wood
milhayser | April 6, 2014Perovskite solar cells can not only emit light, they can also emit up to 70% of absorbed sunlight as lasers.
Critical signaling molecules can be used to convert stem cells to neural progenitor cells, increasing the yield of healthy motor neurons and decreasing the time required to grow them.
Mexican blind cavefish are so close to their sighted kin that they are considered the same species, but they use pressure waves (from opening and closing their mouths) to navigate in the dark.
Electrostatic assembly allows luminescent elements (like Europium) to be embedded in nanodiamonds; these glowing…
sastyk | February 1, 2012Counting Out Rhyme
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow. - Edna St. Vincent Millay
I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to…
stoat | July 19, 2011Every now and again, people get a little bit confused when they realise that the thing we all call the "greenhouse effect" is not the mechanism that warms greenhouses. This is nothing new; R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse pointed it out in 1909. The wikipedia [[Greenhouse effect]] page states this explicitly (because I added it. I had a very long edit war with some bozo who didn't believe it). Sometimes septics - or simply the badly confused - get very excited, because they think it tells you something useful about the actual greenhouse effect - usually, they think it proves…
stoat | January 7, 2011This has been on my website http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html for some time now; but websites are so tedious to update. So I think I'll copy it here; more may follow. And it will distract the squabbling children. Note that as of now, this is the maintained copy; the version on my website is now longer "live".
R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse
The following text is from the Philosophical magazine (more properly the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine (and Journal of Science?); its name has morphed since), 1909, vol 17, p319-320. Cambridge UL…
sastyk | November 4, 2010Note: A cold, wet day in November seems like as good a day as any to talk about owning a wood cookstove, re-running a piece I first wrote in 2007. When people come to my house, they are often a little disappointed to see that it looks pretty much like other houses. But the wood cookstove really is different than what most people know - even folks who heat with wood usually don't cook with it as well. And while heating and cooking with wood aren't appropriate in every environment, it is appropriate to mine, and maybe to more people than have given it thought before. I also know it is one…
rallain | March 30, 2010This isn't much - really it is part of another post I am working on. The point of this post is to calculate the density of this piece of wood.
Really, there is a reason for this. I saw this little stick (sticklette?) and noticed that it was very cylindrically shaped. So, what if I just pretend it is a cylinder to calculate the volume? This way I won't have to get it wet or anything (because I might need this stick later).
First the mass
Yes, there is some uncertainty in the mass - but it is small. I put the stick on balance and I will use a value of m = 28.9 g or 0.0289 kg.
Volume
The…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2010tags: How It's Made: Toothpicks, material science, engineering, technology, streaming video
This video follows a majestic birch log as it goes through the process of being made into millions of itty bitty toothpicks.
bioephemera | April 26, 2009
One of the sucky things about viral interest in offbeat art from small vendors is that it always immediately depletes the supply. Like this fabulous minimalist plywood octopus from inthewoods' etsy shop. Sure, you can still get a plywood squirrel with a plywood acorn, but where's the sinister, feverish Cthulhulian majesty in that? Frustrated now!
Via monoscope