A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

Credit: Getty images; Mystery termite nest under the religion building in Chiang Rai province, Thailand

Inspired by the way termites build their nests, researchers at Caltech have developed a framework to design new materials that mimics the fundamental rules hidden in nature's growth patterns. The investigators showed that, using these rules, it is possible to create materials designed with specific programmable properties.

The U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study, led by Chiara Daraio, was published in the journal Science. "Termites are only a few millimeters in length, but their nests can stand as high as four meters — the equivalent of a human constructing a house the height of California's Mount Whitney," says Daraio.

Credit: crossref.org

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.

Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it's taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we're going to address that.

Credit: Getty images

Each beginning in a new profession is challenging, no matter the sphere one has chosen. At first, it looks like it isn't such a great effort but as soon as one realizes the size of the journey that has been undertaken it gets more and more appalling to continue. It is not rare that a lack of confidence and support scares and finally fails students and young scientific researchers. Here is a motivational speech by the world-renowned biologist E.O. Wilson that will make young scientists think twice before they abandon their dream.

Credit: Getty images

Astronomers have yet to fully understand how the most massive stars — those more than 100 times the mass of the sun — are formed. One particularly challenging piece of this puzzle is obtaining observations of these giants, which typically dwell in the densely populated hearts of dust-shrouded star clusters.

Giant stars also live fast and die young, burning through their fuel reserves in only a few million years. In comparison, the sun is less than halfway through its 10-billion-year lifespan. The combination of densely packed stars, relatively short lifetimes and vast astronomical distances makes distinguishing individual massive stars in clusters a daunting technical challenge.

Credit: Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman stands in front of a blackboard strewn with notation in his lab in Los Angeles, Californina. (Photo by Kevin Fleming/Corbis via Getty Images)

1. "We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed."

2. "With quantum physics, who needs drugs?"