people that study them might be. Well, this video gets pretty neat after about a minute. Its a bunch of metal balls suspended on wires from the ceiling making 3D sculptures.

Foam/Poppin' Possibilities

 This is quite the amazing video if you like patterns. My favorite part: thinking about the quantum length scale as a foam. Interesting because I had been thinking about this for the past couple of years and I'm glad to hear others may have thought of it too. My theory: Poppin' Possibilities. Infinite possibilities are arranged in a foam structure, and you can pop each of those possibility bubble just by thinking of that possibility. The world around you is the result of popping all other possibilities. Crazy? Probably...pop.

Soft Body Physics- Ripples in a Water Baloon

This video shows the way waves are transferred through a soft body. I used to poke my dad's belly in the swimming pool and I would see the same thing. Some parts of the video look almost like they were computer generated. Freaky how similar real life and virtual life are becoming. And that's one tough water balloon.

Panspermia and Exogenesis

Panspermia translated from Greek as "all seed" (Pan = all, spermia = seed), is the theory that forms of life exist throughout the universe and are just floating around waiting to hit something that provides the right conditions for them to grow on. Generally, it's thought that this would happen in the form of dormant bacteria on asteroids that hit planets that allow the bacteria to wake up and multiply. This is where exogenesis comes into play. Exogenesis is the theory that life on earth was started somewhere else in the universe and was brought here either randomly or on purpose by aliens. Neither of these theories are supposed to explain how life started, just how it might have spread/will spread.

Today there was some evidence found on a meteorite that two of the four nucleic acids that make up DNA might have come from space along with some related molecules that are not used by life on earth. Neato, I want some synthetic space DNA.

Magnetic "Micro-robots"

These magnetic particles are manipulated by magnetic fields to open and close their pincers and pick up a glass bead to move it around. The particles lie at the interface between layers of oil and water. A magnetic field perpendicular to the interface causes the particles to form the clumps/"micro-robots" and a magnetic field parallel to the interface causes them to swim. So the next step is obviously to filter different beads from a mixed bag of them. And then, world domination.

Nerdy Jokes

Make the world go 'round.

Acrylic/PMMA

Acrylic a.k.a. PMMA a.k.a. poly(methyl methacrylate) a.k.a. that plastic that disguises itself as silica glass. It's just as clear as glass but doesn't shatter when you drop it (from a reasonable height). It's easier to machine than glass, so it's used for more complicated designs. That's not to say it's easy to machine, because it's not, but it is a lot tougher than glass.

A little bit of history: developed in 1928 and commercialized in 1933 it was hailed as a shatter proof replacement for silica glass. It was first branded as Plexiglas by the Rohm and Haas Company and has since been sold under names such as Lucite and Perspex. Its chemical structure is shown below.  

Why is PMMA so cool? Well, it can be easily cast to make basically any shape you want. And its clear, and you can add dyes to make sweet translucent objects, and you can embed stuff in in (kind of like how amber embeds bugs).