Art From Kumari Loves A Monster By Rashmi Devadasan. Illustrated By Shyam. 

At the very centre of the image above is something incredible - a single, positively-charged strontium atom, suspended in motion by electric fields.

Not only is this an incredibly rare sight, it’s also difficult to wrap your head around the fact that this tiny point of blue light is a building block of matter.

The image was captured by physicist David Nadlinger from the University of Oxford, and it’s been awarded the overall prize in the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council photo competition.

To give you a little perspective on the size of this set-up, the atom is being held in place by electric fields emanating from those two metal needles on either side of it.

The distance between them is about 2 millimetres (0.08 inch).

The atom is being illuminated by a blue-violet laser. The energy from the laser causes the atom to emit photons which Nadlinger could capture on camera using a long exposure.

The whole thing is housed inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber and dramatically cooled to keep the atom still. Nadlinger took this photo through the window of the vacuum chamber.

To learn more, click here.

William Scully (American, b. 1967, based Boston, MA, USA) - 1: Water Lily Study No. 18  2: Water Lily Study No. 20, Underwater Photography

La sonda DART de la NASA ha chocado contra un asteroide en la primera prueba de defensa planetaria

La sonda DART de la NASA ha chocado contra un asteroide en la primera prueba de defensa planetaria

La misión DART de la NASA ha chocado contra un asteroide para intentar variar su órbita. La ha lanzado contra una pequeña luna de un asteroide doble llamado Didymos , la sonda del tamaño un coche pequeño, llamada DART (Doble Asteroid Redirection Test), ha chocado deliberadamente contra la luna del asteroide llamada Dimorphos. Esto es solo una prueba, ya que ni el asteroide Didymos ni su luna…

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Long Exposure Photos Capture the Light Paths of Drones Above Mountainous Landscapes

Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012).

“You want a tea?

“No, I want romance. I want music. I want love and beauty.

“But not tea, eh? Amazing …”

Sumerian cuneiform tablet (c. 3100 – 2900 BC).  Administrative account recording the distribution of barley and emmer wheat. Probably from Uruk (Warka, Iraq).

The first system of writing in the world was developed by the Sumerians, beginning c. 3500 – 3000 BC.  It was the most significant of Sumer’s cultural contributions, and much of this development happened in the city of Uruk.

A stylus was used to creat wedge-like impresssions in soft clay, and the clay was fired afterwards.  The word “cuneiform” comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge”.

These wedge-like impressions were first pictographs, and later on phonograms (symbols representing vocal sounds) and “word-concepts” – closer to a modern-day understanding of words and writing.  All the great Mesopotamian civilizations used cuneiform, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Hatti, Hittites, Assyrians and Hurrians.  Around 100 BC, it was abandoned in favour of the alphabetic script.

The earliest texts used proto-cuneiform, and were pictorial. Writing was a technique for noting down things, items and objects (e.g. Two Sheep Temple God Inanna).  This system worked well for concrete, visible subjects, but could give little in the way of details.  As subject matter became more intangible (e.g. the will of the gods, the quest for immortality), cuneiform developed in complexity to represent this.

By 3000 BC, the representations were more simplified.  The stylus’ impressions conveyed word-concepts rather than word-signs – for example, the scribe could write about the more abstract concept of “honour”, rather than having to specifically depict “an honourable man”.

The “rebus” principle was used to isolate the phonetic (sound) value of a particular sign.  Rebus is a device that combines pictures (or pictographs) with individual letters to depict words and/or phrases.  For example, the picture of a bumblebee followed by the letter “n” would represent the word “been”.  With the rebus principle, scribes could express grammatical relationships and syntax to clarify meaning and be more precise.

There are only a few examples of the use of rebus in the earliest stages of cuneiform (c. 3200 – 3000 BC).  Consistent usage of rebus became apparent only after c. 2600 BC.  This was the beginning of a true writing system, characterized by a complex combination of word signs and phonograms (signs for vowels and syllables).

By c. 2500 BC, cuneiform (written mostly on clay tablets) was used for a wide variety of religious, political, literary, scholarly and economic documents.

Now the reader of the tablet didn’t have to struggle with the meaning of a pictograph – they could read word-concepts that more clearly conveyed the scribe’s meaning.  The number of characters used in writing was reduced from 1000 to 600, to make it simpler.

By the time of the famous priestess-poet Enheduanna (c. 2285 – 2250 BC), cuneiform had become sophisticated enough to convey not only emotional states such as love or betrayal, but also the reasons behind the writer’s experience of these states.  Enheduanna wrote a collection of hymns to Inanna in the Sumerian city of Ur, and she is the first author in the world known by name.

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Vintage Home Plans

Vintage Home Plans

United States, 1959: 5405 A modern two-bedroom house with a large open living/dining room and a multi-use space. Planned Homes for Better Li