Happy Birthday, Max Planck!
It’s the birthday of Max Planck, who was born in 1858 in Kiel, Germany. As a student he was advised against going into physics because, said his professor, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.” Decades later, he did more than fill in a hole. By applying Ludwig Boltzmann’s statistical approach to thermodynamics and assuming that radiation is emitted in discrete quanta, he could account for the entire black body spectrum
This is really interesing!
The DNA double helix that we’re all familiar with is a molecular ladder made of three key parts. The backbone of phosphates that tie everything together up and down, the sugar rings (“deoxyribose”) that serve as rungs, and the bases (A, C, G, T) that invisibly bond the two strands of the helix together, head to toe.
But that helix can be broken or mutated in nature, leading to mutations. And out of all the compounds in the world that could have evolved to carry our information, why just DNA and its cousin RNA? To answer that question, Vitor Pinheiro’s team created a completely new set of information molecules called XNA.
XNA replaces the deoxyribose sugar ring with other chemical rings like threose and cyclohexane. By evolving an enzyme that could read these funny bases, they were able to read DNA into XNA as well as the reverse. Plus it’s super-strong and resistant to breaking or cleaving.
Molecules like XNA could expand the information code for synthetic biology as well as help us answer the ultimate question about DNA: Why that, and not something else? Ed Yong has more great detail here.
In basic physics, we all learn that like charge repel, opposite charges attract. However, we are also told that protons and neutrons form the tightly grouped nucleus. One must ask themselves, shouldn’t these protons repel each other? Thanks to something known as the strong nuclear force, the nuclei don’t break apart - and matter can exist relatively peacefully.The strong nuclear force is the force that binds the nucleus together, as well as the force that binds quarks together to create hadron particles.
Just like photons are exchange particles for the electromagnetic force, all forces have some sort of particle to channel it - known as gauge bosons. Gluons are the particles that act as gauge bosons for the strong nuclear force. Thus, in the most simple terms - Gluons are the particles that hold all of matter together, and make existence possible. Since gluons are gauge bosons, they are massless and carry no electric charge.
P.S: Do you like the picture? Get awesome plush particles from the Particle Zoo!
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the largest storm in the solar system. The hurricane has been going on for as long as humans have pointed telescopes at it, hundreds of years at the very least, and it’s twice as wide as the diameter of the Earth. Lately, it’s been shrinking, but not slowing down. This picture (here digitally processed) was originally taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. Voyager is the man-made object that’s traveled farthest from Earth. At the moment, the distance between Voyager 1 and our planet is more than 100 times more than the average distance between Earth and the Sun. At some point in the not too distant future, it will leave the solar system entirely.