OKAY THIS ARTICLE IS SO COOL
I'm going to try to explain this in a comprehensible way, because honestly it's wild to wrap your head around even for me, who has a degree in chemistry. But bear with me.
Okay, so. Solids, right? They are rigid enough to hold their shape, but aside from that they are quite variable. Some solids are hard, others are soft, some are brittle or rubbery or malleable. So what determines these qualities? And what creates the rigid structure that makes a solid a solid? Most people would tell you that it depends on the atoms that make up the solid, and the bonds between those atoms. Rubber is flexible because of the polymers it's made of, steel is strong because of the metallic bonds between its atoms. And this applies to all solids. Or so everybody thought.
A paper published in the journal Nature has discovered that biological materials such as wood, fungi, cotton, hair, and anything else that can respond to the humidity in the environment may be composed of a new class of matter dubbed "hydration solids". That's because the rigidity and solidness of the materials doesn't actually come from the atoms and bonds, but from the water molecules hanging out in between.
So basically, try to imagine a hydration solid as a bunch of balloons taped together to form a giant cube, with the actual balloon part representing the atoms and bonds of the material, and the air filling the balloons as the water in the pores of the solid. What makes this "solid" cube shaped? It's not because of the rubber at all, but the air inside. If you took out all the air from inside the balloons, the structure wouldn't be able to hold its shape.
Ozger Sahin, one of the paper's authors, said
"When we take a walk in the woods, we think of the trees and plants around us as typical solids. This research shows that we should really think of those trees and plants as towers of water holding sugars and proteins in place. It's really water's world."
And the great thing about this discovery (and one of the reasons to support its validity) is that thinking about hydration solids this way makes the math so so so much easier. Before this, if you wanted to calculate how water interacts with organic matter, you would need advanced computer simulations. Now, there are simple equations that you can do in your head. Being able to calculate a material's properties using basic physics principles is a really big deal, because so far we have only been able to do that with gasses (PV=nRT anyone?). Expanding that to a group that encompasses 50-90% of the biological world around us is huge.
Total Solar Eclipse l April 2024 l U.S. & Canada
Cr. Deran Hall l Rami Ammoun(236) l GabeWasylko l REUTERS l KendallRust l Joshua Intini l Alfredo Juárez l KuzcoKhanda
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, University of Copenhagen researchers have become the first to see the formation of three of the earliest galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. The sensational discovery contributes important knowledge about the universe and is now published in Science. For the first time in the history of astronomy, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have witnessed the birth of three of the universe's absolute earliest galaxies, somewhere between 13.3 and 13.4 billion years ago.
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El Ojo ‘The Eye’ Island Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
First discovered by Argentinian filmmaker Sergio Neuspiller in 2003, El Ojo is an uninhabited circular rotating floating island located within a slightly larger circular lake in the Paraná Delta in the Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. This island is constantly rotating on its own axis due to the flow of the river beneath it. The island was named because of its resemblance to an eye when viewed from above: as the island rotates within its surrounding circular lake, the eye appears to move.
The Moon Dressed Like Saturn ©
Someone captured the solar eclipse on an airplane
Milky Way Over Easter Island
The 2nd full moon of August 2023 l Rami Ammoun
After an academic career at U.C. Riverside and Caltech, Chris Birch became a track cyclist on the U.S. National Team. She was training for the 2020 Olympics when she was chosen as an astronaut candidate. https://go.nasa.gov/49WJKHj
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Hey, so--we cooled your boyfriend down to a hundredth of a kelvin above absolute zero. Yeah, it was so cold that all of the chemical reactions in his body ceased. Sorry. We, uh, yeah, we used him as a dielectric material in a tiny qubit. And then we quantum-entangled him with another qubit, just to see if we could. Sorry. Yeah, anyway, we thawed him out after two weeks and apparently he's doing fine now. Didn't really teach us anything about how quantum processes work in biological systems, but it sure was, uh, cool. If you'll pardon the pun.