fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, hold their position in the fast-moving water. As it turns out, those trout really were swimming effortlessly, in a manner demonstrated above. The fish you see here swimming behind the obstacle is dead. There’s nothing powering it, except the energy its flexible body can extract from the flow around it. 

The obstacle sheds a wake of alternating vortices into the flow, and when the fish is properly positioned in that wake, the vortices themselves flex the fish’s body such that its head and its tail point in different directions. Under just the right conditions, there’s actually a resonance between the vortices and the fish’s body that generates enough thrust to overcome the fish’s drag. This means the fish can actually swim upstream without expending any energy of its own! The researchers came across this entirely by accident, and one of the questions that remains is how the trout is able to sense its surroundings well enough to intentionally take advantage of the effect. (Image and research credit: D. Beal et al.; via PhysicsBuzz; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

thiscrypticworld:

Why Does Honey Last Forever?

In addition to having a low pH,
honey has almost no water content and is loaded with sugar. This helps
to dry out any bacteria that attempt to make its home in honey. Any
bacteria that find itself in honey will have the water leached out of
its cell walls thanks to osmosis.

The high sugar content and lack of water make honey a hypertonic solution, whereas bacteria and other living organisms are hypotonic.
When you mix the two, they will equalize – this process is called
osmosis. Since there is much more honey and sugar than bacteria, the
bacteria lose the battle and have their water leached out of them into
the honey. This causes instant death to any unfortunate bacteria.

(via ZidBits)

jenroses:

round-t-w-o:

plenoptic07:

weavemama:

weavemama:

It was nice knowin y’all

@ science side of tumblr,, ALL JOKES ASIDE WE REALLY NEED YALL TO TELL US IF WE’RE GONNA BE OKAY OR NOT

By “diseases,” they mean microbes (MICROBES, not the same as PATHOGENS), that were living their merry lives in water when it began to freeze over.

Yes, we are going to be okay, at least as far as these little friends are concerned. The odds of a microbe that evolved in an aquatic environment THOUSANDS of years ago suddenly up and adapting to infect a human system as soon as it’s thawed are basically zilch. (The megaviridae [big ass viruses] that are the actual subject of the above clickbait infected ancient amoeba. It would take a TREMENDOUS amount of time and selection pressure for these viruses to learn to infect human systems, even by viral time scales.)

You SHOULD be worried about deforestation, especially in rain forests, which has the potential to release microbes that are more than adapted to mammalian systems and are generally happy to make a zoonotic (animal to human) jump, especially those that primarily infect simians. The major hemorrhagic fevers (Ebola, Marburg) were more than likely first exposed to humans after major deforestation.

Wow im so glad at least someone in this craphole of a website is smart and can educate my dumb ass.

“Science! Reassure us!”

Science: “Yeah, don’t be afraid of that.”

Also Science: “Be afraid of this thing you’ve never heard of. It’s much more likely.”