Mina Is Very Good At Sight Reading!

So You Want To Be a Surgeon

(For: Domonique Nichols)

Every surgeon has to learn how to hold scissors without nervous hands, how to break open skin and wound a body just to fix it. How can we mend a broken heart if we’re too afraid of getting its blood on our hands? There will be blood on your hands. If you are going to be something, then you have to learn to kill for it. Every surgeon has the power to kill, however life exists at the cusp of that incision. Look at your hands. There is blood running through your fingers and every line in your palms lead somewhere. Where? to your destiny, where the light shines like a fire burning down forest. 

Be scared, but do not fear. The nervous pounds in your blood are natural stimuli just as the rain that feeds the seeds in the ground that cause the herbs to grow. Fear is created from the voices of question, of failure–waiting for rain. But voices can be silenced like the way a wave rushes in and drowns a ship. Rain will come.  I hope your insides tremble when you whisper your dreams and you awake at midnight hours gasping for air. there is a call for you I hope you answer in passion. So you want to be a surgeon? Your first surgery starts here. Here, in the quiet hours where the world sleeps and darkness swallows you with anxiety…  Make an incision while you are awake. bleed, feel, ache, heal. Begin to remove and sew whatever it is that is holding you back. Release yourself from self arrest; because walls are only walls, they are built with the same hands you have to cut away. Get away, pull apart the jail bars, diseased parts and set yourself free. Look at what your hands can do.

Your hands can sew and mended a heart, remove cysts that grow in the mind of emotional hurt bodies, cut away fears and tumors of the past. You can leave a body working like an unbreakable machine.  Your hands can bring life. Your hands can fight back, your hands can love better, Hold tighter, and let go easier. So you want to be a surgeon? Have faith. Kiss your hands with belief, and hold your dreams like a trophy you haven’t seen yet. Hold on to your hope, cradle dreams, sew wounds, and love is always a scar on the body like a piece of art. So love like a heart beat at the will of your hands on an open operating table.  Throbbing, breathing, beating.

Your hands they are warm and loving as the sun even when winter digs up goose bumps on the skin. You’ll spend time planting gardens just to see its beauty. Loving like petals but I hope you love like a rose thorn and pierce someone’s side so much they wail out in pain but are still strong enough to kiss you like a ticking time bomb just went off. Every surgery you will ever have to perform begins now. It begins with you. And if you’re too afraid to cut off people like snapped branches or too in love to let go as the leaves leave the trees in winter then you will never be able to save a life. Spring will never come. So walk with your hands wide open, walk ready to give. Give, give yourself. Surgery begins with saving your own life. Your life lived is a fountain of beauty awed by the eyes of another. You keep giving and they live from your waters.

You are herbs in a bush, a twinkle in the sky and one day someone’s body will pray for your hands. Somebody’s body will thank your hands. You are beauty in flaw and an ocean that refuses to stop waving even in winter when no one visits the beach. Your smile is a candle in a cave, your laughter a soothing anodyne in the moment of pain. Breathe and let be. Your hands can move an orchestra so beautifully tears fall without notice. And when the song is done, the score keeps singing in the soprano whisper of hope. So you want to be a surgeon… make an incision down the middle of your own heart and carry it in your hands. Give it away. So you want to be a surgeon… cut the world in half and let the light in. Die for this, breathe for this, shine for this, live for this. And your very hands that cut the world open will sew the world back up. 

Timeless by Alena Aenami

If you dropped a water balloon on a bed of nails, you’d expect it to burst spectacularly. And you’d be right – some of the time. Under the right conditions, though, you’d see what a high-speed camera caught in the animation above: a pancake-shaped bounce with nary a leak. Physically, this is a scaled-up version of what happens to a water droplet when it hits a superhydrophobic surface. 

Water repellent superhydrophobic surfaces are covered in microscale roughness, much like a bed of tiny nails. When the balloon (or droplet) hits, it deforms into the gaps between posts. In the case of the water balloon, its rubbery exterior pulls back against that deformation. (For the droplet, the same effect is provided by surface tension.) That tension pulls the deformed parts of the balloon back up, causing the whole balloon to rebound off the nails in a pancake-like shape. For more, check out this video on the student balloon project or the original water droplet research. (Image credits: T. Hecksher et al., Y. Liu et al.; via The New York Times; submitted by Justin B.)

La Vie en Rose playing from another room

Edith Piaf

Seen at Marshall University School of Music…

It’s like being home sick for a place that doesn’t exist.

(via my-vanishing-hope)

5 things you didn’t know about...conductive graphene inks

Credit: James Macleod/University of Cambridge Department of Engineering

1. They have a high concentration of graphene flakes – up to 100g per litre.

2. They are made in a microfluidisation process, during which graphene flakes are broken off graphite using ultra-high shear forces.

3. 100% of the starting graphite material is converted into useable graphene flakes.

4. Carboxymethylcellulose sodium salt is used to stabilise the material, without a need for centrifugation.

5. Applications include large-scale screen-printing, flexible electronics, such as transistors and photovoltaic cells, and potential future uses in food packaging.

To find out more see page 15 of the upcoming April issue of Materials World.