nicevagina:

l0stkeys:

assassinbutts:

wenchymcwench:

We enter a little coffeehouse with a friend of mine and give our order. While we’re aproaching our table two people come in and they go to the counter:
‘Five coffees, please. Two of them for us and three suspended’ They pay for their order, take the two and leave.

I ask my friend: “What are those ‘suspended’ coffees?”
My friend: “Wait for it and you will see.”

Some more people enter. Two girls ask for one coffee each, pay and go. The next order was for seven coffees and it was made by three lawyers - three for them and four ‘suspended’. While I still wonder what’s the deal with those ‘suspended’ coffees I enjoy the sunny weather and the beautiful view towards the square infront of the café. Suddenly a man dressed in shabby clothes who looks like a beggar comes in throught the door and kindly asks
‘Do you have a suspended coffee ?’

It’s simple - people pay in advance for a coffee meant for someone who can not afford a warm bevarage. The tradition with the suspended coffees started in Naples, but it has spread all over the world and in some places you can order not only a suspended coffee, but also a sandwitch or a whole meal.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have such cafés or even grocery stores in every town where the less fortunate will find hope and support ? If you own a business why don’t you offer it to your clients… I am sure many of them will like it.

 

Source : [x]

this is beautiful

I love this so much

(via xiu-han)

wildcat2030:

Unexpectedly Amazing Carbon-Based Energy Form

A lab “accident” may solve your annoying battery problems

-

Batteries are terrible. Compared to many other methods of storing energy, especially fossil fuels, batteries aren’t very energy dense—that is, a 1-pound battery stores far less energy than is contained in a pound of gasoline. That wouldn’t be so bad if the energy in a battery were easy to replenish—your Tesla might still go only a couple hundred miles on a single charge, but if you could fully recharge it in five minutes rather than several hours, the low capacity wouldn’t bother you as much.

Scientists have spent decades trying to create the perfect battery—a battery with great energy density or, at least, one that doesn’t take so long to charge. If we could somehow make this perfect battery, pretty much every gadget you use, from your phone to your laptop to your future electric car, would be amazing, or just less annoying than they are today. The perfect battery might also help with some other important stuff: climate change, oil wars, pollution, etc.

One approach for improving the battery is to forget about the battery and instead improve capacitors. A capacitor, like a battery, is a device that stores electrical energy. But capacitors charge and discharge their energy an order of magnitude faster than batteries. So if your phone contained a capacitor rather than a battery, you’d charge it up in a few seconds rather than an hour. But capacitors have a big downside—they’re even less energy dense than batteries. You can’t run a phone off a capacitor unless you wanted a phone bigger than a breadbox. But what if you could make a dense capacitor, one that stored a lot of energy but also charged and discharged very quickly? Over the past few years, researchers at several companies and institutions around the world have been racing to do just that.

They’re in hot pursuit of the perfect “supercapacitor,” a kind of capacitor that stores energy using carbon electrodes that are immersed in an electrolyte solution. Until recently, though, supercapacitors have been expensive to produce, and their energy densities have fallen far short of what’s theoretically possible. One of the most promising ways of creating supercaps uses graphene—a much-celebrated substance composed of a one-atom layer of carbon—but producing graphene cheaply at scale has proved elusive.

Then something unexpectedly amazing happened. Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in chemist Richard Kaner’s lab at UCLA, wondered what would happen if he placed a sheet of graphite oxide—an abundant carbon compound—under a laser. And not just any laser, but a really inexpensive one, something that millions of people around the world already have—a DVD burner containing a technology called LightScribe, which is used for etching labels and designs on your mixtapes. As El-Kady, Kamer, and their colleagues described in a paper published last year in Science, the simple trick produced very high-quality sheets of graphene, very quickly, and at low cost. (via Graphene supercapacitors: Small, cheap, energy-dense replacements for batteries. - Slate Magazine)

(via scinerds)

throughascientificlens:

Vitamin B₁₂

Metabolic pathways are extremely complex, but here I will give a snapshot of a cross section of the pathway for Vitamin B₁₂. At the center of the molecule there is a cobalt atom which is first converted to Co³⁺ and then to Co⁺ by flavoprotein reductase enzymes. Co+ is a very strong nucleophile: read, it has a very strong attraction for positive charges. It thus attacks the number five carbon on ATP causing a reaction which forms 5’-deoxyadenosyl-cobalamin. This active form of the vitamin can be used in other metabolic pathways for a plethora of things.

It should be noted that Vitamin B₁₂ does not occur commonly in nature but can be converted through the above pathway into an active molecule which can then be run through other metabolic pathways to be used in biological systems.

(x, x)

(via scientificthought)

asmymlivural:

If anyone ever asks me to define love, I’m just going to show them this

(Source: femburton, via xiu-han)

thisisnotkorea:

haeranara:

Gwangju, May 1980
(이미지 출처: 518 기념재단 홈페이지 www.518.org)

역사를 잊은 민족에게 미래란 없다.

Okay. Today is one of the really rare days when I’m going to talk about my country’s own history and politics. 

The Gwangju massacre, also known as the Gwangju uprising or Gwangju democratization movement, was an event where citizens rose up against Chun Doo Hwan’s dictatorship and took control of the city. This was later crushed by the South Korean army, leading to massive civilian deaths. This damaged Chun Doo Hwan’s popularity and ultimately led to other democratization movements in June, which later overthrew the government. 

I’d like to say that this is what people like Hyosung are making fun of when they say shit like “democratization” in the wrong context. 

I’d like to say that this is a traumatic event still for Koreans from Gwangju even to today, and that today, the current politician, Park Geun Hye, refused a song called “임을 위한 행진곡” which is a song that symbolizes the movement, to be played at the memorial.

That’s all I’d like to say for today.