always reblog

sciencecenter:

This is a single celled algea, magnified almost 300 times. I think it’s beautiful. And when these marine diatoms bloom, they’re visible from space.

Check out more awesome pictures of the secret lives of plankton.

The Unreasonable Beauty of Mathematics

If you shut yourself in a room and devise some abstract mathematics for the sake of sheer intellectual fascination, you might not expect your scribblings to have any relevance to the real world. Your parents would probably bug you about what you were doing with your life. And yet time and again, scientists find that the creations of pure thought match what they discover in nature. Does it mean the world at its deepest levels is somehow mathematical? Does it simply mean that scientists are good at cherry-picking the conceptual tools they need? Mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and others debate that question, as astrophysicist Mario Livio describes in the August issue of Scientific American. Whatever the answer may be, we can still marvel at the beauty of mathematical structures.

Image: Heavenly Spirals:

Spiral patterns occur throughout nature, perhaps most dramatically in spiral galaxies. This pair of galaxies has particularly unusual spiral patterns that are presumably the result of the gravitational tidal forces between them. The inner spiral arms of the upper galaxy (UGC 1810) are not planar, and the outer arm may have been pulled into a ring by a direct collision with the lower one (UGC 1813).

More examples after the link

(via ikenbot)

Beauty in The Eyes of The Beholder: Science States How The Object You Feel Becomes More Important Than How It Looks Over Time

People prefer big objects to small ones, round forms to sharp ones and complex designs to simpler renditions. Observers often pick a prototype as prettiest, but these “average” examples of a face, coach or pattern can bore an expert or even someone in a good mood. After a month of using a product, how the object feels is generally more important than how it looks.

Each person’s aesthetic taste seems distinct, and yet that perception belies a large body of shared preferences. Our team at the University of Vienna, among others, has sought to unravel the patterns and principles behind people’s emotional reactions to objects. Although trends drive certain design decisions, scientists have identified fundamental properties of the mind that consistently dictate which products people tend to like and dislike. Psychologists are now better equipped than ever to explain how you came to choose your belongings in the first place. They can also begin to decipher why you continue to love certain purchases long after they have lost their initial shine, whereas others land in the trash.

(via ikenbot)