STEMsocial Distilled - September is over!

It is @mobbs for a change! Remember me? I'll assume the answer is yes so I don't have to re-introduce myself. Let's take a deep dive into STEMsocial Distilled. In short, the STEMsocial Distilled series aims to shed light, week after week, on five of the best blogs posted in the STEMsocial community during the previous week. This is a communal effort which isn't always the most consistent, but we believe it is important to highlight those putting great effort into their content.

The upcoming choices are decided from several factors, including engagement/receptivity, quality and diversity of topics. Moreover, any single author cannot be featured more than once in three consecutive editions.

^{[Credits: @raj808]}

For a change, I decided to rank the first post only, with posts 2-5 being randomly ordered. Therefore the top post is indeed the greatest post of all time, or something. Just simmering below are the fantastic works of Physics, Tech, Biology and Chemistry - a pretty quintessential mix of STEM subjects right here!

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Our top choices

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The Birth of England; Vikings be damned!

I think I deserve to be in the top spot after so much hard work. Besides, I've been blogging fairly consistently but this is my first STEM-esque post in a long time. I just have so many other things to ponder about. Since the Queen's passing, my interest in the history of the British Monarchy and nation on the whole sparked into a flame of inspiration and intrigue. This is my first of a possibly ongoing series trying to make the history short, concise and interesting to the average person, knowing full well how historically boring history was throughout my own childhood! To start off I'm delving into the age old question I really ought to know by now: How did iEngland actually begin??

Back from HiveFest - Combine and conquer (new phenomena at particle colliders)

Not to be too elitist having us all at the top here, but @lemouth fully deserves second place below myself, not only due to his hard work on this project overall but because he even put the effort into representing us at Hive Fest! His post-fest article here discusses a recently published paper by him and his collaborators. He goes on to discuss how LHC results are designed and interpreted, as well as how one can re-interpret in the context of new, updated theories that may increase or improve accuracy. Not all this data is even possible to collect given the planet-sized amount of information that comes out every second, but with the right tech, this doesn't matter. In the ever evolving and updating pursuit of data, @lemouth is the one to call to get it all under wraps.

Explaining Phototransduction in the Eye

Eyes. What more can I say? Eyes are just beyond words when it comes to the level of complexity and awesomeness. Without eyes, there would be no hairstyles. Think about it. @eni-ola, after giving us a brief intro to the eye's inner workings, before diving into phototransduction, which can briefly be said to mean 'how we turn light into vision'. I love the writing style in this post which kind of flies you through the eye and demonstrates, though seemingly impossible to understand the process, humans somehow have managed to do so. And now you can too by checking out this post!

ORGANIC MATTER AS A SOURCE FOR OBTAINING FUEL ADDITIVES

Fuel and energy crises abound! We have to do something to our globalised world to become more reliably sustainable, right? Well, one way to do it is by making more use of new types of organic resources as a fuel. More fossil fuels? No, we're talking potatoes! The most versatile of all foods. Through a complex process including the use of bacteria, demonstrated by custom made gifs, these potatoes can have their essence turned into butanol which may then be used as a fuel's additive. Pretty neat. Potatoes are once again the... starch of the show.

Self-Driving cars/ Technologies behind this innovation

And here, last but not least we have @jsalvage giving us a rather deep look into the technologies of innovation behind self-driving cars, as well as some thoughts on the pros and cons of such a development that we're already starting to see appear all over our news feeds, if not our roads. We can see there is clearly a long way to go, including psychologically, as humans struggle to find comfort in the whole idea, but it's best to have an informed opinion on these major societal developments, so take a look and forge your own thoughts here!

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All rewards earned on the distilled posts are used to fund the STEMsocial project functioning and activities. The author of the distilled, who may be any STEMsocial member depending on the week, gets 30% of the rewards of this post. Moreover, @raj808 gets 7% for the usage of his image. If you like what we do, please consider joining our community on HIVE, and delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned), or trailing it.

Thanks a lot to all STEMsocial authors of the week for their very nice contributions to our community. For those who do not know what STEMsocial is, please take a look here, or pass by Discord.

See you next week!