I wish more people had this attitude.

skaterboytae:

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odor that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. This might seem a supreme final act of social responsibility. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid [a fairly complex molecule, CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH, where = stands for a double chemical bond]. 

What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid?

Then, no matter how strapping and vigorous it might be, it is carried “kicking and screaming” out of the hive. Even the Queen bee, if she’s painted with invisible amounts of oleic acid, will be subjected to this indignity.

Do the bees understand the danger of corpses decomposing in the hive? Are they aware of the connection between death and oleic acid? Do they have any idea what death is? Do they think to check the oleic acid signal against other information, such as healty spontaneous movement? The answer to all these questions is, almost certainly, No. In the life of the hive there’s no way that a bee can give off detectable whiff of oleic acid other than by dying. Elaborate contemplative machinery is unnecessary. Their perceptions are adequate for their needs.

Ann Druyan & Carl Sagan, Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors: Who Are We?, What Thin Partitions 

Huh. How interesting… I wonder if they have any idea what they’re doing when they remove fellow bees from the hive or if it’s all purely instinctual.

A lot of material is covered in organic chemistry I & II, but something that was not covered (for me, anyway) were indoles:

Aromatic (thanks to nitrogen’s lone pair, getting to that magic number tenfor Hückel’s rule) and heterocyclic, indole is a bicyclic organic compound. The third carbon position is the most reactive position for electrophilic aromatic substitution. Why? It probably has to do with stability. Removing pi electrons from a benzene ring is tough, so it makes sense that it’s going to come from the pyrrole part of this bicyclic molecule instead. Now as to why the electrophile will add to C3 rather than C2… I’m not totally sure. Though I’m betting any intermolecular interactions on C3 are more likely to occur because a double bond reforming from C3 to C2 has to happen to avoid any charges left over… having the electrophile bond on C2 risks this. At least that’s my theory, if someone has any better insight, let me know!

This is all important to me because my research over the summer involves indoles in some fashion. I’m doing a lot of green chemistry work on a compound calledindole-3-acetic acid(IAA), a compound found in plants that are crucial for plant growth and development… so yes, IAA is a renewable resource!:

As you can see, the C3 position is bonded to acetic acid. Confirming that C3 is really most reactive position. Understanding indoles will be really important for me for my green chemistry research.

Pulsars

Ever look up at a clear night sky and notice some of the stars blink a bit more than others? They dwindle and fade in and out at different rates, almost making the skies look like sparkling water. What you are looking at most of the time is actual stars that are making their way to the end of their life. The moment prior to their eventual death

But to understand what a Pulsar is you need to Understand what Neutron stars are as well. Neutron stars are one of the possible ends for a star. They result from massive stars which have mass greater than 4 to 8 times that of our Sun. After these stars have finished burning their nuclear fuel, they undergo a supernova explosion. This explosion blows off the outer layers of a star into a beautiful supernova remnant. The central region of the star collapses under gravity. It collapses so much that protons and electrons combine to form neutrons. Hence the name “neutron star”.

Simply put, pulsars are rotating neutron stars. And pulsars appear to pulse because they rotate, Like shown in the figures below & above.

Pulsars are spinning neutron stars that have jets of particles moving almost at the speed of light streaming out above their magnetic poles. These jets produce very powerful beams of light. In addition, since stars variate in energy output, every single pulsar in the night sky is unique and has it’s own “pulsating” beacon. Kind of the same way species here on Earth have variations of the beating heart.

Information Via: NASA

Very cool to know!

Not to long ago I got a grant from my college’s Center for Sustainability to do green chemistry research over 10 weeks during the Summer. This actually started a couple days ago, and it has been great so far. I’m learning a lot and I’m practicing lab techniques— which is something I’ve felt I needed more practice with. And now I’ll get all the practice I need and more!

I’ll most likely be posting green chemistry-related subject matter more frequently now. Gotta fill up Tumblr with green chem!

ikenbot:

Amazing Video of Solar Eclipse Shows Sun’s Structure

This time-lapse video of Sunday’s solar eclipse highlights the Sun’s outer layers

About the video: The photographer Cory Poole constructed the video by pasting together 700 photographs taken with a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope. According to Jason Kottke, Poole used a filter that only allows light from hydrogen atoms moving from the 2nd excited state to the 1st excited state. This allows Poole to highlight the chromosphere, the Sun’s lower atmosphere.

Amazing! Makes me wish I lived near central United States so I could have seen this.

Collaboration is so important, especially in the sciences. Not just certain fields of science with other fields of science— physics and biology, geology and chemistry, etc. But with disciplines outside of math and science.

This article talks a bit about that, about using art and science together to convey the negative effects of climate change and the positivity of sustainability. A few other things I’ve read also support the combination of art and science, as it is a great way to convey scientific thoughts and processes in a whole new way. And proper communication of ideas is critical in the sciences.

Geez. This makes me so upset. I wish could better fund NASA… space is so fascinating and has so much for us to learn from.

Amazing video. Very inspiring.

milleniumoftheblind:

I’m squidward
He’s squidward

We’re both squidward

future-physicist:

First satellite to be launched for the sole purpose of cleaning out the debris in our orbit. A tip of my hat to the Swiss.

Space junk is getting to be more and more of a problem, but while there have been plenty of serious talks on the subject, the first country to actually go and do something about it may be the Swiss. By 2016, Switzerland plans to launch a “janitor satellite” to start fighting the the space junk problem directly while the rest of us keep twiddling our thumbs.

CleanSpace One is, as far as we know, the first purpose-built spacecraft designed from the ground up to tackle the space junk problem directly. Costing just under $11 million, it’s simple, cheap, and hopefully, it’ll be effective. At only about a foot on a side and two feet long, CleanSpace One isn’t what you’d call intimidating, but it doesn’t need to be. After launch, the satellite will rendezvous with its target using a new kind of ultra-compact space engine, and once it gets within range, it’ll shoot out some sort of crazy plant-inspired grappling tendrils to grab onto the junk. Once it’s got hold, CleanSpace One will fire up its engine and drag the junk down into the atmosphere with it, burning them both to dust.

(Article Via)

Huh. That’s interesting. Though, it sort of concerns me, is all this… space junk “dust” going to have a negative affect on the atmosphere or wherever it happens to land?

Our Sun May Have Been Bigger Long Ago

Standard models predict that our sun was much dimmer in its youth, but devising a way to keep the early Earth from freezing over has not been easy for climate modelers. An alternative solution — currently being reexamined by a group of researchers — is to assume our sun started out a bit heftier (and therefore brighter) than expected.

Most stars tend to increase in luminosity as they get older. This is due to their cores becoming denser and thus hotter over time. Assuming our sun has followed this same trend, one can estimate that it was 30 percent fainter 4.5 billion years ago.

“The faint young sun presents us with a paradox, because the predicted temperatures on Earth and Mars would have been too cold for liquid water,” said Steinn Sigurdsson of Penn State University.

Too cold for liquid water? Not likely. Evidence in the oldest rocks suggests that Earth had liquid oceans as far back as 4.4 billion years ago. On Mars, scientists have built up a case that it too was warm and wet around 4 billion years ago.

Continue..

alchymista:

In the J0806 binary star system about 1600 light-ears away, two white dwarfs are continuously orbiting each other at a rate of one orbit every 321 seconds. Upon reaching the end of their lives, most smaller stars become white dwarfs.
(via) 

Coolest. Picture. Ever.

These are some crazy chemicals. This why we need green chemistry— so we don’t need to worry about chemicals bursting into flames and blood red, highly toxic, compounds!