Giant Freakin Robot

You know how Anne Geddes’ baby photos sit at the precise intersection of “eye-gougingly adorable” and “Oh my God, they’re treating those infants like veal!” Can you just imagine what those pictures would look like if the subjects were baby planets? There’s no way there’s a Pea Pod costume that big!

For study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team led by ETH Zurich astronomer Sascha Quanz published their findings of a “protoplanet” located a relatively close 335 light years away. This would be one of the only observations so far of a planet in the early stages of its existence. How can one see a baby planet from that far away? Well, aside from the usual method of studying blips in star orbits to find planets, this sucker has a mass at least the size of Jupiter, and is two to three times its size, which clearly means that the universe had to have a C-section.

“If we are correct, this is the first time we are seeing a planet forming inside its natal environment,” said Quanz, who along with colleagues observed the planet through a high-resolution infrared camera linked to the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the Chilean desert. The protoplanet was seen as a bright orbiting blob in the disk of material surrounding the star.

A lot of things are taken for granted in industrialized nations, and it’s only becoming more obvious as our cell phones get smarter and our computers get smaller and our Taco Bell tacos get more Dorito-ier. I bet barely anyone reading this has ever thought to themselves, “Boy, I sure hope I don’t have a medical emergency after sunset, since my survival rate is cut by more than half in the dark.”

For the last few years, Dr. Laura Stachel, OBGYN, has used her nonprofit, We Care Solar, to bring light to medical facilities in under-developed nations all over the world. She does this by way of the ingenious Solar Suitcase, developed by Stachel, her husband, Hal Aronson, and a solar energy educator. After having spent two weeks in 2008 horrified by the detrimental conditions during nighttime childbirths, Stachel was inspired to devise a solution, and though the Solar Suitcase was only a prototype for a larger idea, the device as it was had an immediate impact on the hospital, which in that next year saw a 70% decrease in the death rate for women during birth.

Let there be light.

Let’s just start the slow clap rolling for the next few minutes, because this story concerns what could be one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in recent medical history. To be sure, we’re not clapping for science, which isn’t exactly sure what happened yet, but we’re applauding a two-year-old child’s survival instinct. All right, maybe science gets a few claps and hollers, just for being so cool.

For the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University announced the first ever case of a child cured of the HIV virus. Persaud and the University of Massachusetts’ Dr. Katherin Luzuriaga were awarded the a grant from the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) that allowed them to establish a research collaboratory with other distinguished colleagues, with the goal of exploring and documenting HIV cure cases in children.

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV particles infecting a human T cell.

I’m a guy with hands that aren’t overly big so much as they are clumsy and non-dexterous – take note, ladies – so the only knots I’m any good at taking apart are baked and covered with pretzel salt. When physicists refer to knots, though, they’re talking more about closed loops with no ends to untie, such as the trefoil, Hopf Link, or Olympic rings. Discussions about theoretical fluid rings have been around since mathematical physicist and temperature superstar Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms were knots in the ether, and now they’ve gone from the world of theory to a scientific reality.

The University of Chicago’s Dustin Kleckner and William Irvine used 3-D printers to create a plastic trefoil knot and a Hopf link, each with a wing-shaped cross section. When they dragged the knots through a pool of water filled with microscopic bubbles, the acceleration of hydrofoils left a knot-shaped vortex in its wake, which sucked in all the bubbles and created a flowing formation shaped like a knot, which was the first fluid knot ever created in a lab. Cue the fireworks and watch the mesmerizing video below, which compiles shots of the knots imaged by lasers.