Hello There, I Think It’s Time To Introduce Myself ✨

Trying to escape reality by reading 7 fantasy books within the last four weeks, also went to a hotpot restaurant with friends. I’m poor now, reality still sucks, but at least autumn’s coming 🦇🕸️

The longer I look at the illustration my materials science professor put in his PowerPoint, the more convinced I am, that he secretly hates students and is actively trying to sabotage us

Or he has grown fond of us over the last year and he just wants to see our faces again next semester

i fucking hate when people look down on those with social anxiety like “oh that happens to everybody” “just do it you’ll be fine” no, it’s a legitimate disorder and a lot of people are inadvertently hurt by you brushing shit under the rug begone thot

This made my day, it’s so wholesome! My childhood cat was a former stray and she was the sweetest kitty I’ve ever met ❤️

Madly in love with my newest IKEA purchase and the neighbor‘s cat Timmy (even though he constantly tries to break into our apartment -a criminal, but a cute one)

Also I’m already 🌼stressed🌼 about my exams

“Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.”    ―   Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

#Whatwouldmariedo, if she had to take a math test on Wednesday about a, b and c, but in her math lecture they’ve only ever talked about subject a and b and will certainly not cover subject c before next week, so she is not sure, how to solve problems involving subject c

phys.org

Scientists discover that water molecules define the materials around us

For decades, the fields of physics and chemistry have maintained that the atoms and molecules that make up the natural world define the char

OKAY THIS ARTICLE IS SO COOL

I'm going to try to explain this in a comprehensible way, because honestly it's wild to wrap your head around even for me, who has a degree in chemistry. But bear with me.

Okay, so. Solids, right? They are rigid enough to hold their shape, but aside from that they are quite variable. Some solids are hard, others are soft, some are brittle or rubbery or malleable. So what determines these qualities? And what creates the rigid structure that makes a solid a solid? Most people would tell you that it depends on the atoms that make up the solid, and the bonds between those atoms. Rubber is flexible because of the polymers it's made of, steel is strong because of the metallic bonds between its atoms. And this applies to all solids. Or so everybody thought.

A paper published in the journal Nature has discovered that biological materials such as wood, fungi, cotton, hair, and anything else that can respond to the humidity in the environment may be composed of a new class of matter dubbed "hydration solids". That's because the rigidity and solidness of the materials doesn't actually come from the atoms and bonds, but from the water molecules hanging out in between.

So basically, try to imagine a hydration solid as a bunch of balloons taped together to form a giant cube, with the actual balloon part representing the atoms and bonds of the material, and the air filling the balloons as the water in the pores of the solid. What makes this "solid" cube shaped? It's not because of the rubber at all, but the air inside. If you took out all the air from inside the balloons, the structure wouldn't be able to hold its shape.

Ozger Sahin, one of the paper's authors, said

"When we take a walk in the woods, we think of the trees and plants around us as typical solids. This research shows that we should really think of those trees and plants as towers of water holding sugars and proteins in place. It's really water's world."

And the great thing about this discovery (and one of the reasons to support its validity) is that thinking about hydration solids this way makes the math so so so much easier. Before this, if you wanted to calculate how water interacts with organic matter, you would need advanced computer simulations. Now, there are simple equations that you can do in your head. Being able to calculate a material's properties using basic physics principles is a really big deal, because so far we have only been able to do that with gasses (PV=nRT anyone?). Expanding that to a group that encompasses 50-90% of the biological world around us is huge.

idk i just wanna sit in a dark library at night in the candlelight wearing an oversized sweater and exchange glances over my book to my lover while the rain pours outside and feel at peace with the world

Do you ever feel like it was way easier to find friends, when you were younger? I don’t know what happened, but somehow between the age of 13 and now, I lost most of my social skills. I get really bad anxiety when talking to strangers and now I only have one friend at Uni and she’s skipping classes pretty often so I don’t know if she’ll pass the exams. All of my close friends live far away, I’m scared of being lonely.

Well, at least I have the neighborhood cats, that’s step one of my 15-year-plan to become a crazy cat lad 🩵🤍