Prince Rupert’s drops are toughened glass beads created by dripping molten glass into cold water, which causes it to solidify into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin tail. These droplets are characterized internally by very high residual stresses, which give rise to counter-intuitive properties, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer or a bullet on the bulbous end without breaking, while exhibiting explosive disintegration if the tail end is even slightly damaged.
In nature, similar structures are produced under certain conditions in volcanic lava
I think it’s incredible how seals experience the world.
Many of the deep-diving seals can go blind during their lifetime and live just fine.
Round whiskers flap around in the water and create their own turbulence, but the specific whisker shape they have cancels turbulence, so they can pinpoint trails of turbulence from prey.
Murderbot is MurderBACK in the next installment of Martha Wells’s NYT bestselling Murderbot Diaries series System Collapse 🤖🚀
WHAT’S IT ABOUT
Following the events of Network Effect, our favorite lethally cybernetic television fiend has done the previously unthinkable: agreed to accompany the sentient spaceship Perihelion (dubbed ART by Murderbot, short for Asshole Research Transport) and crew on its next mission.
Unfortunately, they’re not going to get too far.
Having failed to harvest dangerous artifacts from their target planet by way of Murderbot misadventure, the Barish-Estranza corporation is much angered and determined to recoup their considerable losses. And when you’re a lethally opportunistic space corp, blood and muscle are valuable currency.
Murderbot, ART’s crew, and the Preservation humans have planetside work to do as Barish-Estranza seeks to claim the planet’s beleaguered colony as a conscripted workforce.
But for Murderbot, the challenge is as internal as it is external. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with it. Normal operational parameters are unmet, but with the corp’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams en route, Murderbot needs to resolve its issues, and fast!
ALT
