Sister From Another Mister / Lab Burgers

Ashley is my sister from another mister. We coordinated our outfits unintentionally, but looking back through these photos, I realise how alike we appear! It's probably got a lot to do with the fact that we're both wearing wigs and teeny dresses. Or maybe it's because Ashley is wearing my clothes. For this outfit post, we went on a little pretend picnic in Victoria park outside of Sydney University, after getting up super early (like 7am, haha) to make sure the light wasn't too intense for our photos! I love that I have finally found someone else who will happily sacrifice sleep, comfort and shoot for hours on end just to get the perfect photo. I am going to miss this girl! Annika's top + skirt - c/o Choies (can also get it here) Annika's bag - Thrifted Annika's socks - Cotton on Annika's shoes - c/o Yeswalker Annika's headband - c/o Milanoo Ashley's dress - c/o Chictopia (The White Pepper) Ashley's sweater - Emoda Ashley's bag - Store in Italy Ashley's shoes - Yeswalker Ashley's headband - Claire's in Japan I wanted to talk properly about lab-grown burgers the other day, but didn't have the time because of my own lab-work (I'm not growing meat, but I am doing some pretty cool stuff). You probably heard all about it on the news, though - a researcher from Maastricht University recently let two people to taste-test a $300,000 hamburger patty made from meat he had grown in his lab. Image source: Not an artificial burger but a super cute crochet burger from bottletopboy on Etsy. Why is this such exciting news? The process No animals die in the process of making lab-meat. A small amount of special cells called "stem cells" are extracted from the shoulder muscle of a cow. A "stem cell" just means that the cell has not yet decided what final form it will take - it's a normal process of growing, or regenerating body tissue after an injury. Stem cells can divide indefinitely in this "undecided" state, so after extraction they are grown with nutrients to encourage them to multiply. After you have about a million stem cells, you let them "decide" to be muscle cells by separating them into different dishes and varying the levels of nutrients and signals in the dish to mimic the inside of the animal. The cells then grow into strips of muscle. Bundle them together, and you have your hamburger patty. What this means: Much less animal slaughter and cruelty. As soon as lab-grown meat becomes commercially available and affordable, I know that I will never eat meat from actual whole animals again. I hope that in 100 years time, people will be quite appalled by the idea that we used to slaughter animals for meat. Much less environmental strain. Lab-grown meat will use 55% of the energy of the current beef industry - a huge cut when you consider how large this industry is - and will also only emit 4% of the greenhouse gases of the current beef industry. Much more free land - lab-grown meat will only use 1% of the land that conventionally farmed beef uses. Hopefully, much less starvation. The human population is only going to keep rising and currently 1 billion go hungry every day. More people = more demand for meat, so having a system in place which doesn't use as much land an energy will be easier on the planet, meaning that hopefully we can produce a lot more of it to feed everyone! Another reason to be super excited by science! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

A Perfect Picnic Dress / Dolphin Talk

This dress has the cutest scalloped design on the front of it, don't you think? I thought that it was definitely the right dress to take on a "picnic" (I didn't go on an actual picnic because I'm doing 20 hours a week in the lab right now and have no time for such luxuries :( but it was a picnic-themed shoot nonetheless). I am planning on turning this picnic basket into a handbag at some point! I think I'll attach a pretty strap so that I can wear it as a shoulder bag. dress - Bonne Chance Collections bag/basket - Thrifted cardigan - Thrifted hat - c/o Wholesale shoes - Yeswalker I learnt the coolest things about dolphins today. Not only are dolphins self-aware (this was worked out by doing a psychological test called the "mark test", where researchers put a dolphin in front of a mirror, then put a mark on its back. If the animal tries to see the mark that the researchers have put on it, it must realise that it can see itself in the mirror and is, therefore, self-aware. Great apes and young children also pass this test, but animals like dogs and cats do not.) Image source But it also turns out that dolphins have different, individual names for each other, and can remember the names of their friends for up to 20 years! Their names are "signature whistles", which the dolphins give themselves at the age of 4 months to a year, and remain their name for the rest of their lives. They use it to identify themselves to other dolphins, and use the whistle-names of other dolphins to call them. This is further proof that dolphins use language, and also great proof of their intelligence! I can't wait until we figure out a way to converse with dolphins. Read the article here. Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

There Are Real Life Unicorns in Croatia!

See? Two of them, right there! Oh ho ho. I'm pretty funny. I hope I got you all with my hilarious title. There are a lot of goats here though. Really big goats - and some of the them have quite large horns on their heads and they just wander around the streets casually. I tried to get some pictures of them, but there was this big alpha-male goat who was walking towards me more quickly than I felt comfortable with, so I jumped on my bike and rode madly away, imagining the whole way that it was chasing me (are goats even that dangerous? I don't know. I didn't want to stick around to find out.) bodysuit - Asos (sold out - but here's another unicorn shirt) belt - Thrifted skirt - Paper Hearts shoes - c/o Yeswalker And here are some photos taken just a short time afterwards, on an Istrian marina. Sunset in Europe lasts for about 3 hours - bizarre for me, because in Sydney the sun sets extremely quickly! I love Croatia more than I can even describe. The night ended with cocktails at what is possibly the coolest bar I have ever been to, sitting on cushions on rocks right next to the crystal-clear sea water. It's pretty mad to think that I only learnt last year why the sky is blue (light of the entire visible spectrum - white light - comes to us from the sun, and the atmosphere of Earth scatters the blue light - the light with the shortest wavelengths - more than the other colours. And that's why the whole sky appears blue). But I never even questioned why the sky turns orange or red at sunset. Thanks to this fantastic video by "It's Okay to be Smart", I now know why sunsets are so pretty! Have a great day, p.s. I'm having an ad sale to help fund a slightly expensive hair-style change that I'll be getting in the next month ;) If you'd like a Large Ad Spot for August to promote your store or blog, use the promo code AUGUSTADSALE at the checkout for $5 off all Large Ad spaces. Use the promo code ANNIKANEEDSNEWHAIR for $1 off all Small Ad spaces. Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Bambi and Mind Control

I've been stuck inside the house for far too long. It has not stopped raining in Sydney. I can't wait to trade it in for summer in a couple of days! I'm a very excited (and lucky) lady to be travelling again this year. But hey, look at this Les Folles Marquises necklace above - it reminds me of an Adventure Time character! It's sooooo cute, plus it's handmade. What do you think? shirt - Thrifted skirt - c/o Sheinside necklace - c/o Les Folles Marquises socks - c/o OASAP shoes - c/o Yeswalker beanie - Stolen from boyfriend Here's a bit of incredible science news from Italy. Giving mobility back to paralysed people using science! The man in the video below has not been able to walk, move or feel his legs for two years. This exoskeleton is now under his control, and has helped him to walk for the first time since he was in a car accident that severed his spinal cord. The exoskeleton is part of a project that aims to eventually give people movement by correlating brain-patterns to the exoskeleton, train them using virtual reality, and then allowing them to control it through thought alone. How cool it that? Check out the the Mindwalker website here and the video of it in action below! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Hot Air Balloons and Aeroplanes

Les Folles Marquises, a gorgeous little etsy store, sent me some of the cutest ever necklaces! I can't even tell you how in love I am with this handmade doll necklace. I wore it to my exam as my good-luck charm (not that I'm at all superstitious nor believe she bestowed good luck upon me, but being able to look at the necklace during my exam did make me smile! Which has gotta help, right?) As a side note, Les Folles Marquises, according to google translate, is "The Crazy Canopies" in English - any French speakers want to tell me if that is at all correct? What a cute name for a cute store, though! And although you'll all know me as an advocate of cheap clothes, if something is handmade this well, it's definitely worth paying more for. I've been making some pretty great thrift-shop finds lately, like this pink cardigan and velvet fitted blazer. Every winter I only ever seem to have one cardigan and one coat which I end up wearing every day, which just makes winter even more depressing, so this year I am making an effort to own quite a few different coats, sweaters and cardigans so I can mix and match them (almost) as frequently as my dresses! Op-shops are definitely the best place to get coats and cardigans from, especially as they are usually under $10 - I don't think I've owned many "new" ones in quite a number of years. dress - c/o Sheinside necklace - c/o Les Folles Marquises cardigan - Thrifted blazer - Thrifted hat - c/o Wholesale socks - c/o OASAP shoes - Yeswalker And isn't this balloon-print Sheinside dress super cute, and just the perfect amount of quirky? Speaking of Sheinside, I have the winner of the Sheinside giveaway to announce. Is this you below? If so... congratulations! You have won a $100 gift voucher to spend at Sheinside. And I highly recommend the dress I am currently wearing ;) So I'm going on an plane to Italy in just a week's time from now. Whenever I go on an aeroplane, at at least one point in the flight I will freak out and go "HOW ARE WE POSSIBLY DOING THIS?!" Knowing really nothing about physics, I am as ignorant as caveman trying to comprehend a smartphone (in fact... I don't really know much about that one, either). I just think that the fact that something as big and heavy as a plane full of people hanging around apparently weightless in the air is insane. And if anyone asked me how planes stayed in the air, I probably wouldn't be able to give them a very good answer, either, apart from mumbling something vague about thrust and lift. And I like to know how things work, rather than just blindly accepting them as fact. So flight is actually kind of simple on the surface. There are four main forces all vying for dominance of your aircraft. You have thrust, which is what the engines provide - propelling you forward - drag, which pulls you backwards, weight, which drags you back down towards the earth, and lift, which is the one that holds you up in the air and is provided by the wings. Lift is the one that helps hold a super heavy object up in the air, and is the cause of my freaking-out. (Image source) Aeroplane wings give you lift, because of the relative differences in speed between a solid object (the wings) and a fluid object (the air). The wing deflects the air above and below the wing, splitting it into two directions. The shape of the wing makes sure that the air that goes over the top moves faster than the air on the bottom. And when air speeds up, its pressure drops, so there is more pressure pushing up from the bottom of the wing, than from the top of the wing. That's how you get lifted up into the air! The speed of sound is what is known as "Mach 1", and commercial planes don't fly this fast, however, the plane I am going on travels at Mach 0.85. That is 85% of the speed of sound, or about 280 metres per second. That is just a little over 1000 kilometres an hour (621 mph). That's... really, really fast. And a good way to segue into this XKCD comic. Speculative physics is even more fun than actual physics. If you could make a stereo fly past someone at twice the speed of sound (Mach 2), then would it sound like it was playing backwards to someone who was sitting by? The answer is yes, the song would sound like it was playing backwards. The stereo is flying faster than the sound it is playing can travel (sound travels at the speed of... well... sound), so the stereo would reach you first, followed by the sound it emitted one second ago, then two seconds ago, then three seconds ago, etc. I can hardly wrap my head around it, but I think that it is one of the coolest thought experiments ever (plus, it's an awesome fact to tell people at parties). Read the whole comic here (especially if you've never seen XKCD's 'What If?' site before.) Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr