Frozen Glass I was pretty shocked to find out just how little liquid fresh water Earth contains, like we saw in this post. But I was equally shocked to find out that as much as one-fifth of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in the beauty above: Lake Baikal. Siberia’s Lake Baikal, not only the world’s oldest lake at ~25 million years of age, is the largest single fresh water source on the planet. The water is so deep and so pure that when it freezes it becomes a sort of cold, turquoise glass, giving an observer a lens that can see over 100 feet straight down. There’s more pictures not to miss at My Modern Met.
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Frozen Glass

I was pretty shocked to find out just how little liquid fresh water Earth contains, like we saw in this post. But I was equally shocked to find out that as much as one-fifth of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in the beauty above: Lake Baikal.

Siberia’s Lake Baikal, not only the world’s oldest lake at ~25 million years of age, is the largest single fresh water source on the planet. The water is so deep and so pure that when it freezes it becomes a sort of cold, turquoise glass, giving an observer a lens that can see over 100 feet straight down.

There’s more pictures not to miss at My Modern Met.

wnycradiolab: Penguins are colder than their surroundings, turns out.  Bonus: psychedelic penguin pics. (via Wired Science) Just goes to show you how efficient an insulation system penguins have developed. With outer temperatures reaching -40˚ F they are still able to maintain a body temperature above 100˚ F! Also file this under “doing ‘shrooms in Antarctica”.
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wnycradiolab: Penguins are colder than their surroundings, turns out.  Bonus: psychedelic penguin pics. (via Wired Science) Just goes to show you how efficient an insulation system penguins have developed. With outer temperatures reaching -40˚ F they are still able to maintain a body temperature above 100˚ F! Also file this under “doing ‘shrooms in Antarctica”.
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wnycradiolab: Penguins are colder than their surroundings, turns out.  Bonus: psychedelic penguin pics. (via Wired Science) Just goes to show you how efficient an insulation system penguins have developed. With outer temperatures reaching -40˚ F they are still able to maintain a body temperature above 100˚ F! Also file this under “doing ‘shrooms in Antarctica”.
Zoom Info
wnycradiolab: Penguins are colder than their surroundings, turns out.  Bonus: psychedelic penguin pics. (via Wired Science) Just goes to show you how efficient an insulation system penguins have developed. With outer temperatures reaching -40˚ F they are still able to maintain a body temperature above 100˚ F! Also file this under “doing ‘shrooms in Antarctica”.
Zoom Info

wnycradiolab:

Penguins are colder than their surroundings, turns out.  Bonus: psychedelic penguin pics. (via Wired Science)

Just goes to show you how efficient an insulation system penguins have developed. With outer temperatures reaching -40˚ F they are still able to maintain a body temperature above 100˚ F!

Also file this under “doing ‘shrooms in Antarctica”.

(via freshphotons)

Source: wnycradiolab

Catching a Snowflake This is what snowflakes really look like. Snow researchers (seriously, how cool of a job is that?) in Utah have developed a high-speed camera set-up that captures images of snowflakes as they fall from the sky. It gives us a nearly three-dimensional view of these tumbling crystals of frozen water vapor, and may help refine weather and storm predictions. That’s not the coolest part, of course. What I find fascinating is that our image of a “snowflake” as a single hexagonal crystal, with infinitely-varied fractally frozen arms, is completely wrong. More often than not, they’re imperfect clumps of randomly branched ice. The old rule of “no two snowflakes are alike” still holds, it just got a lot more complicated.  (via TechNewsDaily)
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Catching a Snowflake

This is what snowflakes really look like.

Snow researchers (seriously, how cool of a job is that?) in Utah have developed a high-speed camera set-up that captures images of snowflakes as they fall from the sky. It gives us a nearly three-dimensional view of these tumbling crystals of frozen water vapor, and may help refine weather and storm predictions.

That’s not the coolest part, of course. What I find fascinating is that our image of a “snowflake” as a single hexagonal crystal, with infinitely-varied fractally frozen arms, is completely wrong. More often than not, they’re imperfect clumps of randomly branched ice.

The old rule of “no two snowflakes are alike” still holds, it just got a lot more complicated. 

(via TechNewsDaily)

Source: technewsdaily.com

Frost Flowers Blooming in the Arctic Ocean are Found to be Teeming with Life These snowflake-like crystals grow from tiny imperfections in floating sea ice, the super-frigid air causing water vapor to crystallize right out of the air into the stunning ordered shapes you see.  These “frost flowers” have been found to harbor microbial life, far more than the sea around them, creating tiny ecosystems like forzen coral. Life does find a way, huh? Read more about the research of these “frost flower” microbial communities here. (via Colossal)
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Frost Flowers Blooming in the Arctic Ocean are Found to be Teeming with Life

These snowflake-like crystals grow from tiny imperfections in floating sea ice, the super-frigid air causing water vapor to crystallize right out of the air into the stunning ordered shapes you see. 

These “frost flowers” have been found to harbor microbial life, far more than the sea around them, creating tiny ecosystems like forzen coral. Life does find a way, huh?

Read more about the research of these “frost flower” microbial communities here.

(via Colossal)

Source: thisiscolossal.com

Why Do We Say That Someone Is "Hot"?

Almost universally (throughout the English language, at least), heat is associated with passion, anger and attractiveness, while cold is associated with sadness, disapproval, and negative emotions. While some of this is surely due to the evolution of our artful and creative lexicon, our brains seem to naturally associate such feelings.

At Scientific American, Kai MacDonald digs in to the primal links between physical and emotional:

In individual brains, then, the multichannel experience of being safe with another (initially, a mother) is forever fused with the experienced physical warmth that comes with being safe, fed and held. At the level of both brain and experience, this multi-sensory co-experiencing forms a wordless bedrock that implicitly grounds relational language, interpersonal evaluation, social cognition, and even imagined ingestion. “Warm” triggers “trust,” as well as the reverse.

The mercury in our brain’s actual thermometer, the temperature regulation region, seems to overlap quite a bit with the social thermometer.

For those of you who speak languages other than English, does this “hot/cold” association hold up?