Tag: science

Dangerous Beauty: The Spiked Palms of Costa Rica’s Jungles | January 03 2026, 02:35

A very typical palm for Costa Rican jungles. Hugging one of these is a bad idea. These black spikes are incredibly sharp, hard, and can reach lengths of 10-15 centimeters. They are arranged in dense rings along the entire trunk. The most treacherous thing about these spikes is their fragility and dirt. If a person or animal runs into such a spike, the tip easily breaks off and remains deep in the wound. Since in the tropical climate these needles are home to millions of bacteria and fungi, a deep splinter almost guarantees a serious, painful, and slow-healing inflammation.

The density of the needles varies, sometimes the trunk is not visible behind them.

Such was the case in the series Pluribus.

Exploring Nature’s Design: How Insect Bites Transform into Palm Leaf Patterns | January 03 2026, 02:15

This is a palm leaf in the jungle about 60-70 centimeters wide. I stopped and wondered how it is that beetles chew through to create such a pattern.

I mean, when you think about it, the answer is obvious. They make one hole in a folded leaf, and then the leaf unfolds, creating many holes – like a paper snowflake. Upon contemplating this, I realized that palm leaves grow as a “cigar,” a rolled-up tube. I didn’t know this, but the very regular holes leave no other explanation.

But there is another thing – the holes are a bit large for a beetle or an ant. Obviously, if they were to eat a leaf that’s rolled up into a tube, they would end up biting through several layers at once, because if they ate the layers separately, the structure wouldn’t appear as regularly. But their mouths aren’t huge enough, of course, to eat such multi-layered leaves.

Apparently, an ant or beetle was eating the leaf while it was still small. Afterwards, the leaf grows evenly throughout and, obviously, the hole increases along with the leaf. The holes don’t heal; the leaf is alive and grows. A hole made by a beetle could initially be only a couple of millimeters in size, but then it grows to the size of a finger.

Celebrating a Quarter Millennium: America’s Semiquincentennial | January 02 2026, 04:19

We pass the marker announcing the start of the sestercentennial, also known as the semiquincentennial. The first term contains sester, which means something on the way from 2 to 3. The second term essentially means half of 5 hundreds. Centennial in both words, of course, refers to hundreds of years.

Exploring ASML’s Advanced Chip-Making Equipment with Veritasium | January 02 2026, 00:47

Veritasium released a very cool report yesterday from ASML about the equipment used to print chips for your little phones, cameras, and laptops.

For those who aren’t familiar with the process. First, a monocrystal is grown from ultra-pure silicon and cut into thin wafers, then multiple layers of thin dielectrics, conductors, and semiconductors are repeatedly applied to the wafer surface, each time shaping the necessary areas using photolithography, etching, and ion doping, eventually creating billions of transistors and connecting metallic paths; finally, the wafer is tested, cut into individual crystals, and packaged into casings, making them into finished microchips.

This process had a limitation – the width of the paths and the distance to the next one are limited by the wavelength of the light used, and reducing it is difficult because there’s nothing to focus such a beam with – lenses simply absorb/reflect everything. In EUV lithography (extreme ultraviolet), the wavelength is 13.5 nm. This is virtually soft X-ray radiation.

The video explains details about the ASML machine costing 400 million dollars. Instead of refracting lenses, highly complex systems of reflecting mirrors are used. These mirrors are the smoothest surfaces ever created by humanity. If the mirror of this machine were enlarged to the size of the Earth, the largest bump on it would not be thicker than a playing card. To enable the mirrors to reflect X-rays, up to 76 alternating layers of tungsten and carbon, each less than a nanometer thick, are applied. All this is done by Zeiss. In addition, this mirror has a controlled curvature—it is constantly adjusted by robots with precision up to picoradians. The precision of the mirror control is so high that if a laser were mounted on it, directed at the Moon, the system could choose on which exact side of a 10-cent coin lying on the moon’s surface to hit with the beam.

But. We don’t have a “light bulb” that emits light in the EUV range.

To generate this light, a laser “shoots” at a droplet of molten tin the size of a white blood cell, traveling at 250 km/h. The first pulse flattens the droplet into a disc, the second and third turn this “disc” into plasma – and all this occurs within just 20 microseconds. When hit by the laser, the droplet heats up to 220,000 Kelvin — approximately 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This plasma emits that very necessary light. And it does so 50,000 times a second. They say it’s been brought up to 100,000. Imagine, at a hundred thousand laser shots per second, it never misses a single one. All this happens in a deep vacuum. To clean the mirrors from tin particles, the chamber is constantly blown with hydrogen at a speed of 360 km/h — faster than a Category 5 hurricane. This process is described by the same formula (Taylor-von Neumann) that describes a nuclear explosion or supernova explosion.

The machine layers the chip with an error margin of no more than five atoms, while the matrix swings back and forth with an overload of 20G.

A single High-NA machine is transported in 250 containers on 25 trucks and seven Boeing 747 aircraft.

Link to the video – in the comments. Or search on YouTube on the channel veritasium.

Designing 3D Volleyball Training Tools on the Fly | January 01 2026, 21:21

What I did on the plane to/from vacation and sometimes in between: 3D visualization and editing volleyball schemes for Nadya (she’s a coach). This court in the attached image freely rotates, players can be placed on it, and the ball and player paths are shown – all in 3D.

The ball’s trajectory is calculated so that it does not cross the net when moving from A to B (Bezier formula). Players can take several poses – right now there are hastily made poses for serve, attack, block, pass/receive. Interestingly, in the code: I had to write a bit of “volleyball brains”. The system itself calculates the ball’s trajectory through Bezier curves so that it always passes over the net. Moreover, the height of the launch depends on the type of action: for an attack, the ball “launches” from a higher point than for a pass. I also added auto-rotation: the 3D model itself turns its face to where, according to the scheme, it needs to pass or run.

The longest and most difficult task was creating the 3D model of a female volleyball player. To generate a realistic volleyball player, I used the tripo3D service. It gave me a model in a neutral pose (for free). Theoretically, you can then use Blender and the Rigify plugin to attach an armature to it and move its arms and legs, which would recalculate the model.

However, in reality, this approach does not work well: the AI-generated model contains a large number of geometric errors, which the renderer forgives but Rigify does not. They can be roughly divided into two types — incorrect polygon normals and issues with non-manifold geometry, which are significantly more challenging to fix. Inside the body, there may be “floating” clusters of polygons or intersecting surfaces. When Rigify tries to calculate weights (which bone affects which part of the skin), this internal noise confuses the algorithm, and as a result, the weights are distributed chaotically (for example, moving the arm might start pulling the mesh on the stomach). Plus, the model is slightly asymmetrical.

Non-manifold is a geometry error where the topology of an object ceases to be correct in terms of a three-dimensional body: edges may belong to more than two polygons, polygons may only touch at vertices or edges without a common volume, and “hanging” surfaces or zero thickness may appear inside the model. Such geometry formally does not describe a closed volume, causing problems with rigging and deformations. Moreover, the model needs to be simplified because millions of polygons are not needed for rendering in real-time in a browser.

I fixed these using MashLab, additionally refining by hand (“with a file”). In the end, the model turns out slightly different from the original almost everywhere. The original model had “skin” in the form of textures – the face, shirt, and shorts had to be colored. How to transfer all this to a simplified model? For that, there’s a special operation in Blender called Baking. This also involves some tricks. In the end, it didn’t transfer perfectly, but perfection isn’t necessary yet.

Next, we attach the armature to the “joints”, and after about three hours of figuring out why everything does not work as it should, it finally worked. I made four poses, and now each circle (player) can be told which pose it is in.

I’ll also need to make dynamic changes to the uniform colors – that shouldn’t be difficult. There’s also an idea to transfer poses from photographs – this is more complicated, but generally feasible. Using MediaPipe/AlphaPose, you can detect key points in 2D, then some models like HMR/HybrIK can “lift” flat coordinates into 3D space, outputting relative joint rotation angles. The resulting data can be attempted to be projected onto a Rigify skeleton. Since the proportions of the generated volleyball player and the person in the photo may not match, that’s exactly why Inverse Kinematics (IK) is used. This part is quite complex, but overall it’s not strictly necessary – just interesting to figure out and make something functional.

Video in the comments

Exploring the Golden Carpenter Ants of Costa Rica | December 31 2025, 14:28

Golden Carpenter ants from my last trip to Costa Rica. They are huge, about 1.5cm. They build nests in wood. Unlike termites, they don’t eat the wood, they just make a home for themselves there. They don’t have stingers, but if disturbed too much, they can bite with their jaws (as seen in the photo on the left) and inject formic acid. Their distinctive feature is a golden abdomen. I’ll write about other notable leaf-cutter ants next time, half of my phone is full of them.

Night Encounter with the Fer De Lance: Survival Against the Jungle’s Deadliest Snake | December 29 2025, 18:06

Last night, I encountered the most dangerous, most venomous snake in the jungle – Fer De Lance (Bothrops asper) on a path. Generally, local clinics have antivenom and with it, the mortality rate drops to zero, but it’s better not to test it – the venom causes rapid necrosis and disrupts blood clotting. It also has a built-in night vision camera in its head. The system is so sensitive that the snake can detect a temperature difference of just 0.003 °C. This helps it hunt warm-blooded rodents and birds at night, when visual sight is limited.

It’s also super fast. Four and a half meters per second. That’s faster than you can blink. Indeed, if you’re not sitting right in front of its nose, there’s enough time for it to switch to a combat position, allowing you to jump away – so I managed to get by from behind.

Exploding Trees in the Jungle: Nature’s Deadly Defense Mechanism | December 29 2025, 14:08

You can find anything in the jungle at night. A tree exploding with poisonous spikes suddenly.

It’s not the tree that explodes, of course, but its fruits. They resemble little pumpkin-capsules. When ripe and dry, the fruit’s walls gradually stretch, accumulating internal tension. At some point, this “biological device” bursts with a loud pop, throwing seeds at tremendous speeds — up to ~70 m/s covering dozens of meters, the sound resembling a gunshot.

All parts of the tree are extremely toxic. The sap contains irritants that cause severe burns and rashes on skin contact, and temporary or even permanent blindness in the eyes.

There are simply more trees around with spikes (non-poisonous), but long and sharp. Just like the one shown in the series pluribus

Exploring the “Christmas Tree” in Oil & Gas | December 18 2025, 18:34

Oh, how many wonderful discoveries the spirit of enlightenment brings…

it turns out, Christmas tree in the oil & gas industry is a wellhead equipment. I am testing this search for work