#crystalline waters

[techdriveplay]

Beneath the Surface: Best Places for Deep-Sea Diving 

The ocean, with its vast expanse and mysterious depths, holds a world beyond imagination. For those willing to venture into its enigmatic realm, the world offers a plethora of dive sites, each with its own unique allure and challenges. From the abyssal trenches to vibrant coral reefs, let’s embark on a journey to uncover some of the most exhilarating deep-sea diving destinations on the…

[sapsanka]

Watercolor

[finalgirlmegumi]

Aster ur right. Im so sorry makimai handmaiden moment gone wrong you will always be famous

[jievan]

.水晶幻雨. Crystalline Rain

凝結天上露珠，降下晶瑩的澄淨之雨。

水的掌控者，善於凝氣成液，液散化成雨。

[yvonnesrespite]

@talia-sings:

In the muted light of the hospital room, the diva of the opera world sat in silence. The woman, whose voice once commanded the stages of the grandest theaters, now found herself grappling with a silence that was not chosen but imposed. She had woken up one day with her voice completely gone, muting the soaring arias and the delicate melodies that were her life's work.

From her perspective, the hospital was a world away from the velvet-draped backstage and the spotlight's warm embrace. Here, the sterile white walls were her only audience. She has never been a fan of hospitals, at all.

Still, however, Talia looked at the young nurse running the reception desk and smiled charmingly at her, keeping her fear at bay. She was here to get her throat checked up, just to find out why she had lost her voice.

Copy, paste, save. Copy, paste, save. Click, drag, shift and ugh, why are spreadsheets so mind numbing?! A scrutinizing gaze befalls the paper in the nurse’s hand at the reception desk. Anyone walking by would instantly clock this young lady as the mean girl type. Ironically she’s more commonly known as one of the sweeter nurses there. Her – for a lack of better words – resting bitch face tends to emerge when she’s handling spreadsheets.

A spectral tickle on the back of her neck draws Yvonne’s attention from her personal spreadsheet purgatory. No, not purgatory. It’s just a new circle of Hell that Dante’s Inferno didn’t cover. Honestly, spreadsheets are the worst sometimes! Her gaze moves upwards to the source of the prickling sensation on the back of her neck. The source happens to be the gaze of a kind-looking woman. The intimidating furrow of Yvonne’s brows and disgruntled frown on her face are replaced with a much warmer and welcoming expression.

“Hm, you’ve been waiting for a bit, haven’t you? One moment.”

The nurse turns around and casually grabs the phone. The conversation seems intense. A haughty sigh heaves forth from her glossy lips and the phone is put down with only a little bit of spite. Oooonly a little bit. Yeah.

Yvonne’s dazzlingly sweet demeanor returns as she stands up. A younger nurse – perhaps an intern – rushes to the reception desk, bows in a hasty apology, and takes her place. Whatever transpired in that call probably put the poor kid’s internship on the line. Maybe this nurse looks sweet but it seems she has this air of authority with how she carries herself. She walks over to Talia with a clipboard and tilts her head. “Your situation needs to be bumped up on our priorities. The sooner it’s looked at, the easier the recovery! Come along and please don’t push yourself to speak much. Even if it doesn’t hurt.”

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

Light Play Part 2

All photos mine, some edited for colour and contrast, others left as is.

[aetherium]

©️ ᐯ丨丂丨ㄥㄩ乂 - 2024

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 3, day 11

Late art tonight for dealing with life bullshit reasons, but we've added lightning! We also did an animation for it but that's gonna take like 15 minutes to render and I need to go to bed 45 minutes ago sooooooo

[turquoiseries]

[gierosajie]

How I visualize the construction of Zapolarny Palace

Tsarisa building Zapolyarny Palace: *Elsa intensifies*

The mental image of the Tsaritsa stomping her foot down and ice extends in fractal patterns into a palace with her as the epicenter is just ✨Perfection✨

[purcaholic]

In a realm of tranquil polygons and gentle gradients, a low-poly sunrise casts a soft glow across crystalline waters. Mountains rise like faceted sculptures, their peaks dipped in dawn's pastels. A lone deer, rendered in angular elegance, grazes on a mosaic of emerald and jade. The air hums with the whisper of pixels, each serene shape a quiet song of harmony. Here, in this serene geometry, fantasy unfolds in calming simplicity, where dreams wander unhurried, tethered by the art of the poly.

[whimsielf3]

Goldie and Sashes

[hollow-vok]

▪︎SolyaMarek futuristic AU ▪︎

Summary

In modern days, pollution is devastating everything, but there is a plan: to send hundreds of people to sleep in capsules until those outside build a better future, of course this plan is only for individuals and families who have privileged access, one of these families is the Algirdons.

Marek does not want to enter these capsules but he is forced, he ends up waking up in a more distant future than he expected, centuries have passed. He has woken up in an era in which pollution is more than controlled, it does not exist. Everything is clean and healthy.

He is introduced to Solya, his temporary guide and host to welcome him in this new era, he explains him that this is a future where everyone strives to be the better version of themselves. In this era, at birth an advanced technology calculates how is the healthiest version of your body and mind and how to achieve it through out your life, there is not a standard for this "perfect body", the path you should take to be the best version of yourself depends, of course, of you. Everyone is perfect if they follows this, everything is in balance, animals and plants live wholly, technology and nature are companions, allies for the great well-being of all.

It's a clean future.

But Marek is afraid, technology is so advanced he doesn't know what's real and what's not, his host acts in such a way that Marek thinks he could be fake, but he will learn how life is now, accompanied by his family and with the help of his host Solya, a very intriguing individual, someone for whom this wonderful world has been like this since he was aware.

[jcmarchi]

Two MIT PhD students awarded J-WAFS fellowships for their research on water

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/two-mit-phd-students-awarded-j-wafs-fellowships-for-their-research-on-water/

Two MIT PhD students awarded J-WAFS fellowships for their research on water

Since 2014, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has advanced interdisciplinary research aimed at solving the world’s most pressing water and food security challenges to meet human needs. In 2017, J-WAFS established the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Water Solutions Fellowship and the J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship. These fellowships provide support to outstanding MIT graduate students who are pursuing research that has the potential to improve water and food systems around the world. 

Recently, J-WAFS awarded the 2024-25 fellowships to Jonathan Bessette and Akash Ball, two MIT PhD students dedicated to addressing water scarcity by enhancing desalination and purification processes. This work is of important relevance since the world’s freshwater supply has been steadily depleting due to the effects of climate change. In fact, one-third of the global population lacks access to safe drinking water. Bessette and Ball are focused on designing innovative solutions to enhance the resilience and sustainability of global water systems. To support their endeavors, J-WAFS will provide each recipient with funding for one academic semester for continued research and related activities.

“This year, we received many strong fellowship applications,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “Bessette and Ball both stood out, even in a very competitive pool of candidates. The award of the J-WAFS fellowships to these two students underscores our confidence in their potential to bring transformative solutions to global water challenges.”

2024-25 Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions

The Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions is a doctoral fellowship for students pursuing research related to water and water supply at MIT. The fellowship is made possible by Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. 

Jonathan Bessette is a doctoral student in the Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center within the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, advised by Professor Amos Winter. His research is focused on water treatment systems for the developing world, mainly desalination, or the process in which salts are removed from water. Currently, Bessette is working on designing and constructing a low-cost, deployable, community-scale desalination system for humanitarian crises.

In arid and semi-arid regions, groundwater often serves as the sole water source, despite its common salinity issues. Many remote and developing areas lack reliable centralized power and water systems, making brackish groundwater desalination a vital, sustainable solution for global water scarcity. 

“An overlooked need for desalination is inland groundwater aquifers, rather than in coastal areas,” says Bessette. “This is because much of the population lives far enough from a coast that seawater desalination could never reach them. My work involves designing low-cost, sustainable, renewable-powered desalination technologies for highly constrained situations, such as drinking water for remote communities,” he adds.

To achieve this goal, Bessette developed a batteryless, renewable electrodialysis desalination system. The technology is energy-efficient, conserves water, and is particularly suited for challenging environments, as it is decentralized and sustainable. The system offers significant advantages over the conventional reverse osmosis method, especially in terms of reduced energy consumption for treating brackish water. Highlighting Bessette’s capacity for engineering insight, his advisor noted the “simple and elegant solution” that Bessette and a staff engineer, Shane Pratt, devised that negated the need for the system to have large batteries. Bessette is now focusing on simplifying the system’s architecture to make it more reliable and cost-effective for deployment in remote areas.

Growing up in upstate New York, Bessette completed a bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As an undergrad, he taught middle and high school students in low-income areas of Buffalo about engineering and sustainability. However, he cited his junior-year travel to India and his experience there measuring water contaminants in rural sites as cementing his dedication to a career addressing food, water, and sanitation challenges. In addition to his doctoral research, his commitment to these goals is further evidenced by another project he is pursuing, funded by a J-WAFS India grant, that uses low-cost, remote sensors to better understand water fetching practices. Bessette is conducting this work with fellow MIT student Gokul Sampath in order to help families in rural India gain access to safe drinking water.

2024-25 J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions

The J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship is supported by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program, which offers companies the opportunity to engage with MIT on water and food research. Current fellowship support was provided by two J-WAFS Research Affiliates: Xylem, a leading U.S.-based provider of water treatment and infrastructure solutions, and GoAigua, a Spanish company at the forefront of digital transformation in the water industry through innovative solutions. 

Akash Ball is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering, advised by Professor Heather Kulik. His research focuses on the computational discovery of novel functional materials for energy-efficient ion separation membranes with high selectivity. Advanced membranes like these are increasingly needed for applications such as water desalination, battery recycling, and removal of heavy metals from industrial wastewater. 

“Climate change, water pollution, and scarce freshwater reserves cause severe water distress for about 4 billion people annually, with 2 billion in India and China’s semiarid regions,” Ball notes. “One potential solution to this global water predicament is the desalination of seawater, since seawater accounts for 97 percent of all water on Earth.”

Although several commercial reverse osmosis membranes are currently available, these membranes suffer several problems, like slow water permeation, permeability-selectivity trade-off, and high fabrication costs. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystalline materials that are promising candidates for highly selective ion separation with fast water transport due to high surface area, the presence of different pore windows, and the tunability of chemical functionality.

In the Kulik lab, Ball is developing a systematic understanding of how MOF chemistry and pore geometry affect water transport and ion rejection rates. By the end of his PhD, Ball plans to identify existing, best-performing MOFs with unparalleled water uptake using machine learning models, propose novel hypothetical MOFs tailored to specific ion separations from water, and discover experimental design rules that enable the synthesis of next-generation membranes.  

Ball’s advisor praised the creativity he brings to his research, and his leadership skills that benefit her whole lab. Before coming to MIT, Ball obtained a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Jadavpur University in India. During a research internship at IIT Bombay in 2018, he worked on developing a technology for in situ arsenic detection in water. Like Bessette, he noted the impact of this prior research experience on his interest in global water challenges, along with his personal experience growing up in an area in India where access to safe drinking water was not guaranteed.

[minmo-cat-foods]

she unleashed the Cuntima weapon upon the Dollriada allowing the Fiercejan resistance to mount a full scale cunterassoult