Anthony - 20 - Florida - Chem major - Cuban/Chinese-American
On this blog, you'll find posts about video games, cartoons, science, men, and random glimpses into my life.
Feel free to hit me up. I love making new friends and I'm a pretty nice guy, I promise. :b
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Fungi May Be Able to Replace Plastics One Day
Fungi, with the exception of shitake and certain other mushrooms, tend to be something we associate with moldy bread or dank-smelling mildew. But they really deserve more respect. Fungi have fantastic capabilities and can be grown, under certain circumstances, in almost any shape and be totally biodegradable. And, if this weren’t enough, they might have the potential to replace plastics one day. The secret is in the mycelia.
How to make your ramen 9001x better, courtesy of /ck/
And you can buy roast beef and roast chicken on the internet. I am set for ramen for like a year now.
QUICK EGG IN UR RAMEN TRICK MY FRIEND TAUGHT ME IN HIGH SCHOOL
pour just enough water into your pot to cover your noodles and other ingredients, then get a small cup/fancy measuring 1 cup cup or w/e and measure out another cuppa watta. dump that shit in too.
make ur ramen. just start boiling and dump whatever you’re supposed to put in in the beginning. u know how to make ramen this isn’t ramen for snot nosed sobbing beginners ok
KEY PART: you know how it says on the back of the package to cook for about 4-5 minutes?? we’re cooking for 5 minutes. wait for your ramen to cook for the first three minutes. stare hungrily if you must. but the EXACT MOMENT 3 minutes hit here’s what you do:
- SCREAM. and then stir your noodles to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pot. (scream is optional) also make sure your broth is still more or less covering your noodles, if its not add a bit more. it doesn’t matter if some is still sticking up we just don’t want chewy noodles (unless you’re into that) (i’m into that)
- make a lil hole in your noodles. this little hole must have broth in it and nothing more. make it in the middle or the side it honestly doesn’t matter you just need a clear shot to the bottom of the pot
- crack your egg and toss that mother into the hole.
- COVER EGG WITH NOODLES AS QUICK AS YOU CAN
- DON’T. STIR.
- I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU STIR FOR THE REMAINING MINUTE AND A HALF YOU probably won’t ruin anything you’ll just have egg drop soup i guess but IF YOU DON’T STIR
- Congratulations, you have poached an egg in your broth! Your poached egg now tastes like your ramen broth. Revel in your victory.
- no seriously that egg will be mildly chewy deliciousness oh my god if you can perfect this technique you will never have your egg in your ramen another way again
this is as close as you’ll get to ramen made in a restaurant…
alskylab:
A thousand fuck yeahs for science.
Side note: The research team called it the Lazarus project.
What you can learn in the shower
My inner chemist got the better of me just as I was gonna throw out an empty bottle of body wash. I decided to find out what all the complicated names meant and what they were for. For more info just ask me or check the content source for this post =)
Ingredients:
Water, Sodium laureth sulfate, Cocamidopropyl betaine, Cocamide MEA, Sodium Chloride, PPG - 9, Menthol, Propylene glycol, Citric acid, Tetrasodium EDTA, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothioazolinone
Cholesterol
This fascinating molecule plays a rather important role in your body, maybe more so than you realised. Cholesterol tests are something we’re aware of, but what actually happens when our cholesterol is too high? Or too low, for that matter?
Every one of our cells is bound by a membrane and this membrane plays an important role of maintaining concentration gradients of chemicals among other things. It is important that this membrane be fluid so that proteins and lipids embedded within the membrane can move around to facilitate transport across the membrane and various other functions.
Cholesterol plays an important role in maintaining fluidity of the membrane. Cholesterol embeds itself in the membrane and proceeds to aid in making the membrane a little more firm. Without cholesterol the membrane would be far too fluid and your membranes would turn to mush, but with too much cholesterol your membranes would harden and you would no loner be able to maintain concentration gradients of such nutrients as Ca2+ and K+. If this could instantaneously happen to you, you would feel an anesthetic-like feeling and then quickly lose consciousness and die.
What we can learn from this is: everything in moderation.
Images courtesy of Wikimedia
(Source: throughascientificlens)
The Get More Out of Google Infographic Summarizes Online Research Tricks for Students
I consistently forget these tricks. Now I have a visual. Thanks, Internet.
I wish I’d known this in undergrad.
Sending this to my coworkers on Monday.
Ever noticed how oil in puddles of water appears to make a rainbow?
This is because the oil spreads out in a thin film of varying thickness over the puddle. As incident light rays strike the surface, they are either transmitted or reflected at the top surface of the film. Rays that are transmitted reach the bottom surface of the film where they can once again be either transmitted or reflected. Light rays reflected from the upper and bottom surfaces interfere; and the degree of constructive or destructive is dependent on the phases of both rays. As a result of the varying thickness of the layer, the angle of reflection varies and the wavelength of light that corresponds to the constructive interference of two rays, is the color that appears. The rainbow pattern is due to the fact that there are multiple angles of reflection. The phenomenon is known as thin-film interference.
MIT’s artificial leaf is ten times more efficient than the real thing
The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.
Nocera’s leaf is stable — operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests — and made of widely available, inexpensive materials — like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It’s also powerful, as much as ten times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.
With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14 terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day.
Dr. Alexis J. Lomakin
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Carnegie Institution of Washington
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Specimen: Xenopus melanophore, showing microtubules, microtubule plus-ends and nucleus
Technique: Fluorescence, 60xMicrotubules are a component of the cytoskeleton. These cylindrical polymers of tubulin can grow as long as 25 micrometers and are highly dynamic. The outer diameter of microtubule is about 25 nm. Microtubules are important for maintaining cell structure, providing platforms for intracellular transport, forming the mitotic spindle, as well as other cellular processes.There are many proteins that bind to microtubules, including motor proteins such as kinesin and dynein, severing proteins like katanin, and other proteins important for regulating microtubule dynamics.
Blood Red?
Ever wonder why Spock has green blood? Ask an avid Star Trek fan and they will tell you it’s because his Vulcan haemoglobin, the protein in blood cells that carries oxygen, is based on copper. Human haemoglobin (depicted here in a painting by Irving Geis) is however based on iron. Each haemoglobin molecule is constructed of four identical building blocks made of globin protein (purple) and heme (red). It is the heme group that gives our blood its distinctive red colour. Each heme contains an iron atom surrounded by a ring structure called porphyrin. When porphyrin is bound to iron carrying oxygen, it produces a red colour. While evolution paired up porphyrins with iron in humans, the same is not true for all creatures on earth. Molluscs, like Spock, also use copper giving their porphyrins a green hue.
Written by Lux Fatimathas
