How A Blobfish Looks With And Without Extreme Water Pressure. Learn More 👇🏽👇🏽

Ove The Horizon

Small pieces larger grow

Single plant cells have amazing capacities for regenerating into entire plants. This property is known as ‘totipotency’ discovered in the 1920s. Linking this with increasing understanding of growth control by plant hormones resulted in the development of the sterile, in vitro, culture. Tiny groups of cells, explants, are cut from the rapidly growing tips of shoots in controlled environments and washed in sterilising agents. These are cultured sterile jars containing a layer of agar supplemented with nutrients and hormones.

Green plantlets growing on sterile agar

The process is known as ‘tissue culture’ or micropropagation. As the cells divide and multiply, they are transferred through a series of sterile conditions which encourage root formation.

Roots growing from newly developing plantlets

Ultimately numerous new whole plants are generated. At that point they are removed from sterile conditions and weaned by planting into clean compost in high humidity environments. High humidity is essential as these transplants lack the protective coating of leaf and stem waxes which prevent desiccation. Ultimately when fully weaned the plants are grown under normal nursery conditions into saleable products.

Why bother with this processes which requires expensive facilities and highly skilled staff? A prime advantage is that micropropagated plants have genotypes very closely similar to those of the original parent, essentially they are clones. As a result vast numbers of progeny can be generated from a few parents preserving their characteristics. That is particularly important as a means of bulking-up newly bred varieties of many ornamental and fruit producing plants which otherwise would be reproduced vegetatively from cuttings or by grafting and budding onto rootstocks. Micropropagation is therefore a means for safeguarding the intellectual property of plant breeding companies.

Explants cut from parent plants before culturing can be heat-treated as a means of removing virus infections. The resultant end-products of rooted plants are therefore disease-free or more accurately disease-tested. These plants are usually more vigorous and produce bigger yields of flowers and fruit. Orchids are one of the crops where the impact of micropropagation is most obvious in florists’ shops and supermarkets. 

Orchids have benefitted greatly from micropropagation

Large numbers of highly attractive orchids are now readily available. Previously orchids were very expensive and available in sparse numbers.   

The world is not perfect and there are disadvantages with micropropagation. Because the progeny are genetically similar they are uniformly susceptible to pests and pathogens. Crops of clonal plants can be and have been rapidly devasted by existing and new strains of insects and diseases to which they have no resistance.

Written by: Professor Geoff Dixon, author of Garden practices and their science (ISBN 978-1-138-20906-0) published by Routledge 2019.

A Visualisation of the Airflow with and without a Facemask. This is done by Utilising Schlieren Imaging.

Recrystallizing a raw product using an infra lamp as a heat source. 

It looks great and it also works well. Instead of a heat gun or an oil bath, we often use infra lamps as heat source during the recrystallization of various products. It is a safe and easy method for heating a flask. 

The Longitudinal Wave Pattern of a Millipedes Legs.

Fly over Earth with the ISS ✨

Music by Ikson

Moving Sofa Problem 🛋 Animation

It's an exciting day: You've just signed the lease on a new apartment. There's only one problem. The hallway leading to your apartment has a sharp corner and your couch won't seem to make it, no matter how much you and your friends yell "pivot!".

When confronted with this frustration, most people keep working at it until they make the corner (or they just can't take it anymore and leave the couch on the curb). But mathematicians see something else. They look at this problem and wonder: What's the largest possible couch you could get around this corner?

The mathematician Leo Moser posed in 1966 the following curious mathematical problem: what is the shape of largest area in the plane that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a two-dimensional hallway of width 1? This question became known as the moving sofa problem, and is still unsolved fifty years after it was first asked. (See more: Moving a Sofa - Avery Thompson)

This is known as the Moving Sofa Problem, and it's far from a real estate curiosity. The problem has been perplexing mathematicians for half a century. It was part of our list of unsolved problems in mathematics, and has been covered in more depth in this video by Numberphile:

With a little knowledge of geometry, it's easy to come up with different shapes that will fit around the corner. With a lot of knowledge of geometry, it's possible to come up with some very large shapes that still fit. But the problem compels us to find the largest possible solution, and it's extremely difficult to show that any one possible shape is the largest possible. Currently, the largest known shape that fits around the corner is called the Gerver sofa, proposed by Joseph Gerver in 1992. There's a lot of evidence that this is, in fact, the largest possible shape, but nobody has ever been able to prove it. There is also an upper bound, meaning we know the largest possible sofa has to be smaller than a certain value.

The Importance of Hand Washing: 5 Different Washing Durations and their Efficiency. (Glowing Regions Show Dirt and Microorganisms). 

1. Before Washing, 2. Rinse and Shake, 3. Six Second Wash No Soap, 4. Six Second Wash with Soap, 5. Fifteen Second Wash with Soap, 6. Thirty Second Wash with Soap.

freshman year labs: - extensive research on every reagent, product and potential byproduct - don’t you dare step away from the fume hood - 500 types of fire extinguishing equipment - gloves!!! - extreme caution at all times - i inhaled a total of three molecules of nitric acid, should i go to the ER?

sophomore year labs: - everything’s toxic why bother - lol here’s some uranium - what’s a fume hood? - that smells weird i hope it won’t kill me - imma just stop the centrifuge with my hand - i’ve been breathing hydrogen sulfide for the past four hours i hope that’s not bad for me