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Right before Halloween, the UK-based Lick Me I’m Delicious revealed the combination we’ve all been waiting for: jellyfish and ice cream.
The inventor, Charlie Harry Francis, claims to have been inspired by bioluminescent sea creatures and wanted to incorporate it into an ice cream. The luminescent protein is synthesized by a scientist in China, so no actual jellyfish were harmed in the making of this dessert. The calcium-activated protein only glows in the ice cream when it has been warmed up and agitated, so essentially, it lights up when you lick it.
In the natural world, animals use bioluminescence to communicate many things like attracting a mate, warning a predator, or lighting up the environment. The luminescent proteins have been synthesized for extensive use as biomarkers in cellular and molecular biology.
Public response to this green glow-in-the-dark ice cream has been mixed. Some are more than excited to get their hands on this new product while others are balking at the $220 per scoop price tag, which Francis himself describes as “insanely expensive.”
Oddly enough, there isn’t any information out there regarding flavor, as safety seems to be the prime concern. While there haven’t been any scientific studies on the topic, Francis has been using himself as a guinea pig: “Is it safe to eat? Well I tried some and I don't seem to be glowing anywhere, so we'll go with a yes for now.”
What is next to come out of the Lick Me I'm Delicious kitchen? “Next we're working on an invisible ice cream. Any scientists or magicians out there who think they can help, please get in touch.” [Reply]
Yeah I've seen it. I can't believe people are complaining about cockroaches being used under these circumstances, when we make cockroach spray and powder to kill millions of them all their children and everything else. Its just borderline retarded to say that this is mistreating an animal. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
Yeah I've seen it. I can't believe people are complaining about cockroaches being used under these circumstances, when we make cockroach spray and powder to kill millions of them all their children and everything else. Its just borderline retarded to say that this is mistreating an animal.
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
Yeah I've seen it. I can't believe people are complaining about cockroaches being used under these circumstances, when we make cockroach spray and powder to kill millions of them all their children and everything else. Its just borderline retarded to say that this is mistreating an animal.
They would hate to hear about our treatment of mice. [Reply]
(CNN) -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided your multicolored space distraction of the day: images of a swirling, six-sided weather feature on the surface of Saturn.
Scientists say the "Hexagon," the formation's working title at NASA, is unlike anything they've seen elsewhere.
They say the feature is "turbulent and unstable," packing 200-mph winds. That's nearly 50 mph stronger than the wind speed required for a Category 5 hurricane.
"A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades -- and who knows -- maybe centuries," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini team member at the California Institute of Technology.
The Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997 and has been in orbit around Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, since 2004. NASA hopes it will collect more pictures and other data of Saturn and its rings and moons through 2017.
Cassini had photographed the hexagon before. But the short video clip released this week is the first high-resolution image of the massive jet stream, and the first with color filters.
Cassini captured images of the hexagon over a 10-hour time period on December 10, 2012.
The images, which scientists are still analyzing, are rendered in "false color," a method that makes it easier to tell the difference between different parts of the storm. To human eyes, the hexagon and the planet's north pole would appear in tones of gold and blue.
Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004. But NASA has begun getting better images of the planet from Cassini since sunlight began bathing Saturn's northern hemisphere with the arrival of the planet's spring season in 2009. ("Seasons" on Saturn go on for years, as the distant planet's orbit around the sun takes 29 years.) [Reply]
A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.
In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.
Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.
In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.
In one paper2, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. In the other3, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.
“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team's work. Regime change
The findings “are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory”, Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”
“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.
Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.
Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory. [Reply]
