Month: March 2015

Dubai Make Believe

Dubai’s Museum of the Future to be Partially 3D Printed. Inscriptions from Sheikh Mohammed’s Arabic poetry appears to be etched into the facade, while a massive hologram is shown to fill the structure’s oval-shaped void.

all of these middle east oil kleptocracies are creating some interesting infrastructure in their flailing efforts to attain cultural relevance.

Vastly better X-ray crystallography

Free-electron lasers provide femtosecond X-ray pulses with a peak brilliance 10 billion times higher than any previously available X-ray source. such pulses could outrun key damage processes and allow structure determination without the need for crystallization and would be sufficient to image HIV, influenza and herpes, and further improvements may soon allow researchers to tackle the study of single proteins

it would be a huge improvement if you don’t need to grow crystals.

Travels with My Censor

Very interesting essay on the media landscape for books in China. It’s rare that you get insights like this.

The issue that once concerned me—the blunt portrayal of poverty—no longer seemed sensitive, because China had changed so quickly. “With the distance of time,” Emily wrote me, in 2011, “everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.” On the recent book tour, reporters often mentioned nostalgia, and the relentless pace of life in China made it hard to document details. “Sometimes in China you have this feeling of suffocation, and it’s hard to notice all these things”. Maybe because you’re a foreigner, you can be a little separate. Maybe it’s easier to be still. We have a phrase, yi bubian ying wanbian”—you cope with change by staying the same. “If you don’t move, then you notice everything moving around you.”

Cold life

fun interdisciplinary work:

Cornell chemical engineers and astronomers offer a template for life that could thrive in a harsh, cold world – specifically Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. Their theorized cell membrane, composed of small organic nitrogen compounds and capable of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees below zero

2022-12-02: The cosmic significance of life on Titan

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has a surface temperature of 94 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, about a third of Earth’s. Titan is located 9.5x farther than the Earth-Sun separation and the surface temperature of Solar system objects declines roughly as the square-root of their distance from the Sun.

Coincidentally, 94 degrees was the temperature of the cosmic microwave background 100ma after the Big Bang when the first generation of stars formed. An object like Titan forming out of gas enriched by heavy elements from the first supernovae, would have had this surface temperature irrespective of its distance from a star. The bath of cosmic radiation would have kept the object warm for 10s of millions of years, sufficiently long for primitive forms of life to emerge on it.

This coincidence of temperatures raises the fascinating possibility of testing how early life could have arisen in the Universe by studying Titan. The question of whether Titan hosts life has cosmic implications. It could unravel the roots of Life in the Cosmos