The Muskegee Phoenix. Bulletproof Skin Made From Spider Silk. Just last week we learned about spiders coming to the aid of burn victims. Now it looks like our friendly neighborhood arachnids are being used to create the ultimate superhero power: bulletproof human skin. Well, almost. BLOG: Artificial Skin Made From Spider Silk In her new project, 2.6g 329m/s, Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi, along with Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands, created a swatch of nearly bulletproof skin made from spider silk and human skin cells. The project takes its name from the maximum weight and velocity a Type 1 bulletproof vest can withstand from a .22 calibre Long Rifle bullet. By grafting spider silk between the epidermis and dermis, the skin was able to stop a bullet that was fired at a reduced speed. But that's fine with Essaidi. "With this work I want to show that safety in its broadest sense is a relative concept, and hence the term bulletproof," Essaidi said in a press release.
"But even with the skin pierced by the bullet the experiment is still a success. US/LHC - Large Hadron Collider. Not Even Wrong. I’ve just replaced the old version of my draft “spacetime is right-handed” paper (discussed here) with a new, hopefully improved version. If it is improved, thanks are due to a couple people who sent helpful comments on the older version, sometimes making clear that I wasn’t getting across at all the main idea.
To further clarify what I’m claiming, here I’ll try and write out an informal explanation of what I see as the relevant fundamental issues about four-dimensional geometry, which appear even for $\mathbf R^4$, before one starts thinking about manifolds. Spinors, twistors and complex spacetime In complex spacetime $\mathbf C^4$ the story of spinors and twistors is quite simple and straightforward. Spinors are more fundamental than vectors: one can write the space $\mathbf C^4$ of vectors as the tensor product of two $\mathbf C^2$ spaces of spinors. Real forms While the twistor/spinor story for complex spacetime is quite simple, the story of real spacetime is much more complicated. The Mathematics of Lego | Wired Science. The world of toys and games is not immune to mathematics. From the Rubik’s Cube to Monopoly, fun pastimes can be quantified. And the same is true of Legos. Lego blocks, the building toys that are truly amazing and that I have never quite grown out of, are amenable to math.
To see that, we have to begin thinking about how we combine things together. In the wonderfully titled paper Scaling of Differentiation in Networks: Nervous Systems, Organisms, Ant Colonies, Ecosystems, Businesses, Universities, Cities, Electronic Circuits, and Legos, Mark Changizi and his colleagues set out to understand this concept. And this includes, of course, Lego bricks.
They found that the number of piece types to total number of pieces could be fit nicely to a power law. This curve demonstrates that as the number of pieces in a set grows, so do the number of piece types. Top image:enerva/Flickr/CC-licensed. Contagious cancer: The evolution of a killer—By David Quammen.