It's Okay To Be Smart: The Feynman Point -
Thanks to your epic smarts (and probably a good amount if Google image search), many of you correctly identified this “mystery” sequence of numbers in pi as the Feynman Point.
Pi is an irrational number, and its sequence is infinite and non-repeating. But there are some cute patterns to be found (as there would be if you look hard enough in any infinitely large number). Feynman thought that if he could memorize pi up to the 762nd decimal place, he could trick people into thinking it was rational and say “999999 and so on and so on …”
Of course, it wouldn’t have fooled Lu Chao, a Chinese man who has memorized pi all the way out to 67,890 digits, according to the World Rankings of Pi Memorization, which is a thing that actually exists.
Quiz time. What famous physicist is the sequence in orange named after, what the hell are we looking at, and why is it significant?
(Source: those-two-atheists)
Two More Elements Added to The Periodic Table
You can now greet by name two new residents of the period table of elements: Flerovium and Livermorium.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry officially approved names for the elements — which sit at slot 114 and 116, respectively — on 31 May. They have until now gone by the temporary monikers ununquadium and ununhexium.
(via smoot)
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X-ray Crystallography
It is a method of determining the arrangement of atoms within a crystal, in which a beam of X-rays strikes a crystal and causes the beam of light to spread into many specific directions. From the angles and intensities of these diffracted beams, a crystallographer can produce a three-dimensional picture of the density of electrons within the crystal. From this electron density, the mean positions of the atoms in the crystal can be determined, as well as their chemical bonds, their disorder and various other information.
X-ray crystallography can locate every atom in a zeolite, an aluminosilicate with many important applications, such as water purification.
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The international radiation symbol (also known as trefoil) first appeared in 1946, at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. At the time, it was rendered as magenta, and was set on a blue background. The modern version used in the U.S. is magenta against a yellow background, and it is drawn with a central circle of radius R, an internal radius of 1.5R and an external radius of 5R for the blades, which are separated from each other by 60°. The trefoil is black in the international version, which is also acceptable in the U.S.
(via 14-billion-years-later)
I have been dying to do this.