Surfing with Coffee

Apple is participating in this year’s Hour of Code, the second annual worldwide event designed to help spark interest in and provide access to coding..

DESIGN: The Coffee-Making Alarm Clock

We need this because reasons. This one’s for the coffee drinkers amongst you - British designer Joshua Renouf has come up with a coffee making alarm clock which can wake you up with a fresh cup of joe.

Send your Wishes to Gino

Donate to support the “Gino Strong Fund" which supports travel costs for Gino’s kids and members of the Odjick family to travel to Vancouver to be with Gino

The reality, reported by German scientists this week in the journal Science, is much, much more complex. They pieced together the blobby jumble through microscopy and advanced protein science, giving us the best picture yet of what a nerve synapse really looks like.  

We’ve already talked about how cells are not bags of water filled with a few organelles, and the synapse is no exception, as it has to shuttle packages of chemicals in and out of the cell sometimes dozens of times per second. The 100+ trillion synapses in your brain all depend on this seemingly chaotic (but really it’s highly regulated) architecture to function.

Looking at this, it’s a wonder that our nerves work at all. But they do, and despite what looks like chaos, they work quite well. I mean, think about it (there they go working again) … they’re what let us figure all this out in the first place.

via freshphotons:

A 3D model of synaptic architecture. ”We used an integrative approach, combining quantitative immunoblotting and mass spectrometry to determine protein numbers; electron microscopy to measure organelle numbers, sizes, and positions; and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy to localize the proteins. Using these data, we generated a three-dimensional model of an “average” synapse, displaying 300,000 proteins in atomic detail.” Via.

Once upon a slide…the first microbiology book for 5 year olds!

At last! No more bed time fairy tales about damsels in distress, princesses in pink and knights in white shining armor.

Move over Disney. This is a world we should be opening our kids up to. Steeped in reality. A world 1000x more exciting than those lands too far far far away, and it is all playing out under our very noses, inside our refrigerators, outside our back doors and throughout our own bodies.

Thank you to Nicola Davies (author) and Emily Sutton (illustrator) for this beautiful non-fiction children’s book that introduces young readers to microscopy.

I can’t wait to buy this for my nieces.

Let me know if you need help with the histological sequel ;)

i-heart-histo

Sources:

View more of Emily’s beautiful artwork at her website

Find out more about award winning author Nicola at her blog/website

I have been waiting all year to post this.