Food For Thought

COFFEE STAIN UNDER A MICROSCOPE

Vin Kitayama, an artist and environmental researcher, created this image from something fairly mundane: an evaporating drop of espresso. Kitayama placed the drop on a microscope slide and then snapped pictures through a polarized light microscope at 4× magnification. As the coffee dried, solid compounds that were dissolved in the coffee, such as caffeine and chlorogenic acid, started forming small crystals. In the polarized light, these crystals shimmered different colors. The image won 9th place in the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition.

Credit: Vin Kitayama

More Chemistry in Pictures and C&EN content:

U.S. Senators Push for Ban on Caffeine Powder

Caffeinated Cocrystals

Great quote sent out today from One Mind Dharma:

“People with a misconception about meditation believe that all thoughts should cease. We cannot, in fact, establish ourselves in a state devoid of thoughts. The fruit of meditation is not the absence of thoughts, but the fact that thoughts cease to harm us. Once enemies, they become friends.” – Bokar Rinpoche

The colors in this Indicolite by @manyminerals are so gorgeous ///// 

instagram.com/manyminerals

This week was a revolutionary week in the sciences - not because we discovered a new fundamental particle or had a new breakthrough in quantum computing - but because some of the most prominent world leaders announced an initiative which asserts that European scientific papers should be made freely available to all by 2020.

This would legally only impact research supported by public and public-private funds, which are a vast portion of the papers produced annually; however, the goal is to make all science freely available.

Gravitational diode could lead to futuristic Star Trek technologies - From teleportation to highly efficient energy generation

A very interesting press release appeared yesterday morning that was brought to our attention. A startup company, Gravitomagnetism, LLC, was granted a patent that enables it a multitude of applications ranging from energy generation to teleportation.

“Imagine one day having a wind-up watch-sized device that could power your entire house, your boat, your car and your airplane.” - Michael Boyd, Gravitomagnetism, LLC

The patent in question, “Device and Method to Produce Gravitomagnetic Induction, Mass Spin-Valve or Gravitational Rectifier | (PDF), has the following items as major applications that could be utilized from this technology:

Disk calibration (Approved in practice by USPTO)

Energy generation (Approved in practice by USPTO) - One square meter would produce near 20 Megawatts/meter² (Concept only)

Propulsion (Concept only)

Teleportation of matter and/or energy (Concept only)

After reading through the entire patent, I needed a beer to recover from the copious bureaucratic sections of necessary fluff and vast complicated material.