Sounds About Right

Hello there, I think it’s time to introduce myself ✨

My name is Sophie (actually my second name, but I prefer this one over my first name) and I am 22 years old. I‘m currently doing my bachelor’s degree in Medical Engineering and work part time at a small café

•I‘m very much in love with the neighborhood’s stray cats and currently trying to befriend them (aka bribing them with salmon snacks.)

•I also like swimming, reading cliché romance novels, crocheting and art.

•I‘d describe myself as a quite sensitive and creative person, but I also love the structure and logic behind science, that’s why I chose this field of study.

If you have any book recommendations, questions, anecdotes you think I would enjoy, feel free to send me a message 🦆 I would love to make some new friends on this site

Also I do have an Instagram Account with the same username, but I feel like tumblr is a bit less overstimulating, that’s why I like using this app

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 🩵🤍

Sometimes it’s not you. Sometimes the textbook is just bad at explaining it. Hang in there keep asking questions loves <3

You are not obligated to save others.

Yes, you should try to help them, yes, you should do your best, but sometimes your best isn't enough, sometimes your own struggle is so overwhelming that you can't concentrate on others and sometimes there are people who don't want to be saved.

It's sad, but it's not your fault. And I feel like this isn't said often enough.

You are worthy and loved, even if you don't sacrifice yourself for others.

The love-hate relationship with the exam season. I’m so tired. Getting up to study early enough to see the sunset. Tea with sugar and cream. Oh god, I forgot to eat. Going on short runs to restart my brain. Messy buns. Fruit and candy. When was the last time I got a full night of sleep? Blasting rock in my headphones so I don’t doze off. I shouldn’t drink so much caffeine. This is my fifth cup today. I’ve been wearing this sweater for a week. I LOVE biology. I don’t want to see amino acids at least for a month. This chapter is fascinating. I’m becoming Rory Gilmore. Band t-shirts. Reading fantasy books when I need to distract myself for a bit. Journaling. Hold on I need to romanticize this. This is the best time of the academic year. I’m so tired. But god, the aesthetics…

being in your 20s is truly just living ibuprofen to ibuprofen

Enjoying the days before exam season starts

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.

Reason to Live #3952

 To protect my best friend from everything and everyone who could ever hurt them.  – Guest Submission

(Please don’t add negative comments to these posts.)