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Acoustic levitation traps particles using specially shaped sound waves, but, thus far, it’s only been useful for small particles. One common method of trapping forms the sound waves into a vortex-like shape. Particles in one of these acoustic vortices will spin rapidly, become unstable, and get ejected from the vortex if they’re larger than about half the wavelength of sound used. Recently, though, researchers have stabilized much larger particles by trapping them between two acoustic vortices with opposite spins. The researchers alternate between the two vortices so that each can counteract the other in order to hold the particle in the center of the trap. The new technique has enabled them to trap particles up to 4 times larger than those in previous experiments. (Image and research credit: A. Marzo et al., source; via Science)

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Border Wall Prototype Clearly Designed By Yayoi Kusama

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“What were you talking about?” “How anticlimactic this park was. We thought we would come to a nice park, but there’s no water, the trees are dead, and the ducks look sad. There’re just squirrels walking around. We were laughing about how ugly it was. The Northeast sucks.’’

(Boston Public Garden) … https://www.patreon.com/portraitsofamerica

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types of people

2am - city lights from a high rise, dusty book piles, tired eyes, writing stories, indie concerts, procrastination, denim jackets, classic movies, writing in a diary, impulse shopping, plants on the window ledge

5am - evening drives, dark circles under eyes, neon lights, vivid dreams, broken handwriting, 90s music, leather jackets, tousled hair, late night phone calls, silver necklaces, flannel around their waist

10am - soft blankets, lover of routine, acoustic songs, good grades, bullet journals, pastels and plants, sweet coffee, freshly baked bread, cat washi tape, cozy apartment, long winter coats over turtle neck jumpers, tote bags

1pm - yellow socks, doodles, doc martens, strawberries in the garden, sunflower daydreams, pictures of clouds and best friends, a handful of flowers, peach slices, paint smears on clothes

5pm - gold sunlight, peach ice tea, whispered secrets, swimming in the lake, roses on the wall, french pastries, learning foreign words, soft voices, bike rides and summer picnics, wax stamped envelopes

7pm - dreamy sunsets, evening laughter, cursive handwriting, glossy makeup, soft lighting, photo booths, cherry ice cream, sparkling ocean waves, vintage mirrors, sweet tangerines on a balcony, flowers in a bath

11pm - scented candles, unwanted nostalgia, existential questions, sadness without reason, sitting in the dark and watching the stars, associating songs with past lovers, soft heart, oversized jumpers

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The Olympic Charter declares that winter sports must be practiced on snow or ice. Both are frozen forms of water, which despite its ubiquity, is one of the strangest substances around. In addition to its tendency to expand as it freezes, ice is inherently slippery, and no one’s quite certain yet why.

Most people have heard the theory that ice skating is possible due to high pressure melting the ice beneath the narrow blade. But realistically, pressure melting should only work for ice down to about -3.5 degrees Celsius. By contrast, the ideal temperatures for figure skating and ice hockey are -5.5 and -9 degrees Celsius, respectively. Melting due to friction might account for slipperiness a few more degrees below freezing, but it doesn’t explain why ice can be slippery when you’re just standing on it.

When physicist Michael Faraday suggested in 1850 that ice has a thin liquid-like layer at its surface, many discounted the theory. But modern experimental techniques and computer simulations have shown that Faraday was right. Ice has a liquid-like layer some 1 to 100 nanometers thick at its surface, and this layer persists to temperatures below -30 degrees Celsius. The process is known as surface pre-melting and what causes it is an area of active research for physical chemists. Current theories include hydrogen bonding and even quantum mechanical effects. (Image credit: AP Photo/B. Armangue; research credit: R. Rosenberg; Y. Li and G. Somorjai; F. Paesani and G. Voth)

This opens FYFD’s two-week series on the physics and fluid dynamics of the Winter Olympics. Stay tuned! - Nicole

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LENEXA, KS—Saying she considered it his best work yet, local mom Arianne Caluso told her son Jack on Thursday that she has been getting pretty into the new Tyler, The Creator album. “Oh, Jack, honey, I’ve been listening to Flower Boy almost nonstop for the past few days—it’s just fabulous!” said Caluso, 54, of the 26-year-old rapper’s fourth studio album, praising the production quality of the beats, especially on her favorite track “Who Dat Boy,” and explaining that she thought it was “real neat” how he evolved from his shock rap, horrorcore-inspired roots to produce something deeper and more sentimental. “I remember being into Bastard when it came out and then falling off after the next few albums, but it’s clear on this new one that he’s grown past Odd Future and started to develop his voice as a solo artist. Oh, and A$AP Rocky and Weezy are also featured on it, which is absolutely lovely!” Caluso reportedly also encouraged her son to make sure to check out the new Lil Uzi Vert single while he’s at it.

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i love girls but they’re out of my league … like every single girl… all of them.. out of my league

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The shrimp structure

A group of researchers at University of California, Riverside, USA, have identified a unique structure that wraps around the mantis shrimp’s club to protect it from self-inflicted damage as it crushes hard-shelled prey. This can help develop ultra-strong materials for the aerospace and sports industries.

Mantis shrimp are aggressive crustaceans known for killing their prey using a predatory strike that is among the fastest known animal movements. There are two groups – spearers, which attack soft-bodied prey using a harpoon-like structure, and smashers, which crush hard-shelled prey using a hammer-like appendage called a dactyl club.

In previous research, the team showed that the dactyl club is a multi-regional composite made of mineralised chitin – the same material found in the shells of insects and crustaceans – arranged in a number of unique structures. The exterior of the club, called the impact region, serves as hard, crack-resistant coating that enables the shrimp to inflict incredible damage by transferring its momentum upon impact. The interior of the club comprises two regions – the periodic region, an energy-absorbing structure that dissipates cracks along a series of long helicoidal fibres, and the striated region paper. The study shows that the striated region features a series of highly aligned fibres that wrap around the club and stop it from expanding upon impact.

David Kisailus, Professor in Energy Innovation in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, said, ‘We believe the role of the fiber-reinforced striated region in the smasher’s club is much like the hand wrap used by boxers when they fight: to compress the club and prevent catastrophic cracking. Together, the impact, periodic and striated regions form a club of incredible strength, durability and impact resistance.’

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one thing i think is interesting, as someone who basically grew up playing video games non-stop, is how some types of video game just don’t gel with people 

like, it’s easy to forget that, even though i’m pretty bad at most games, that my skill at handling video games is definitely “above average.” as much as i hate to put it like this, i’d say my experience level is at “expert” solely because I can pick up any game controller and understand how to use it with no additional training. 

a friend of mine on twitter posted a video of him stuck on a part of samus returns. the tutorial area where it teaches you how to ledge-grab. the video is of him jumping against the wall, doing everything but grabbing the ledge, and him getting frustrated 

i’ve been playing games all my life, so i’d naturally intuit that i should jump towards the ledge to see what happens 

but he doesn’t do that.

it’s kinda making me realize that as games are becoming more complex and controllers are getting more buttons, games are being designed more and more for people who already know how to play them and not people with little to no base understanding of the types of games they’re playing 

so that’s got me thinking: should video games assume that you have zero base knowledge of video games and try to teach you from there? should Metroid: Samus Returns assume that you already know how to play a Metroid game and base its tutorial around that, or should it assume that you’ve never even played Mario before? 

it’s got me thinking about that Cuphead video again. you know the one. to anyone with a lot of experience with video games, especially 2D ones, we would naturally intuit that one part of the tutorial to require a jump and a dash at the same time.

but most people lack that experience and that learned intuition and might struggle with that, and that’s something a lot of people forget to consider. 

it reminds me a bit of the “land of Punt” that I read about in this Tumblr post. Egypt had this big trading partner back in the day called Punt and they wrote down everything about it except where it was, because who doesn’t know where Punt is? and now, we have no idea where it was, because everyone in Egypt assumed everyone else knew.

take that same line of thinking with games: “who doesn’t know how to play a 2D platform game?” nobody takes in to consideration the fact that somebody might not know how to play a 2D game on a base level, because that style of gameplay is thoroughly ingrained in to the minds of the majority of gamers. and then the Cuphead situation happens.

the point of this post isn’t to make fun of anybody, but to ask everyone to step back for a second and consider that things that they might not normally consider. as weird as it is to think about for people that grew up playing video games, anyone who can pick up a controller with thirty buttons on it and not get intimidated is actually operating at an expert level. if you pick up a playstation or an Xbox controller and your thumbs naturally land on the face buttons and the analog stick and your index fingers naturally land on the trigger buttons, that is because you are an expert at operating a complex piece of machinery. you have a lifetime of experience using this piece of equipment, and assuming that your skill level is the base line is a problem.

that assumption is rapidly becoming a problem as games become more complex. it’s something that should be considered when talking about games going forward. games should be accessible, but it’s reaching a point where even Nintendo games are assuming certain levels of skill without teaching the player the absolute basics. basics like “what is an analog stick” and “where should my fingers even be on this controller right now.” 

basically what i’m saying is that games are becoming too complex for new players to reasonably get in to and are starting to assume skill levels higher than what should be considered the base line. it’s becoming a legitimate problem that shouldn’t be laughed at and disregarded. it’s very easy to forget that thing things YOU know aren’t known by everyone and that idea should be taken in to consideration when talking about video games. 

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phoebe buffay: canon bisexual

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Funny way to find out which plant you might like to buy.

Source: apartmenttherapy.com

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HUNTSVILLE, AL—Scanning his mind for any minority groups he could have demonized more forcefully, Alabama Senate candidate and secret Democratic operative Roy Moore admitted Tuesday that he wasn’t sure what else he could have done to destroy the Republican Party’s reputation. “When Nancy [Pelosi] sent me here, I was convinced that revealing myself as a pedophile would be more than enough, but now I’m just at a loss,” said Moore, who admitted he thought DNC chair Tom Perez was going over the top by suggesting he say gay marriage had made the U.S. the source of all evil, but that didn’t even budge the polls. “I mean, I stood on a stage and wistfully recalled the era in which slavery existed in this country. What else am I supposed to do? I’ve been really digging deep to vilify the GOP and make myself unelectable, but I still might win.” At press time, Moore was kicking himself for not sabotaging himself more egregiously by claiming he supported a ban on assault weapons.

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SILVER SPRING, MD—Following months of research into the psychedelic compound’s effects, the Food and Drug Administration confirmed Thursday that psilocybin could significantly reduce the risk of mindlessly following society’s rules like a fucking lemming. “After numerous clinical trials, we can state with a high degree of certainty that ingesting small doses of psilocybin greatly decreases the chances of blindly marching in lockstep like a bunch of goddamn sheep being led to the slaughter,” said FDA Chief Scott Gottlieb, noting that brain-scan data collected from a double-blind study indicated that a 3.5-gram dosage of psilocybin could greatly enhance the probability of busting open the doors of perception and freeing users from their mind-prisons. “We found that study participants were far more likely than the general public to cut the marionette strings that had been controlling them their entire shitty lives. In addition, test subjects also entered a heightened state of awareness of the fact that the entire social order is a sick fucking joke perpetrated by the man.” Gottlieb cautioned that not all the results were as positive, however, noting that many users experienced a deep depression resulting from watching the masses sleepwalk through life like pathetic automatons.

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For more exemplary journalism, visit theonion.com.

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being in a public restroom and hearing someone shitting really loud