Birthday Presents ✨️

shit man this got me emotional

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, from ‘Mythopoeia’

Karl Schwarzschild

He provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to a derivation of the Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole.

Schwarzschild accomplished this while serving in the German army during World War I. He died the following year from the autoimmune disease pemphigus, which he developed while at the Russian front. Various forms of the disease particularly affect people of Ashkenazi Jewish origin.

Asteroid 837 Schwarzschild is named in his honour, as is the large crater Schwarzschild, on the far side of the moon. (source) (biography) (more)

Abandoned library, roadside somewhere in Oregon.

The Myth of Dreamless Sleep

Consciousness never "switches off" because it isn't generated by the brain. Its sensory inputs can be switched off - during sleep or general anesthesia, for instance - but your consciousness is still there. For example, a small but consistent number of patients report out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) or near-death experiences (NDEs) while under general anesthesia. As someone with REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD) I can attest to this, since I act out dreams that occur during the non-REM phases of sleep.

ScienceAlert

We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep, Say Scientists

When it comes to dreamlessness, conventional wisdom states that consciousness disappears when we fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.  But res

Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the nebula's newborn star cluster, Melotte 15. IC 1805 is located about 7,500 light years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia.

Image Credit: Richard McInnis

Today I found a good video about merging tubes with different angles, ellipses, phase shift of sine waves, featuring sculptures by Frank Smullin.

This video is exceptionally comprehensive.

[Shared by hardm.ix on instagram: Text says: "A little more on the analytic constructivist sculpture of Frank Smullin, a professor of mine at Duke University who combined art and engineering in a way that reminded me a little of Kenneth Snelson and Tensegrity or Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes."]

Trying to do research on time

Physicists; uh yeah, space and time are one but we don't really know what they are actually, we use this highly specific magic crystal tho here have it

Neuroscientists: yeah, we also use the same crystal, but it doesn't matter because you don't experience time like that, we don't know

Some guy in 19th century, yeah time is not internally generated it is out there and you get it from the outside?? And then the idea took over the Europe

?? ? ?

Some neuroscientist: time doesn't exist, it's all happening at once, you brain is a time machine (the title of the book actually , one of my favorite)

Some other physicist: you're right, time doesn't exist in physics it's the humans that order things

?

Gravity?

What are we looking at?

Unusual antibiotic killing mechanism we just published in Nature

Our study about the unusual molecular mechanism behind the antibiotic activity of teixobactin can be read open access here: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05019-y

Figure: The target of teixobactin are bacteria-specific molecules (e.g. they do not exist in human cells) in outer membranes of bacteria. Teixobactin sits on the membrane and aggregates into fibrils, damaging the bacterial membrane and hindering its functions. We got these images by atomic force microscopy that has nanometer resolution. We can see individual teixobactin molecules coming to the bacterial membrane and forming the aggregate.

This is the first star from my research on antibiotics that I started at my postdoc in the Netherlands. More are coming out soon! The very first star was published in Nature, the most read journal in life sciences. I am in scientific heaven!