Simple, Classic / Cichic Giveaway Winners Announced!

Hello! Just popping in really quickly today, because I'm meant to be working on an assignment *shhhh*. I am so happy I found this shirt the other day, because I've been wearing it almost constantly since. It worked really well with this plain black skater-style skirt sent to me by Cichic, too! I really like this skirt - it's simple but a little bit different from your average plain-black skirt, because it has these panels which make it flare out from your waist in a really flattering way. skirt - c/o Cichic blouse -  Forever 21 tights - c/o Oasap shoes - c/o YesWalker bloomers - Wholesale bag - Thrifted belt - Thrifted And as promised, I am announcing the winners of the Cichic giveaway, who will get to pick one item of their choice from cichic.com! Winners are Emmy Anne, Alina and Man Yee. Please check your email, and email me back to get your prize! Also, don't forget to go and enter my 1 Million Pageviews giveaway, if you haven't already! And because I am supposed to be doing an assignment right now, here are some amazing facts to blow your mind (requiring no effort on my part ;) I can't write up a DIY on how to extract DNA every day). Which fact was your favourite? Mine is the card shuffling one. I just couldn't believe that one is real! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

1 Million Pageviews Giveaway! / CLOSED

I reached an excitingly arbitrary number of pageviews on my blog a few weeks ago - 1 Million! That's 1,000,000 times that people have looked at my blog. Whoa. So I wanted to thank you all for visiting my blog with this little giveaway (and I may do another with something handmade by me :D). This giveaway is a collaboration with a long-time sponsor of mine, OASAP! The winner will get one of the items in the above picture of their choice (most are available in many different colours as well). Up for grabs is your choice of the following: Candy Skater Skirt | Denim Shorts | Mini Mesh Skirt | Triangle Print Shirt | Striped Letter Denim Cutoffs | Crochet Vest | Eagle T-Shirt | Cloud Sunglasses All you need to do for one entry is to register on OASAP, but there are several other ways of gaining extra entries as well! Use the rafflecopter widget below to enter. a Rafflecopter giveaway (Results of the Cichic giveaway will be announced shortly, by the way. Thanks for your patience!) Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Stripes, Denim & Science Museums / The World's Smallest Movie

I'm wearing pants! What is this unusual thing? I just counted, and out of all the outfits I've worn on my blog, I've worn jeans just three times. Usually, I don't wear jeans because I feel like they look too casual, and I feel too boring wearing them (I am someone who dresses up even when going up the street to buy bread). However, when I saw these stripey ones on Sheinside I thought I'd give jeans another go, because the bold vertical stripes are far from unnoticeable. My friend Hannah gave me these badges that she thrifted the other day. Aren't they sweet? I LOVE the science museum one, and they go super well with this denim tie-shirt. jeans - c/o Sheinside denim shirt - c/o Oasap badges - Gift from my friend Hannah (thrifted) shoes - c/o Topb2c Did you guys catch this the other day? Using a machine that can move around single atoms on surfaces, and by moving atoms one at a time, scientists at IBM have created "The World's Smallest Movie". The images in the movie are magnified about 100 million times, and the whole thing was captured at -260°C. Each frame features a separate picture, put together using a stop-motion animation technique. The movie itself is not going to win any Nobel prizes, but it shows the kind of awesome things you can achieve if you work in science. And it does raise possibilities for future technologies. Atoms, the smallest "unit" that makes up everything in our universe, including your computer, your chair and you yourself, are so incomprehensibly tiny. I can't even believe that we can see and image them, let alone show off and make a movie out of them. Here's a link to a video about the making of the movie, which is worth a watch, but I've embedded the actual "World's Smallest Movie" below for your viewing pleasure: Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

The Return of Summer / Alien Life in the Solar System (part 3)

For some reason summer has decided to visit us again in Sydney despite it being a month away from winter. This has been a nice excuse to wear some summery outfits and (if you saw my instagram yesterday) indulge in all-day-long-"no-pants"-days at the beach. On days like these, boater hats and lace shirts are a must. Although I was getting sick of the heat, I am going to embrace these last couple of days of pseduo-summer before it switches over into full-blown winter. dress - Paddy's Markets shirt - c/o Oasap necklace - c/o Merrin & Gussy socks - Cotton On hat -  c/o Wholesale shoes - c/o Chictopia So picture Saturn's 6th largest moon, Enceladus. It's not very large - it's about 7 times smaller in diameter than our own moon (in length, it would fit inside Great Britain). Enceladus is moon that is totally covered in ice, but if you look towards the South Pole you might see massive water spouts shooting out from underground. Some of this falls back down on you as snow, and some of it floats off to become part of Saturn's rings. Saturn hangs in the sky overhead. It's a pretty magical scene.  But are there any little alien critters on Enceladus that might also be gazing up at the sky in wonder? Image credit This moon is thought by some to be a better candidate for life than Europa, because the water exists near the surface rather than underneath a thick ice-crust. The moon also has an atmosphere, and last year it was discovered that the geysers (the water spouts) not only spew out water, but also organic compounds propane, ethane and acetylene. This is a great indication for possible alien life. Furthermore, the water in Enceladus' subsurface ocean is kept warm by what seems to be geothermal activity, much like on Earth with our deep-ocean vents (around which life a whole lot of strange life flourishes).  So could there be life on this tiny world? Well, it's about as friendly to life as Titan and Europa are. In fact, Enceladus would be even easier to gain information about than these two moons, because of its water spouts, meaning that a probe equipped to recognise complex organic molecules could merely fly through them and it wouldn't even have to land on the surface. I'm all for a mission to Saturn's moons, which does a fly-by of Enceladus before visiting Titan, as suggested by this Nature article. I hope you're all enjoying your weekends! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Plaid & Lace / Capturing an Asteroid

I really like pairing plaid with lace. This plaid skater skirt from Choies is exactly what I've been looking after for ages - it also looks great (although super preppy, but I don't mind) paired with suspenders. This lace shirt is also a versatile wardrobe piece - throw it on over a dress on a cooler day when you don't want to completely cover up with a sweater. I've been doing this a lot lately, now we're finally coming into some colder weather here! shirt - c/o Oasap skirt - c/o Choies shoes - Chicory socks - c/o Sock Dreams So NASA's next big plan, after sending Curiosity up to Mars last year (...who incidentally hopefully won't be obliterated by a possible collision with Mars and a comet next year, but that's another story), is to capture an asteroid and bring it into stable orbit around the Earth. What NASA want to do is to use an unmanned robot vehicle to capture the asteroid, then bring it back into orbit where it can be studied and explored by humans, and also mined for things like water - to provide to the international space station (for whom it currently costs thousands of dollars per kg of water sent there). Exactly how the asteroid will be captured is still unclear, but NASA believe with new technology coming out of physics and engineering, it can be done within 10 years. I think that this is really exciting. Although hopefully NASA will be able to figure out how to stop the asteroid colliding with all the thousands of satellites and space junk currently in orbit around Earth. It's a pretty huge job! Read more about it here. Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Holy Cats!

This dress is yet another extremely fantastic one (did you see my teapot dress yesterday?). I just couldn't go past the print on the front of this dress. And how could you? It's a cat wearing a crown, pretending to be a king. Come on, now. Look at his little crown and cape! Also, I forgot to take closer-up pictures, but the dress has collar tips which are little skulls. It's a very interesting dress indeed. Also, in this post I'm reviewing these shoes, sent to me by a company called Sammydress. Well, I'm definitely a fan of big, beautiful (and impractical) shoes, so they definitely ticked that box. I was really surprised with the quality of the shoes, being from a wholesale website (FIFTEEN DOLLARS, PEOPLE!) - they are suede and really well-made, the stiletto heels feel really strong and don't wobble at all, and my feet feel really secure walking in them, which is always a good thing. I've had bad experiences with wholesale shoes before (often smelling really like petrol, taking forever to ship and being very "plastic-y" and cheap-looking), but these were entirely the opposite to that. They didn't smell, they arrived in about a week and, most importantly, look amazing. Another great thing was that the size was perfect - I'm a US 8/UK 6, and the 39 fits me perfectly. They're really the most beautiful things, and basically about as comfortable as sky-high-stilettos could be. Now I just have to learn how to walk properly in them... dress - c/o Oasap tights - Ebay shoes - c/o Sammydress I'm sorry that a lot of my "science segments" have just been videos from these guys lately, but I don't have a lot of internet access at my new house as of yet. Soooo I am not really able to research cool science things for hours and hours :( anyway, this is something I found a couple of weeks ago, and is way too good not to share. Especially as I'm wearing a cat dress. Enjoy! p.s. The winner of the TNK vintage giveaway is Emmy Anne! You will be emailed shortly. Remember, you can still get 50% off anything at TNK vintage using the coupon code 26790. Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

A Colourful Mermaid

This is a very colourful outfit that I have been planning in my mind for quite a long time - I just had to wait for all of the pieces to come to me in the mail (all the way to Australia, so it's been a while!) I'm very happy because it turned out exactly as I imagined. I'm going to save this outfit for an overcast, rainy day. blouse - c/o Oasap tights - c/o Oasap shoes - c/o YesWalker skirt - c/o Faith & Lola necklace - c/o I Love Crafty Some days, I just want to post pretty outfits on my blog. The science I'm really focusing on at the moment at uni is all about eukaryotic transcriptional and translational regulation and how cells regulate their mRNAs, eIFs and other proteins to control gene expression. While I am finding it very fascinating, it's not the easiest thing for communicating here (in fact I showed it to Luci, who just said "yeah... that was all gobbledegook. Like, I got some words were in English, but that was all I understood.") So I hope you all don't get mad at me for missing out on a science fact today. Alright... a little science fact then. Many of you were interested by my Synaesthesia post the other day, and said that you also strongly associate colours with numbers or letters, but don't actually see them. Have a look at Ideasthesia. Probably, the majority of people have some form of this (just look at the "Kiki and Bouba" effect, for instance. Why would most people associate a spiky shape with the word "kiki" and a rounded shape with "bouba"? Do we all have a predisposition to synaesthetic-like-qualities?). Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Synaesthesia

Beige, stripes and a bow-tie! These are some amazingly cool new stockings from my sponsor Oasap. Though pricey, I'm happy to recommend these ones because they are thick and don't seem like they'll ladder easily (I've also worn them for a few days, and they're all good so far!) There's also a black & white version instead of the so-called "nude" version for anyone with darker skin - I've always though it's pretty unfair that standard "nude" colour always actually means "nude white person" colour, because there's a heck of a lot more skin types out there than this so called "nude". Anyway. They're still cool tights. blouse - c/o Choies skirt - Wholesale tights - c/o Oasap shoes - Chicory (Japan) hat - c/o Wholesale bag - Vintage After talking about colour perception in my last few posts, a number of people brought up synaesthesia.  Synaesthesia is one of the first things to get me interested in neuroscience and the study of human perception, and it's an incredibly wonderful and weird phenomenon! Synaesthesia is a rare neurological trait, leading to the crossing over of perceptual information: that means people with it can "see colours" in numbers or letters, "taste" words, "smell" days of the week, or "feel" that certain words or numbers have distinct personalities. It can involve any of the senses. Someone talking, for example, can simultaneously be perceived as sounds and as a taste on the tongue by someone with synaesthesia. The most common form is what is called "grapheme colour synaesthesia", where individual letters and numbers are associated strongly with different colours. This type can often help synesthetes with memory tasks where long strings of words, letters or numbers need to be remembered. It's unclear which parts of the brain are involved in synaesthesia, although a leading theory is that it's due to "cross-wiring" in the brain: neurons (brain cells that can conduct electricity) that are meant to be in sensory system cross over into another sensory system. There is also a theory that all babies are born with "cross-wired" brains, which as we grow, are "pruned back", and that synaesthesia is a failure of the brain to do this properly. (Though the word "failure" puts synaesthesia in a negative light, which I don't think it should be at all. I think it would be a pretty cool thing to have - although experiencing the taste of  mouldy detergent every time you heard a particular person's voice wouldn't be so awesome). The wikipedia page on Synesthesia provides some pretty sweet reading. Hoping you're all feelin' fine, Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Fairy Bread, Sleepy Head

Check out these Oasap tights! *Droooool*. Aren't they awesome? (They're not super dooper thin either, if you're thinking of purchasing them!) And yes, I cut a fringe into my new wig - and I'm not sure if I made it better or worse. Time will tell... blouse - Vintage sweater - Vintage necklace - Claire's (Japan) tights - c/o Oasap skirt - Vintage shoes - c/o Yes Walker hat - c/o Wholesale Why do we yawn? One of my new favourite science bloggers, Katie from the Molecular Circus, tried to answer this question on her blog the other day. It's a really interesting read! There are several theories as to why we yawn, and science still doesn't really know - my favourite theory is the empathy one, but it's likely there are a couple of reasons for the existence of yawning. (Click here to read her post!) Also, did I make all you guys yawn with all this talk of yawning? No? How about a photo - will that help? *YAWN* Hope you're all having a happy day! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr