Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie about what happens when you select "all toppings" without reading the menu. After watching characters experience parallel universes, I'm happy we're sharing this one together...and don't have hot dogs for fingers.

- Alpha Steve

Join The Convo for weekly briefings on the coolest STEM news!

Getting STARted

Your new wallpaper has arrived. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) flexed $10b muscles with its first full-color images of space.

• JWST sent these images ~1 million miles back to Earth

• Onboard sunshield helps JWST operate at -370°F

• Launched: 12/25/2021

JWST is 100x more powerful than Hubble and detects infrared light from objects much further than ever witnessed. More than just a pretty picture, astronomers can use these images to evaluate distant planets and systems.

Get lost in colorful galaxies, Jupiter, and a Hubble/JWST comparison

Shrimp Shock

Pistol Shrimp have big sound energy. Snapping their claws generates a shock wave that stuns small fish, but a hood protects the shrimp from the same fate.

• Hoods have an opening near the front

• When a shock wave hits the hood, water is pushed away

• Displacement of water absorbs most of the impact

Removal of the hood from some shrimp caused them to struggle with their own force. Researchers hope to apply shrimp-hood engineering to protective equipment in the near future. But like, human-sized.

Pew pew

Lab Grown Heart

Some people grow tomatoes, others grow hearts. Researchers successfully grew a pumping mini-left ventricle in a lab.

• Grown using real heart muscle cells

• Electric pulses controlled beat patterns

• Contains 3 layers of cells (full-sized human hearts have 11)

Lab-grown hearts give us the opportunity to reverse-engineer our complex organ. Researchers will scale up as they learn how to mimic other systems, like including blood vessels for oxygen transport. In other words, their love is growing.

<3

Clickables

• Closest thing to a real-life Pokemon

• Gravity + cones = sad ice cream  space tourism

• Squirrel contraceptive, a nonviolent way to eradicate invasive species

• Watch a beluga whale creatively retrieve its toy on land

• Octo-glove: the underwater grip strength of an octopus

st3v on site

2D Printing

Printing hearts is a lot easier in two dimensions.

Thank you for reading!

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