GARAKAMI

Black forest tattoo by Ariella Wundersam

Head over to marcelxo for more.

Chipicas Town House by Alejandro Sanchez Garcia Arquitectos

Fibonacci you crazy bastard….

As seen in the solar system (by no ridiculous coincidence), Earth orbits the Sun 8 times in the same period that Venus orbits the Sun 13 times! Drawing a line between Earth & Venus every week results in a spectacular FIVE side symmetry!!

Lets bring up those Fibonacci numbers again: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34..

So if we imagine planets with Fibonacci orbits, do they create Fibonacci symmetries?!

You bet!! Depicted here is a:

2 sided symmetry (5 orbits x 3 orbits)

3 sided symmetry (8 orbits x 5 orbits)

5 sided symmetry (13 orbits x 8 orbits) - like Earth & Venus

8 sided symmetry (21 orbits x 13 orbits)

I wonder if relationships like this exist somewhere in the universe….

Tell it your prescription, and the experimental screen makes blurry images clear for you.

People with vision problems, rejoice: A team from Microsoft, U.C. Berkeley, and MIT has created an experimental screen technology that would allow you to view your devices clearly without your glasses. 

What do you think when you see a bubble? Do you smile? Do you look lovingly at the pretty colours? Or do you, like the scientists throughout the Royal Institution’s history, start to work out its surface tension, properties or how it can be used to structure patterns?

Children, and adults let’s face it, are fascinated with making, catching and popping bubbles. They innately bring joy to everyone but far from being just child’s play they are also serious science.

The fascination of bubbles has been recorded since the days of the Etruscans, where vases from the period are decorated with children blowing bubbles out of pipes. Since then most children have grown up blowing bubbles for fun. However in 1804 Thomas Young while working at the Ri started to look at bubbles differently in his research looking into the cohesion of liquids. He determined that with a liquid there should always be a constant ‘angle of contact’, at which a surface film of a liquid meets a solid, developing an equation for this angle which is still in use today. This work was important in determining the size of a molecule, something which we take for granted today.

The next player in Ri ‘bubble science’ did not come along for another 100 years. Professor C.V. Boys was asked to undertake the Christmas Lecture series for the Royal Institution in 1899 on the subject of ‘Fluids in Motion and at Rest’. As part of this lecture series he concentrated on ‘Soap Bubbles and the Forces which mould them’. A subject of fascination to his young juvenile audience and one which allowed for lots of demonstrations and experiments but this was only the start. The next to undertake the mantel of this serious scientific research was Professor James Dewar, Professor of Chemistry at the Ri. In 1916 he started his work on the spectroscopic analysis of light reflected from a soap film. As part of his work he decided to undertake the challenge of creating a bubble in a jar and seeing how long it could exist. The press in those days thought that this was a modern wonder and each week reported on its progress and whether or not it had or was due to burst. Dewar, when asked when the bubble will burst, stated ‘No human person can say…. I did not know of the possibility of keeping a bubble so long. When it bursts I shall, if I live so long, give a lecture about it’. Dewar was true to his word and a year later gave a Friday Evening Discourse on ‘Soap bubbles of long duration’, showing off the bubble specimen which was still complete.