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No matter how long the slinky is, the bottom of the slinky will stay still (hover) until the top reaches it. Even if the slinky is over 1000 feet long.

Via nature.com in the article “Evolution of an HIV glycan-dependent broadly neutralizing antibody epitope through immune escape”

Nanofilm Prevents Premature Implant Failures Every year, more than a million Americans receive an artificial hip or knee prosthesis. Such implants are designed to last many years, but in about 17 percent of patients who receive a total joint replacement, the implant eventually loosens and has to be replaced early, which can cause dangerous complications for elderly patients. To help minimize these burdensome operations, a team of MIT chemical engineers has developed a new coating for implants that could help them better adhere to the patient’s bone, preventing premature failure. Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Nanofilm-Could-Prevent-Hip-Implant-Failures-042012.aspx

Stereoscopic image, to be viewed in crossview technique. (Flickr : voxel123)

“The image is the result of fiber tractography from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. It illustrates the white matter of the brain, or in other words, its structural connections. The red smooth surface represents a glioblastoma tumor. We can see the effect of repulsion and infiltration of this mass on the white matter fiber pathways. A distance colormap is used for interpretation. Blue fibers mean that they are located within a safe distance of the tumor whereas red fibers are in a close perimeter to the tumor, and can cause severe post-operation deficits, if resected.” -Cerebral Infiltration, Maxime Chamberland, David Fortin, Maxime Descoteaux, Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab. 

Engineers and designers are giving commercial aircraft a makeover, in a bid to make them faster, greener and more efficient. Look up into the skies today at a passing aeroplane and the view is not that much different to the one you would have seen 60 years ago. Then and now, most airliners have two wings, a cigar-shaped fuselage and a trio of vertical and horizontal stabilizers at the tail. If it isn’t broke, the mantra has been, why fix it, particularly when your design needs to travel through the air at several hundred miles an hour packed with people. But that conservative view could soon change. Rising fuel prices, increasingly stringent pollution limits, as well as a surge in demand for air travel, mean plane designers are going back to their drawing boards. And, now, radical new shapes and engine technologies are beginning to emerge, promising the biggest shake-up in air travel since de Haviland introduced the first commercial jet airliner in 1952. Of course, it would be wrong to say nothing has changed in the last few decades, says Rich Wahls, an aerodynamicist at Nasa’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “New model airliners don’t come out every year like cars, but it’s not as if they haven’t been evolving under the skin the whole time. There’s so much more technology in there nowadays.” (via BBC - Future - Technology - Radical planes take shape)

IC 5067, IC 5070 (LBN 353) - Emission Nebulae and Herbig-Haro 555 in Sygnus

The Emerald lakes are explosion craters on the massif at Mount Tongariro, a compound volcano on the North Island of New Zealand.

The sun in Calcium K as imaged through a refractor telescope.