A Field Guide To Awkwardness

exhibition-ism:

Carly Fischer creates realistic sculptures of trash entirely from paper 

explore-blog:

jtotheizzoe:

A brilliant series of minimalist typographic tributes to scientists and their discoveries by Kapil Ghagat (on Tumblr at bhagatkapil)

Best thing since these minimalist posters celebrating women in science.

(via drozkanandmrscary-deactivated20)

exhibition-ism:

Stained porcelain works from Belgium based artist Jeanne Opgenhaffen 

xshiromorix:

Just a reminder:

When Prophet Muhammad (sallahu alayhi wa sallam) was travelling on the road with his cousin, Al-Fadl ibn Abbas, a woman stopped him to ask him a question.  The woman was very beautiful, and Al-Fadl couldn’t help but stare at her.

Seeing this, Prophet Muhammad reached out his hand and turned his cousin’s face away.

He didn’t tell the woman to cover her face.

He didn’t tell her to change her clothing.

He didn’t tell her that her appearance was too tempting or indecent.

He averted his cousin’s impolite stare.

(via drozkanandmrscary-deactivated20)

nybg:

And so my dream of seeing a redwood as tall as the Burj Khalifa comes to a disappointing end. Still, the science behind the limitation is a pleasantly interesting consolation prize. —MN

science-junkie:

Why trees can’t grow taller than 100 metres

TYPICALLY, the taller the tree, the smaller its leaves. The mathematical explanation for this phenomenon, it turns out, also sets a limit on how tall trees can grow.

Kaare Jensen of Harvard University and Maciej Zwieniecki of the University of California, Davis, compared 1925 tree species, with leaves ranging from a few millimetres to over 1 metre long, and found that leaf size varied most in relatively short trees.

Jensen thinks the explanation lies in the plant’s circulatory system. Sugars produced in leaves diffuse through a network of tube-shaped cells called the phloem. Sugars accelerate as they move, so the bigger the leaves the faster they reach the rest of the plant. But the phloem in stems, branches and the trunk acts as a bottleneck. There comes a point when it becomes a waste of energy for leaves to grow any bigger. Tall trees hit this limit when their leaves are still small, because sugars have to move through so much trunk to get to the roots, creating a bigger bottleneck.

Jensen’s equations describing the relationship show that as trees get taller, unusually large or small leaves both cease to be viable (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/j6n). The range of leaf sizes narrows and at around 100 m tall, the upper limit matches the lower limit. Above that, it seems, trees can’t build a viable leaf. Which could explain why California’s tallest redwoods max out at 115.6 m.

Source: New Scientist.
Images: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4.