Under the right conditions of saturated brine and heat, salt rapidly forms within minutes into hollow upside-down pyramid ‘boats’. They must be gently skimmed off the surface before they fill with brine and sink. Industrial pyramid (’flake’) salt, or hopper crystals, is hand-harvested and sold as fleur de sel.
Top and bottom, above on the left are home-made ‘gourmet’ kitchen salts from basic market products. Image sources “Why Salt Crystals Grow as Pyramids (sometimes)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVEZuzEHwQk and “Gourmet Salt is Crazy Expensive” (Alex, giving a how-to for do it yourself) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN6U58LzyHg
Hopper Growth of Salt Crystals –[2018]– “…We show that the sodium chloride crystals that grow very fast from a highly supersaturated solution form a peculiar form of hopper crystal consisting of a series of connected miniature versions of the original cubic crystal…in [a] cascade… The morphology of such hopper crystals is common to many substances and minerals, such as bismuth, quartz (called skeletal or fenster crystals), gold, calcite, and halite (NaCl)… Sodium chloride is a key factor in many industrial and geological processes, e.g., in the food industry, oil well drilling, CO2 sequestration, erosion of rocks, sodification of soils, and weathering of historical monuments. Equilibrium NaCl crystals are well-known to have a cubic shape because the underlying crystal lattice has a cubic close-packed (CCP) structure; however, both in nature and in laboratory experiments, hopper shapes are often encountered…” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.goc/pmc/articles/PMC5994728/
And with a little something added, many more kinds of hoppers can be created –look to the right (below) for another form of salt:
The tendency of a crystal type to form varied and repeatable structures from a basic lattice template is called a “habit” :
What Is Crystal Habit?
“Crystal habit is the tendency for specimens of a mineral to repeatedly grow into characteristic shapes. These shapes are influenced by the atomic structure of the mineral, but they can also be influenced by the environment of crystal growth. Regardless of influence, crystal habit shapes can be characteristic of the mineral and displayed by many specimens of that mineral from diverse locations… habit names are often adjectives that help convey the shape of a crystal or a group of crystals. Bladed, cubic, fibrous, granular, prismatic, and radiating are names of crystal habits that quickly convey a generalized geometric appearance.” https://geology.com/minerals/crystal-habit/
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in his banned TEDx talk of 2013, expressed some interesting thoughts about habits:
…“In an evolving universe I think a much better idea is the metaphor of habits. I think the habits of nature evolve and the regularities of nature are habitual. This was an idea put forth at the beginning of the 20th century by philosopher C.S. Pearce and…one which I myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis, the hypothesis of Morphic Resonance which is the basis of these evolving habits… Every species has a kind of collective memory. Even crystals do. This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time, the very first time you make it, it won’t have an existing habit. But once it crystallizes then the next time you make it there’ll be an influence from the first crystals to the second ones all over the world by morphic resonance—it will crystallize a bit easier. The third time there’ll be an influence from the first and second crystals. There is, in fact, good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world, just as this theory would predict. It also predicts that if you you train animals to learn a new trick, for example rats learn a new trick in London, then all around the world rats of the same breed should learn the trick quicker just because rats have learned it [elsewhere] and surprisingly there’s already evidence that this actually happens. And that’s my own hypothesis of Morphic Resonance in a nutshell; Everything depends on evolving habits and not on fixed laws.” https://rumble.com/v3dymyu-the-science-delusion-rupert-sheldrake-banned-tedx-talk.html
The pyramids of Meroe Sudan along the Nile are a good match for the natural varieties of salt hoppers, and even though the large Giza pyramids are ‘too perfect’ by comparison, their angular precision of 52 degrees slope matches English gematria for S-A-L-T (19+1+12+20=52).
Still a wonder…
“The Great Pyramid of Giza is the only Pyramid discovered anywhere on the planet with eight sides… Curiously, this phenomenon is nearly invisible from the ground and can best be appreciated from the air, above the Pyramid but only under proper lighting conditions… [allegedly] at either dawn or sunset on the spring and autumn equinoxes when the sun casts shadows on the Pyramid.” https://curiosmos.com/the-great-pyramid-of-giza-is-the-only-known-eight-sided-pyramid-in-existence/ ; and according to the lore, nobody noticed the indentations until RAF pilot P. Groves overflew the site in 1940.
Geometry alone, however, could tell us that an 8-face square-base pyramid is a common type, suggesting (to me, a non-geometer) at least three modes of measurement; stereographic projection of a sphere on a plane (3D to 2D), octahedral(3D) and octagonal(2D) sectioning, and hypercubes in four-dimensions. In other words, the Great Pyramid is a crystal in space, and as many investigators promote, by measurement, a representation of the Earth.
image source: https://anhngq.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/stereographic-projection/
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The properties of Giza, though, attracting me the most these days lay in the likeness to salt ever since I observed the appearance of salts in Covid vaccine sample pictures (see Corona the Crow part Four). I’m wondering if and how the great pyramids might also encode chemical –biochemical—information in their complex metrology. The first space crystals that I heard of, literally grown in space aboard the International Space Station, were hoppers of salt made from the astronauts’ own galley supply.
Thousands of crystal types and maybe tens-of-thousands of space crystal experiments have been made in microgravity. Here’s one composite image of protein and virus crystals brought back to Earth.
Image source, Space Safety Magazine 2013
Today, Space Crystals LLC is offering to make space crystals with your DNA and send them to the Moon: “The $150,000 fee covers one DNA kit, DNA processing into a crystalline solution, flight to ISS to grow two crystals, return of one crystal to the customer for safekeeping and transportation of the matching crystal to the moon. (Space Crystals extracts DNA from a strand of a customer’s hair.)” https://spacenews.com/space-crystals/
Kevin Heath CEO, Space Crystals founder will also send cremation remains to space, kinda stardust style. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/space/article/Houston-companies-will-send-cremated-remains-17652475.php
Guess who wants a Moon crystal?
“For Shatner, it’s about leaving something on the moon that will last for eternity, Spectrum News reported. ‘I’m going to die, and I’m going to disappear,’ he told a crowd outside the TCL Chinese Theatre July 14 [2023]. ‘What can I do? Here we have the possibility of a type of immortality.’” –because, ya know, Star Trek re-runs just aren’t enough. “When the fully grown crystals return to Earth, one is given to the customer to wear as jewelry…” (–what I was thinking! That and The Family Jewels…) https://www.galvnews.com/business/buzz/biz-buzz-star-treks-shatner-boldly-boosts-brand-of-league-city-startup-popeyes-plans-broadway/article_bac022d4-2ebd-5cea-967b-97a6ff3c599f.html So, ponder the Family Jewels because NASA’s got ‘em through its front company Space Crystals and it’s a whole new ball game.
NASA is looking for The Perfect Crystal, enlisting select schools at the highschool level to participate in its Perfect Crystal mission.
Among the curious, possibly perfect space crystals is the shape-shifting Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) that produces a variety of shape-shifting offspring. Both a-b samples below are called virtovirus, versions of Satellite TMV spun-off from its mother.
The ‘a’ form is shown twice in the collage from Space Safety mag– and ‘b’ reminds me of The Andromeda Strain and its author, Michael Crichton.
Tobacco Mosaic Virus was the first ‘mother’ (solution) ever to be crystallized, winning a 1936 Nobel Prize for its maker Wendall Stanley. It is still said to be the most-studied plant virus in science, and perhaps as Morphic Resonance suggests, evolving.
Because it bears repeating: TMV crystals were grown from conventionally-derived filtrate, the clear liquid end-product from vacuum-pumping a slurry of biological specimens through a porcelain filter. For many decades after the 1890s, “filtrate” and “virus” were synonymous until crystallization took hold and crystals became the new virus and the first nanotechnology, co-evolving with electron microscopes. See “Planting Viruses From Plants” for more TMV story.
In a nutshell, this 29 second video displays the basic growth of perfect crystals in microgravity.
For 3 minutes of your time, see a more sophisticated display of space crystals still suitable for little children. Tell them this is how to make a virus, as Francis Crick said, because “any child can make a virus.”
Unmanned rockets and satellites have been used by the US since the 1960s to grow space crystals, setup as boxed-in automata to be recovered after flight. Details of these projects have been hard to come by but contemporary equivalents are occurring now all over the world. In effect, The Andromeda Strain scenario, referencing Crichton’s 1969 book concerning a crashed satellite and release of its exobiologic content, was plausible in its own time. Crichton, having recently graduated from Harvard Medical with an MD, was then at the Salk Institute in San Diego county on a two-year fellowship (1969-70), “hired” by appearances for his talent writing science fiction—except The Andromeda Strain was his first work of science fiction and first published under his own name. Context within the Salk Institute itself during those two years only adds to the mystery of Crichton’s stay, his phenomenal writer’s success, and future choices of subject matter. Despite his training, Michael Crichton never wanted and never did practice medicine.
The Salk, built atop a bluff overlooking the Pacific on Torrey Pines mesa in La Jolla (‘the Jewel’), was planned in 1958 as a citadel of “metabiology” where raw biologic resources would become transformed into advanced new metamaterials. Joining institutional partnerships on the mesa that included Scripps Oceanographic (under Roger Revelle) and General Atomics (subsid of General Dynamics specializing in nuclear reactors, under Frederic deHoffmann), a new University of California San Diego was built and opened there in 1963, complementing the Life Science/nuclear theme of the consortium. In 1970, Freddy deHoffmann, former assistant to Edward Teller at Los Alamos, joined the board of the Salk and became its longtime president until death by AIDS in 1988. At the hand of Roger Revelle (‘mentor’ to Al Gore Jr.), Scripps can be hailed as the late 1950s birthplace of manmade Global Warming, the climate-change doctrine that Michael Crichton publicly discredited shortly before his untimely death.
Salk Institute partners, sponsors and staff: https://polioforever.wordpress.com/salk-institute/
The satellites…
CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD “In its May 2, 1946 report, Preliminary Design for an Experimental World Circling Spaceship, the Douglas Aircraft Corporation examined the potential value of satellites for scientific and military purposes… A little less than nine years later, on March 16, 1955, the Air Force issued General Operational Requirement No. 80, officially establishing a high-level requirement for an advanced reconnaissance satellite [with recoverable cargo]… Over the next five years the U.S. reconnaissance satellite program evolved in a variety of ways. The success of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik I and II satellites in the fall of 1957 provided a spur to all U.S. space programs – as any success could be used in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union. In the case of U.S. reconnaissance programs, Sputnik provided a second incentive…[that] increased the pressure on discovering the extent of Soviet capabilities – something that the sporadic U-2 flights could only do in a limited fashion.10 The Air Force program was first designated the Advanced Reconnaissance System (ARS)…” https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB13/
In a Twilight Language-like twist of an old story, announcements about SARS-Corona outbreaks brought to my mind the thought of satellites—not just spacecraft, but viruses too—and the transition from ARS to SARS (as in the 2003 outbreaks) and virus-like satellites to Sputniks. The Corona satellites flew from 1959 until May 1972, ejecting their specious payload for mid-air capture by pilots, a remarkably successful strategy as long as the falling packages could be spotted by the cruising airmen. “The [surveillance] goal of the program was not revealed to the public at the time [and]was presented as a program to orbit large satellites to test satellite subsystems and investigate the communication and environmental aspects of placing humans in space, including carrying biological packages for return to Earth from orbit.” https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1959-002A
Historically “biological packages” on space flights are more matter-of-course than exceptions. Supposedly, it all started with fruit flies: “On a July 9, 1946, suborbital V-2 rocket flight, fruit flies became the first living and sentient organisms to go to space, and on February 20, 1947, fruit flies safely returned from a suborbital space flight…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_flies_in_space While I’m interested in who provided the specimens and who received them after, the seemingly relevant questions about space crystals during the Corona missions regards the film. The ‘syn-bio’ qualities of photographic film presented a major challenge to the program, as the official line from CIA notes, causing brittle crystallization and halo (corona) effects on exposed material. One can wonder if ‘Corona’ got its name from more than just the polar, pole-to-pole, orientation of its spaceflights. Eastman-Kodak gets the credit as Corona’s film provider but it’s another company at the highest level of government secrecy that had the goods on 3D stereochemistry: Polaroid.
I wrote about Polaroid on this blog (2012) in a post called Morgification, pursuing the fate of a hydrogel substance called polyvinylpyrrolidone, PVP. Then, as now, the pervasive presence of PVP in the human food supply and other consumables has the alarming potential to cause the horrific outcomes (specimen exudates!) of Morgellon’s. Morgification is the prequel to space crystals. https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/morgification/ Likewise is the evil twin Borgification: “Borrowing a Star Trek term for ‘techno-sapiens’, borgification looks to be an interim step for human enhancement ..[but]I don’t think it will last long, like 8-track tape or VHS –“new genes” are coming with compact DNA… Document excerpts below were generated out of a conference held by the National Science Foundation, December 3-4 of 2001: The NBIC report [Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno] http://www.forbiddengate.com/NBIC_report.pdf : ‘The integration and synergy of the four technologies (nano-bio-info-cogno) originate from the nanoscale, where the building blocks of matter are established… Convergence of diverse technologies is based on material unity at the nanoscale and on technology integration from that scale…’ ” https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/borgification/
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Scaling Up…
The Borg hypercube was introduced to Star Trek fans on May 6, 1989, coincident with the first tangible space crystal successes published by Science magazine. A follow-on Science article for general readers, published in November 1989, is called “Zero Gravity Produces Weighty Improvements”:
“Protein crystals raised in outer space may be inherently superior to their Earth-bred cousins… [A]stronauts on the space shuttle grew protein crystals that were much larger and provided much better structural data than those grown on Earth under identical conditions… The space-grown crystals are already proving their worth. Since their paper was submitted to Science, several of the researchers have obtained new information about the structures of…proteins… The ultimate goal is to understand how other molecules bind to the protein, information that may aid in designing…compounds…” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.2814485
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“This paper summarizes the history of this international initiative along with a description of some of the flight hardware systems and crystallization results… It is important to note that crystals grown in space represent not only common proteins useful in crystallization studies, such as canavalin and lysozyme, but other very unique macromolecules as well. These include viruses, DNA, numerous pharmaceutical targets, and a variety of membrane proteins. As additional experiments are carried out in the future, one of the most important objectives will be to determine which classes of macromolecules, and which specific members of those classes will obtain the greatest benefit from crystallization in microgravity.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5515504/
—“the most important objectives will be to determine which classes…and which specific members of those classes will obtain the greatest benefit” indeed.
To borg or not to borg…
“The traditional mechanistic view of morphogenesis attempts to explain the formation of organisms in terms of how particles and molecules interact with one another. It also focuses on genes, gene activation and proteins…[but] the mechanistic view doesn’t explain what organizes these components into patterns…encouraging them to continue assembling into yet higher forms… Morphic resonance, on the other hand, is able to explain not only how proteins progressively arrange into higher forms…but also how organisms are greater than the sum of their parts… Taking clues from evidence we will further explore later on in this series, the answer…seems to be that a mysterious creative field—referred to sometimes as the quantum field, zero-point field or source field, and to which we will henceforth refer to as the Field—spontaneously gives rise to these morphic fields. Once they are birthed from the Field, they not only guide the structural formation and activity patterns of various substances and organisms, they are also informed by the various behaviors and environmental patterns of these same substances and organisms… [We] as humans are not only informed by the Field as a whole, but are also somehow informing the Field through our habitual patterns. If this is the case, it would seem that our responsibility to evolve our consciousness cannot be overstated.” https://subtle.energy/morphic-resonance-introduction-biofield-science-part-1/
[disclaimer: use of the phrase “evolve our consciousness” mystifies a normal process of maturation: growing up, gaining insight, discernment, wisdom and ability by experience and self-discipline. A few decades ago the trend in word choice was expanding consciousness, the idea of opening mind to the Field and enlarging one’s perspective. No outcome, value, or moral judgement is implied by either word, only a communicable effect.]
Informing the Field
….from the ISS
Image source “Benefits For Humanity (Growing the LEO Economy)” posted September 2022 https://www.facebook.com/100064698066408/videos/398423385788994/?__so__=watchlist&__rv__=video_home_www_playlist_video_list
Here are two video examples on the corporate ambitions of space manufacturing, currently attaining and aspiring:
“Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything” ( 3D printing of human organs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUj1-cPaFgo
“Who wants to be a Trillionaire” (mining asteroids for metals and water) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGosZWBTF7A
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Keeping the emphasis of this post on Life Science technology (biophysics and biochemistry), projects spun from the ISS yielding practical ‘benefits’ as of now concern “protein crystal growth (PCG) experiments on the space station [that are]by far the largest single category of experiments conducted on the orbiting lab. Proteins are involved in every aspect of our lives… One of the best ways to analyze a protein structure is to grow it in crystalline form.” https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/creating-new-and-better-drugs-with-protein-crystal-growth-experiments/#hds-sidebar-nav-1
The textbook Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus is a crystal shape called a truncated icosahedron, a spherical arrangement of hexamers and pentamers comprising 32 faces, otherwise known as a classic carbon-60 [atoms] fullerene.
“Fullerenes [a.k.a. buckyballs] had been predicted for some time, but only after their accidental synthesis in 1985 were they detected in nature[3][4] and outer space… [Harold] Kroto commented: ‘This most exciting breakthrough provides convincing evidence that the buckyball has, as I long suspected, existed since time immemorial in the dark recesses of our galaxy.’[6] According to astronomer Letizia Stanghellini, ‘It’s possible that buckyballs from outer space provided seeds for life on Earth.’ ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene
–incidentally, it’s okay nowadays to call viruses fullerenes: [2019 example paper] “Structural basis for fullerene geometry in a human endogenous retrovirus capsid” www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13786-y ; and that goes for carbon nanotubes too– from Britannica: “fullerene, any of a series of hollow carbon molecules that form either a closed cage (“buckyballs”) or a cylinder (carbon “nanotubes”)… The elongated cousins of buckyballs, carbon nanotubes, were identified in 1991 by Iijima Sumio of Japan… With fullerenes now available in workable amounts, research on these species expanded to a remarkable degree, and the field of fullerene chemistry was born. The C60 molecule undergoes a wide range of novel chemical reactions. It readily accepts and donates electrons, a behaviour that suggests possible applications in batteries and advanced electronic devices. The molecule readily adds atoms of hydrogen and of the [‘salt-forming’] halogen elements. The halogen atoms can be replaced by other groups, such as phenyl (a ring-shaped hydrocarbon with the formula C6H5 that is derived from benzene), thus opening useful routes to a wide range of novel fullerene derivatives… Particularly interesting in fullerene chemistry are the so-called endohedral species, in which [another type of] atom…is physically trapped inside a fullerene cage…” https://www.britannica.com/science/fullerene
Image, Dr. Anton Zeilinger and model “core-shell” fullerene used in quantum teleportation
University of California professor and space crystal specialist, Alexander McPherson: “Protein crystallization was discovered by chance nearly 200 years ago and was developed in the late nineteenth century as a powerful purification tool, and a demonstration of chemical purity. The crystallization of proteins, nucleic acids, and large biological complexes such as viruses, depends upon the creation of a [‘mother liquor’] solution that is supersaturated in the macromolecule[s]… Supersaturation is produced through the addition of mild precipitating agents such as neutral salts or polymers and by manipulation of various parameters that include temperature, ionic strength and pH. Also important in the crystallization process are factors that can affect the structural state of the macromolecule such as metal ions, inhibitors, cofactors, or other conventional small molecules.” https://link.springer.com/protocol/10.1007/978-1-4939-7000-1_2 ; small molecule ‘seeds’ are conventionally called “atomic clusters” or nanoclusters.
Listen and watch: “Protein Crystallization Over 200 Years: From Art to Science” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtM2v7JAa48&t=211s
“Protein crystallization has been known since 1840…[when it] stimulated the birth of the biocrystallogenesis field… The new nanotechnologies have brought a significant improvement in the practice of protein crystallization… [but] structural biology projects always become more challenging and thereby require adapted methods to enable the growth of the appropriate crystals, notably macromolecular assemblages.” https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/febs.12580
[“Advanced Biocrystallogenesis” March 2021] “Nowadays, X-ray crystallography is one of the most popular structural biology methods…[and] several advanced methods for macromolecular crystallization have been developed. Crystallization in capillaries, gels, microfluidic chips, electric and magnetic fields as well as crystallization under microgravity…and crystallization in living cells… [The] seeding strategy has been developed as one of the most powerful [methods]… Another benefit is that it reduces the amount of the used protein and saves time needed for the spontaneous nucleation. This is also suitable for…adding new additives or even new precipitants. Several seeding strategies such as macroseeding and microseeding and/or their modifications can be applied… Additionally, the antibodies and nanobodies are used…to reinforce protein crystallization, mainly for membrane protein co-crystallization. Latterly, nanobodies replaced the use of antibodies because…nanobodies are extremely stable and soluble antibody single-domain fragments that stabilize unstructured proteins by binding to them, form crystal contacts and thus speed up crystal growth…[and] enhance the probability of best quality crystal hits… The formation of native protein crystals in living cells [called in cellulo crystallization]…is ideal for proteins that cannot be crystallized applying basic crystallization techniques… Next…are attempts to use crystals in different non-conventional ways. One of them is sending biosubstances…into space to try to crystallize them for finding new uses… The protein crystals can be supposedly thereafter used for long-term storage or…stabilization…by transferring them into solid state.” https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/76140
Solid state long-term storage—hmm?—shipping, biobanking, think of the possibilities!
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A question of identity: the triplets below each have a different label. In fact, the first image marked ‘b’ (tobacco-spun virtovirus) is the same photo in McPherson’s lecture (minute7) showing ‘urease.’ The crystal marked ‘j’ is labeled as apoferritin from this montage source below https://www.researchgate.net/figure/An-array-of-crystals-grown-in-the-dewar-device-that-used-liquid-liquid-diffusion-from_fig22_282416059 ; both ‘b’ and ‘j’ photos purport to be space crystals.
Here’s the montage caption: “Figure 14 An array of crystals grown in the dewar device that used liquid–liquid diffusion from frozen biphasic samples. This experiment was performed by American investigators (Koszelak et al.75) on the Russian Space Station Mir. The crystals (labeled by row from left to right) are of top row: (a) rhombohedral canavalin, (b) creatine kinase, (c) lysozyme, (d) beef catalase; middle row: (e) porcine alpha amylase, (f) fungal catalase, (g) myglobin, (h) concanavalin B; and bottom row: (i) thaumatin, (j) apoferritin, (k) satellite tobacco mosaic virus (STMV), (l) hexagonal canavalin.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5515504/; a 2015 paper by Alexander McPherson and Lawrence J. DeLucas, America’s first optometrist in space, who authored the image of tobacco-based virtovirus within the same paper.
Using your eyes, do you see that ‘j’ (apoferritin) is the qualitatively oddball photograph? Text within this 2015 paper, called “Microgravity Protein Crystallization” states that “Macromolecules [meaning proteins], being unique in their properties, both in terms of size and complexity, give rise to crystals that are also unique” and leads me to speculate that the images of virtovirus, apoferritin, and possibly urease are one and the same crystal.
What is apoferritin? — “Apoferritin is a protein commonly present in the intestinal mucosa membrane. The important biological function of apoferritin is its ability to bind and store iron, by combining with a ferric hydroxide-phosphate compound to form ferritin. Apoferritin from horse spleen was the first protein cage studied and used as a template for the synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles. Apoferritin has found extensive use in the synthesis of numerous metallic nanoparticles including Pd2+, Cu2+, Fe2+, Co2+, Cr3+, Ni2+, Mn2+, Cd2+, and Zn2+…” [in use as MRI contrast media] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/apoferritin; “…Apoferritin, the empty shell of ferritin, can be modified to carry tailored properties exploitable for targeted and direct drug delivery. This protein shell has the ability to dis-[assemble] and reassemble depending on the pH value of the liquid environment… [F]erritin…can be exploited for different medical and electronic applications…” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53943-3; [2014] “Tuning the band gap of ferritin nanoparticles by co-depositing iron with halides or oxo-anions— Iron-containing ferritin has been used for light harvesting and as a photocatalyst…” https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/ta/c4ta04588b/unauth
“The optical properties of materials are determined by their electronic structure and band gap. The energy gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (HOMO/LUMO) varies with the size and composition of a nanocluster. Thus, the optical properties of nanoclusters change. Furthermore, the gaps can be modified by coating the nanoclusters with different ligands or surfactants. It is also possible to design nanoclusters with tailored band gaps and thus tailor optical properties by simply tuning the size and coating layer of the nanocluster.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2206983/
[2023]– “Here, a systematic approach is provided to investigate electrochemical behavior, electronic properties, and biodegradation mechanism of cobalt ferrite (CFO) and cobalt-ferrite-bismuth (CFO-BFO) core-shell nanoparticles in apoferritin-containing media… Among various oxide nanomaterials, magnetic oxide nanostructures have been suggested for targeted drug delivery, tissue engineering, magnetic hyperthermia treatment, and magnetic resonance imaging since the magnetic properties can be wirelessly controlled with external magnetic fields…” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/admi.202300558
Aug 2020: “A single immunization with spike-functionalized ferritin vaccines elicits neutralizing antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2 in mice”… “Ferritin is an attractive nanoparticle platform for production of vaccines and ferritin-based vaccines have been investigated in humans…” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.28.272518v1.full ; 2022 example, an engineered ferritin nanoparticle vaccine for EBV https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches-clinical-trial-epstein-barr-virus-vaccine
The importance of ferritin in your metabolism as ‘iron control’ against oxidative stress is described here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=csodSCoAAAAJ&citation_for_view=csodSCoAAAJ:J_g5lzvAfSwC [from Richard K. Watt of Brigham Young Univ, cited above in ‘Tuning the band gap’]
“Ferritin is a universal intracellular protein that stores iron and releases it in a controlled fashion. The protein is produced by almost all living organisms, including archaea, bacteria, algae, higher plants, and animals. It is the primary intracellular iron-storage protein in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, keeping iron in a soluble and non-toxic form. In humans, it acts as a buffer against iron deficiency and iron overload…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferritin
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Most of the non-animal space-crystal proteins that I’ve been able to identify so far come from ‘higher plants’ that traffick in seeds and carry storage proteins. My proposed crystal identity problem (urease-tobacco-apoferritin) stems from this source, with the plant kingdom itself being the largest category of genetic diversity on the planet known to science. As I write, lawmakers in various U.S states are working out the legislation to promote and protect food-delivered vaccines grown in plants. (Example: https://msn.com/en-us/health/medical/tennessee-vaccine-lettuce-bill-heads-to-gov-bill-lee-s-desk/ar-BB1kIfBT/ )
“Key to making [food vaccines] work are chloroplasts…which allow the plant to grow… They’re also an untapped source for making desirable molecules…[because] it is possible for chloroplasts to express genes that aren’t naturally part of the plant… Our idea is to repurpose naturally occurring nanoparticles, namely plant viruses, for gene delivery to plants… and also render them non-infectious toward the plants…” https://www.news.ucr.edu/articles/2021/09/16/grow-and-eat-your-own-vaccines/ The voices quoted here are two scientists from the Universities of California Riverside (UCR) and San Diego (UCSD), one of whom, Nicole Steinmetz, is intensively focused on the metabiology uses of tobacco.
Those of you familiar with my evidence contending of “planting viruses”—really, plant-derived fullerene nanoparticle inoculation—in the Cold War polio campaigns can probably appreciate this in light of COVID and the next pending round, advertised in 2012 as tobacco-grown vaccines by DARPA. Obviously, they’d figured how to get their protein NPs to ferret in the GMO genes of choice—maybe yours, yes, yours. I wrote in September of 2020 that “DARPA, of course, is covering the bases: One early [covid vax] top contender on the way, Moderna Inc. of Cambridge MA, maker of the mRNA vaccine advocated by the Gates [Foundation] and trialed on computer technology workers in Seattle, is in “strategic alliances with…DARPA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” –as expected. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MRNA/profile Moderna is the ‘wealthiest’[highest capitalization] company in the state of Massachusetts. But in the liberalized wild-west climate of “national” vaccines, the current COVID tobacco contender made by Kentucky BioProcessing (KBP), a subsidiary of British American Tobacco ( B.A.T., or BATS on the London stock exchange), may have its day –expect it!” https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/tobacco-vaccines-by-darpa/ –and I still do. The ‘bat soup’ narrative was not for nothing. Maybe this time it will come to us as food. Another contention in-progress with me is that Tobacco Mosaic Virus and similar analogs found in food plants are as much a part of our human genome as they are of plants. You Are What You Eat—remember that?—fuels a speculation that findings of Ice Age people in the Americas who were transporting tobacco seeds may have been carrying their precious food and medicine with them into new lands.
…“the most interesting part of the discovery is that there is no direct evidence that people used tobacco past 3,000 years ago, but this research proved its use more than 12,000 years ago.” https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/oldest-known-evidence-tobacco-use-north-america-found-ice-age-hunting-camp-020922 ; beside the tobacco seeds, this blog post introduces the ‘holobiont’ web-of-life and other uses of tobacco, like stuffing Egyptian mummies for their ‘second life’ resurrection: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/04/17/plant-control-and-smokin-genius/
“Storage proteins serve as biological reserves of metal ions and amino acids, used by organisms. They are found in plant seeds, egg whites, and milk. Ferritin is an example of a storage protein that stores iron. Iron is a component of heme, which is contained in the transport protein, hemoglobin and in cytochromes… Storage proteins’ amino acids are used in embryonic development of animals or plants. Two amino acid storage proteins in animals are casein and ovalbumin. Seeds, particularly of leguminous plants, contain high concentrations of storage proteins. Up to 25 percent of the dry weight of the seed can be composed of storage proteins. The best known storage protein in wheat is the prolamin gliadin, a component of gluten.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_protein
Tobacco use: “Plant-based digital data storage is a futuristic view that proposes storing digital data in plants and seeds… The first practical idea about using plants as storage media was proposed by Karin Fister and Iztok Fister Jr. in 2013 when the two were still undergraduate students at the University of Maribor (Slovenia)… With the help of two biotechnologists, they encoded a basic computer program…into Nicotiana benthamiana… synthesized it and cloned this coded DNA into a plasmid-vector to be used further for transformation into Nicotiana benthamiana plants. The encoded program was reconstructed from the resulting seedlings with 100% accuracy…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_digital_data_storage
Further uses: “TMV is playing a leading role in the exploration of various strategies to use viruses as vectors for expressing foreign genes in plants. Tom Turpen (Biosource Technologies, Vacaville, CA) echoed the current interest in TMV not only as a model system, but also as a commercial vector. The high titer of TMV in infected plants and the renowned stability of the virus contribute to its attractiveness for use in large-scale production of highly valued compounds. Turpen reported that Biosource has used TMV to produce therapeutic human enzymes of high purity and specific activity, and that pilot tests are underway in new biomass processing facilities in Kentucky for the harvesting of commercially valuable proteins from field-grown tobacco plants. One could not fail to reflect upon the socio-economic and political implications of ‘milking tobacco leaves for human enzymes’…” http://www.plantcell.org/content/11/3/301
The One Health paradigm that fuses human medical treatment across boundaries among livestock has generally played down the inclusion of plants. The US government CDC advertises its plant-inclusion as “food safety and security” and “other health threats shared by…the environment” –read it here https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/index.html – but not all reference resources are maintaining the illusion at scale: “Echoing the resurgent theme of One Health – the parallels between animal and plant health – Rosalind Franklin was able to use her knowledge of plant viruses to elucidate the structure of the devastating Human Poliomyelitis virus, similar in its structure to Turnip yellow mosaic virus…” https://www.bspp.org.uk/rosalind-franklin-100-years/
And we have a space crystal for that, posted up above, but look here again. The TYMV-polio turnip virus from space gave me the impression of two merged 8-face pyramids and set off this whole shebang of a blog post.
“…the resurgent theme of One Health – the parallels between animal and plant…”
Crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958, became posthumously famous for not being included in the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded to Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for their earlier joint discovery of the structure of DNA at King’s College Cambridge (UK) in 1953. A subterfuge against her involved the surreptitious theft (by Max Perutz) of her notes and x-ray pictures of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV image#51) showing the ‘X’ of its double-strand shape. Max Perutz also won a Nobel in ’62 for his career work on hemoglobin.
Regarding our space crystals, soon after her negative experience with Crick & Watson at Cambridge, Rosalind moved to the University of London (Birkbeck College) to head her own virus research lab under the supervision of renown communist and graphite expert John Desmond Bernal***(see the note):
“At that time, she was using X-ray diffraction to study fibres of the rod-shaped tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and crystals of the spherical turnip yellow mosaic virus (TYMV). She started talking to Aaron [Klug, her assistant, who also moved over from Cambridge in ‘53]…and a close collaboration quickly developed… After Rosalind’s death in 1958, Aaron became head of the virus group.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2019.0034
Klug would also continue a collaboration forged under Franklin with the University of California at Berkeley that provided virus samples to their London group, eventually resolving a geometric architecture for viruses with colleague Donald Caspar called Caspar-Klug Theory. But in 1957, the year prior to Franklin’s death, the Birkbeck Virus Group graduated from plants to their first animal virus, the human poliovirus, that became a celebrated ‘model’ of microcosmic perfection.
The poliovirus ‘balloon’ model (center) was displayed to the public at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels Belgium –note the Freemasonic setting. As a proof of its dodecahedron shape, I’ve added another fascinating crystal on the right known as the first made-in-a-lab quasicrystal, of a general type found principally in meteorites and nuclear explosion residues.
***John Desmond Bernal— “His 1929 work The World, the Flesh and the Devil has been called “the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made” by Arthur C. Clarke.[33] It is famous for having been the first to propose the so-called Bernal sphere, a type of space habitat intended for permanent residence. The second chapter explores radical changes to human bodies and intelligence and the third discusses the impact of these on society… In the early 1960s, Bernal returned to the subject of the origin of life, analysing meteorites for evidence of complex molecules, and to the topic of the structure of liquids, which he talked about in his Bakerian lecture in 1962.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Bernal
“ABSTRACT– This paper traces the beginnings of structural virology in the mid-20th century, focusing especially on the synergy between models of virus structure and models within art, notably Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and Kenneth Snelson’s tensegrity structures. As Donald Caspar and Aaron Klug sought to extend the Crick-Watson theory of spherical virus structure, they explored analogies between biology and architecture, eventually publishing the classic Caspar-Klug theory of virus structure in 1962.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23408434_Virus_Design_1955-1962_Science_Meets_Art
I’ll toss in a history note here that the year 1962 delivered a unique boon to the United States space efforts, including NASA’s exobiology prerogatives. President Kennedy gave his “We choose to go to the Moon” speech in September of ’62. A month later he was mired in the Cuban Missile Crisis which led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets—limiting tests to earth and water-based proving grounds (for the occult making of more quasicrystals) and Albert Sabin launched the oral polio vaccine onto the global stage. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/john-f-kennedy-jfk-moon-speech-transcript-we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon
In October 1957, with U.S. funding from NIH and the Public Health Service, Rosalind Franklin and her three assistants (Klug, Holmes, and Finch) began the study of poliovirus. The United States, and the world, was at Peak Fallout from atmospheric nuke tests, such as Operation Plumbob (‘lead weight’) when John T. Finch took the task of shuttling the virus samples around the labs: “John’s first project[was] on TYMV [turnip yellow mosaic virus, and] was technically demanding because of the very large unit cell (700 Å), then the largest that had been studied… [his] second PhD project involved crystals of poliovirus, which were given to Rosalind in 1957 by Drs. Schaffer and Schwerdt* from Berkeley… Aaron [Klug] wrote out a protocol for storing and handling the crystals, which were transferred to the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, across the road from Birkbeck. John mounted them there and then took them to the Royal Institution for X-raying. Only crystals mounted in [sealed glass] capillaries could be brought into the laboratory, with adequate supplies of neutralizing formaldehyde close by in case of accidents. The members of the group were vaccinated against polio with the newly available Salk vaccine. X-ray exposures were long, sometimes overnight, and, as someone had to be in attendance, John remembered the nighttime Royal Institution as an eerie place… The study showed that poliovirus was rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses also being worked on then, but the analysis was not taken any further.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0028 *(Mrs. Carlton Schwerdt, Patsy, hand-carried bottled poliovirus from San Francisco to London in her purse) –information first posted to the internet in 2017. Source: Planting Viruses From Plants, Part Two
A curiosity of this dated story is that normal glass caused the viruses to disappear before they could be studied by x-ray or EM; the researchers learned by substituting special fused-quartz ‘optical’ lab glass that they could reconstitute the missing viruses in the particle beams. The question is: Were the so-called viruses ever really there in the first place or were they artifacts generated out of ‘mother liquor’ by the high-energy exposure? Whatever the answer, the Franklin group’s 1958 balloon model of polio itself soon disappeared, seeming to have made its last public appearance as a dodecahedron, as published in The Observer news, on June 21, 1959.
Though it’s difficult to see what’s drawn inside the triangle-faced icosahedron, the geometry lesson of the five Platonic solids demonstrates the spacial ‘mirror’ and complement of the icosahedron and dodecahedron, demonstrated here as symbols of Osiris and Isis.
picture source: Secrets in Plain Sight, by Scott Onstott(5hrs) https://rumble.com/v3z3hq1-secrets-in-plain-sight-volume-1-and-2-scott-onstott.html
Randall Carlson calls them “duals,” mathematically able to nest perfectly together, one inside the other or side by side: Hidden Mathematics – Randall Carlson (min11) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7oyZGW99os
The atomic-molecular arrangement of this Platonic pair maps to a ‘wire’ graph connecting the hexagon and pentagon, shown below (from Secrets in Plain Sight) as molecules found in meteorites.
The meteorite substances listed on the ‘record’ above are vital signaling molecules that moderate metabolic energy transfer: Melatonin (pineal gland hormone), Caffeine (plant alkaloid stimulant),Theobromine (plant alkaloid stimulant), Adenine (nuclei acid ‘A’ essential component of ATP and ADP), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT, a hallucinogenic tryptamine drug from plants) and there are many more to add like Guanine (nucleic acid ‘G’ essential component to GTP and GDP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanosine_triphosphate
And a host of plant alkaloids: “Basic (see base) organic compounds of plant origin, containing combined nitrogen. Alkaloids are amines, so their names usually end in “ine” (e.g., caffeine, nicotine, morphine, quinine)… Some plants (e.g., opium poppy, ergot fungus) produce many different alkaloids, but most produce only one or a few. Certain plant families, including the poppy family (Papaveraceae) and the nightshade family (Solanaceae) [like Nicotiana tobaccos], are particularly rich in them.” https://www.britannica.com/summary/alkaloid
Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD+): “NAD, sometimes written as NAD+…has an advantage…because it boosts the activity of all seven [human] sirtuins… And because NAD is used by over five hundred different enzymes, without any NAD, we’d be dead in thirty seconds.” –pp133-134, Lifespan, by David A. Sinclair https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/04/21/grab-your-nads/
For the record, I think Franklin’s Birkbeck virus group modeled not a poliovirus but another tobacco type artifact called satellite tobacco necrosis virus (STNV or TNSV), a subviral type of entity that was not formally discovered until 1962, and hence the need to suppress the World’s Fair display model that, for all I know, was photographed in a Brussels’ Masonic Temple and never seen by the public at large. My proposition is that most of the ‘virus-like particles’(VLPs) called satellites are made and not found. They are plant-associated debris reformed under mechanical forces from high energy microscopes, prevalent in our studied favorite foods and flowers. Here’s a string of tobacco necrosis satellite images that pops up on a search. The pentagonal units of a dodecahedron appear clearly in the 3rd and 5th pictures.
If you fix a mother solution of SatelliteTNV for space crystal manufacture, it could or should look like this:
The updated polio crystal came back as a truncated icosahedron-buckyball-C-60fullerene-like TWIN of its plant cousins:
If you fix a crystal mother solution for the newer polio baby, will it look like this or did I just fall off the turnip truck?
Polio vaccines are still promoted as time-tested, safe and necessary for children in the West, but here’s something you weren’t taught about the vaccine —the Sabin OPV (‘O’ for oral) drops—in a 2020 TED talk from Leor Weinberger who is answering the question about creating a “self-spreading therapy,” like a communicable disease:
[minutes 11-12]“…I thought if we can create a therapy that replicates, it would only need to be taken once. It could mutate along with the virus and possibly it could transmit between infected individuals to treat them… It was a therapy that could do all of the things that the virus could do. It solved the fundamental mismatch. The most radical part of this concept was that the super-spreaders would also be converted from transmitting the virus to now transmitting the therapy. It was a therapy that would go viral along with the virus. This scared some people…But there’s already a precedent: we already inadvertently use therapies that transmit. The vaccine that eradicated polio in the US, the oral polio vaccine, transmits between people. It’s not well-known, but the fact that this vaccine transmits is part of the reason that it was chosen for the worldwide eradication effort despite its safety issues…”
Leor Weinberger: Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?
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Deus ex Machina
“English ‘god from the machine’ is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence… The term was coined from the conventions of ancient Greek theater, where actors who were playing gods were brought on stage using a machine. The machine could be either a crane (mechane) used to lower actors from above or a riser that brought them up through a trapdoor…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
“Deus ex machina…provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty… The dramatic device dates from the 5th century BC; a god appears …to solve a crisis by divine intervention. Since ancient times, the phrase has also been applied to an unexpected saviour or to an improbable event that brings order out of chaos…” https://www.britannica.com/art/deus-ex-machina
…GOD Crystals…
The GOD crystals (as I’m calling them) are clockwise from the left; the ‘Flower of Life’ or Seed of Life, fully drawn from the hexagonal unit at its center; upper right is the image appearing as word ‘GOD’ is spoken in the Freemasonic narration of the film ‘Riddles In Stone’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaEKBBsncng; below right is an icosahedron ‘wire’ graph identified as West Nile Virus (a.k.a. polio) and the Quantum teleportation ‘core-shell’ model in the hands of its creator Anton Zeilinger.
…a House of Glass…
Instructive to making GOD Crystals going back to the 1950s, is the contemporary example of the 2023 Nobel Prize winner Alexei Ekimov, who shared the Chemistry award with two others. Ekimov made the first quantum dots in the ‘70s, they said, discovered by irradiating optical glass with X-rays:
“Since the 1930s physicists and chemists have known that a material’s size has a significant effect on its properties. That is, in particles of matter a few nanometers in size (1 nanometer = 10−9 meter), quantum mechanical effects become significant… In the late 1970s [Alexei] Ekimov became interested in colored glass and how adding different substances to glass produced the colors. He worked with glass to which he added copper chloride (CuCl). He found tiny CuCl crystals in the glass ranging in size from about 2 to 30 nanometers, the size of the crystals depending on the temperature and length of the glassmaking process. Ekimov scattered X-rays off the glass and found that the wavelengths of the absorption lines depended on the size of the CuCl crystals in the glass. He realized that this wavelength shift was a quantum mechanical effect. He had discovered quantum dots and showed that they could be produced in the well-known glassmaking process…” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexei-Ekimov
Below are colloidal ‘quantum shells’ photographed in 2024 (QSs, left ‘a’) and a 1950s electron image of poliovirus (right), both propagated in liquid solutions, that make a remarkable side-by-side comparison. Of particular note is the reference from Ekimov about the size of his dots ranging to 30 nanometers, the ‘standard’ size assigned to poliovirus.
Picture source for quantum shells https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48351-9; Picture source for poliovirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_electron_microscopy
…Crystallogenesis…
“…Crystallization has been called “one of the most secretive processes in nature” (1). The mystery lies in how structures with long-range order form from building blocks that only interact with their local neighbors. The most extreme case is when solids form from weak solutions, in which the molecules begin widely separated so that not even local structure is present… [However] it is now recognized that the process of reaching a crystalline critical cluster is often much more complicated than supposed in the naïve [assembly] scenario, with multiple intermediate phases sometimes playing a role in reaching the final state… The discovery of the “two-step” mechanism of crystallization in proteins has been an important factor in driving interest in the subject (14, 15). Since then, complex pathways have been reported for many other systems including calcium carbonate (16, 17), potassium dihydrogen phosphate (18), polyoxometalates (10), and biomimetic polymers (19), to name a few. As a result, nucleation pathways have become a central focus of modern research.” [2019] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6450691/
Glass, by conventional definition, is a reference to molecular order within a matrix of nonspecific chemical substances. Glasses and ‘glassy substituents’ have traditionally had a limited short range ‘local’ organization, labeled as amorphous in structure, but modern atomically precise material engineering with gels and colloids is extending the category of glasses into the long range order of crystals.
…Magic Numbers…
“Complexity in nature, whether in chlorophyll or in living organisms, often results from self-assembly and is considered particularly robust. Compact clusters of elemental particles can be shown to be of practical relevance, and are found in atomic nuclei, nano particles or viruses… Structures assemble themselves. The first step for the researchers in a process which covers several steps was to synthesize minute colloidal clusters, no larger than a tenth of the diameter of a single hair in total. ‘First of all, water evaporates from an emulsion droplet and the polymer balls are pushed together. Over time, they assemble increasingly smoother sphere-shaped clusters and begin to crystallize. It is remarkable how several thousand individual particles independently find their ideal position in a precise and highly symmetrical structure in which all particles are placed in predictable positions,’ explains Prof. Vogel.
“The researchers discovered more than 25 different magic number colloidal clusters of various shapes and sizes and were able to define four different cluster morphologies: where evaporation was fastest, buckled clusters were formed, as the droplet interface moved faster than the colloidal particles could consolidate. If the evaporation rate was lowered, the clusters were predominantly spherical. Spherical clusters have a uniformly curved surface with only a weak pattern of crystals. Clusters with icosahedral symmetry were formed as the rate of evaporation decreased further. These clusters have a particularly high degree of symmetry and have numerous two, three or five fold symmetry axes…
…”The analyses proved that clusters consisting of numbers of particles corresponding to a magic number are indeed more stable, as predicted on the basis of the theory. It is well known that the observed icosahedral symmetry can be found in viruses and ultra-small metal clusters, but it has never been investigated directly. Now, with these results, a detailed and systematic understanding of how such magic number clusters are formed in the investigated model system is possible for the first time, allowing conclusions to be drawn for other natural systems where clusters tend to be formed.” https://www.fau.eu/2018/12/13/news/research/magic-number-colloidal-clusters/
“The existence of MCCs [Magic-number Colloid Clusters] reported in this work has similarities to other clustering processes, such as micelles, fullerene assemblies, protein aggregates, supramolecules of ionic liquids, inorganic clusters, and natural framboidal pyrite. Just like these natural self-organization processes, MCC formation is efficient in solving the high-optimization problem of finding a global free energy minimum… Similar design principles may be applied to hierarchical structures of bimetallic nanoparticles, molecular self-assembly and plasmonic nanocluster formation… [We] demonstrate that the magic phenomenon known from atomic clusters extends to the colloidal realm. We report a discrete family of icosahedral clusters spanning a large range of particle numbers and propose a geometric model based on the Mackay and anti-Mackay clusters to accurately describe all…the experimental observations[s]. ” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07600-4
Alan L. Mackay, the crystallographer cited above, gave his name to the icosahedron particles that were formed under ‘forces’ from solution; particles that were called ‘viruses’in the 1950s and are ‘virus-like particles’ [VLPs] today. “Mackay, one of the rare generalists of our time, was a disciple and follower of J.[John] Desmond Bernal. Mackay has contributed decisively to the development of the science of structures… His inquiries prompted him to predict the existence of… quasicrystals.” https://www.link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11224-016-0766-1 ; J.D. Bernal, mentioned earlier as a communist and graphite expert who conceived the Bernal Sphere space habitat, was Mackay’s supervisor and mentor as he was to Rosalind Franklin’s virus group at Birkbeck College, University of London. Mackay came to Birkbeck in 1949 and stayed for the rest of his very long career.
“Mackay introduced two important crystallographic concepts… One is the icosahedral shell structure (iss)…displaying five-fold rotational symmetry…[that[ agrees well with the magic numbers in rare gas clusters, (C60)N molecules, and some metal clusters…on energy considerations… The second concept is the hierarchic icosahedral structures…of a core icosahedron connected to 12 outer icosahedra by vertex sharing, or an icosahedron of icosahedra…” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-19827-9_5 ; “The ideal Mackay cluster is…known as the Mackay icosahedron which Alan introduced in 1962.” https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ideal-Mackay-cluster-is-the-stacking-of-the-two-first-shells-of-an-almost-perfect-tetrahedron
The icosahedron is a hierarchic structure of liquid water, assigned to water by Plato and confirmed many times over in our day: “The living world should be thought of as an equal partnership between biological molecules and water. Both short-range (< 1nm) and long-range (> 100 nm) [2268] organization of the water molecules has been detected… Enlightenment comes from an understanding that water molecules form an infinite dynamic hydrogen-bonded network with localized and structured clustering…” https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/water/clusters_overview.html
Chasing water, and icosahedra, is a daunting but fascinating and challenging task—if I keep side-winding my way to better comprehension instead of posting, well then it’s ‘see you next year.’ Scientists generally admit that their current understanding of water is far from complete:
“Water…forms an extraordinary range of structures, most of them transient, that assist chemical and information transfer processes… Liquid water forms a fluctuating network of hydrogen bonds, but each bond has an average lifetime of around a picosecond. The shape of the H2O molecule encourages the formation of a tetrahedrally coordinated motif which is itself the building block of ephemeral five- and six-membered rings [that] create a good deal of empty space within the network… The presence of a solute usually alters the hydrogen bond network. Some small polar solutes such as urea can be ‘fitted in’ with relatively little solute rearrangement, whereas small hydrophobic solutes can be enclosed in a cavity around which surrounding water molecules preserve their hydrogen bonding by rearrangement… For larger surfaces, such as those of proteins, truncation of the hydrogen bond network is inevitable…” https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1703781114 ; this ‘pnas’ paper introduces itself with NASA’s ‘unofficial’ exobiology program slogan: “Follow the water.”
…might have to coin a term for it: HYDROTHEOLOGY, except that a natural philosophy scholar and theologian named Johann Albert Fabricius beat me to it in 1734. Fabricius wrote and published Hydrotheology as his follow-up to Pyrotheology. https://www.cis.org.uk/serve.php?filename=scb-19-2-russell.pdf . Without an original text, one has to guess if Fabricius might have witnessed supercritical water phenomena like burning underwater flames.
Check in with Cosmic Core for insights about the icosahedron, including references to the work of Martin F. Chaplin: “… Many special structural patterns have been proposed to describe water structures and explain many anomalous properties. Based on hydrogen bonds, fluctuating water clusters containing 280 water molecules with local icosahedral symmetry were proposed by Chaplin. The networks contain a mixture of hexamer and pentamer substructures and convert between lower- and higher-density forms without breaking hydrogen bonds.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11947-6 ; https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/water/icosahedral_water_clusters.html#tetra ; www.cosmic-core.org/free/article-50-geometry-platonic-solids-part-11-the-icosahedron/
Chaplin’s proposition about water structure seems to pin down the origin of viruses as complexes of H2O water—no protein need apply. Water is architecture. Solve et coagula!
image source: minute 9, https://hancockhour.com/podcast/dr-gerald-h-pollack-the-fourth-phase-of-water/, created by Rustum Roy (1924-2010) who was born and educated in India: “In 1962 he was named the first director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustum_Roy
In the interview linked just above, Gerald Pollack informs the audience [at minute 17] that the gel-like Fourth Phase water that he calls ‘EZ’ (for Exclusion Zone) is made by Light: “It’s created from light, the energy from light. It’s not necessarily visible light… it’s infrared light, so infrared light coming to you and received by your body converts that water [in you] to EZ…[and] is the kind of energy that helps build this EZ water.” They can make it in the laboratory, but Jerry recommends juicing your vegetables to get it from plants: “We’re studying [cell water in] plants…” Indeed.
Here are two short videos from AcquaPHI www.youtube.com/@AcquaPHI (that makes a filter/‘harmonizer’ device) that I’m posting for learning purposes:
“Water Memory and Structured Water” (8 minutes) with an appearance from Rustum Roy
“Water has memory”—even imprinting on individuals who handle it with containers (3 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh9RhOxChfQ
–And don’t miss the 2014 documentary “Water Memory” (50 minutes), featuring Luc Montagnier in his furthering the marginalized but ‘red hot’ water research of Jacques Benveniste, who transmits a water-diluted HIV signal by electronic means to a distant water tank for reassembly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VyUsVOic0
Water is universal : “…Over the past 30 years, water has been discovered almost everywhere in space…including the Moon…[and] in interstellar clouds…formed with the help of comets and volcanoes…” however existing as ICE. https://orbitaltoday.com/2022/10/08/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-water-in-space/;
“As of 2021, there are now twenty known crystalline forms of ice (Hansen, 2021) with scientists still attempting to discover more.” https://blogs.ubc.ca/theundergraduatescientist/2021/08/25/how-many-types-of-ice-are-there/ , and this is determined by ‘discovery’ in lab creations as none of these ‘higher’ ices exist in nature. The website Water Structure and Science (WSS) created by Martin Chaplin suggests “ice XIX” (19) has two forms and is currently the known limit, holding the ‘alchemical’ 19 for the time being. https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/water/ice_xviii.html
Infrared (IR): Not counting human-use gadgets, the best infrared detectors on Earth are the mammal-hunting snakes, ancient water symbols all over the world. Next come certain fish and butterflies followed by the bats. The western diamond-back rattler, they say, is the keenest of the IR-sighted snakes and it gives me a lot of pause to find it together with ‘salt’ and ‘water’ on the University of California San Diego campus adjacent to, and in partnership with, the Salk Institute, Scripps Oceanographic, General Atomics and the Torrey Pines Institute.
This particular House of Glass, once blandly called Central Library, was designated a Sphere and is still described as a “five-level spheroid” though “sphere might not be the first word you think of when you look at our library” says UCSD’s historian. The first word I think of is SALT. The architect, William L. Pereira [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pereira] spoke at the building’s dedication ceremony in 1971: “If it appears to some that the design of this library conveys the idea that powerful and permanent hands are holding aloft knowledge itself…I can only say in all humility, that is what we meant to do… And in future years, I would like it to be said about the authorship of this building, as Emerson said it, ‘He builded better than he knew’.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bbxXKrjpII
Pereira quoted Emerson’s poem, “The Problem” https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/the-problem/ , evidently comparing his library to a temple, suggesting a Deus ex Machina ‘problem’ with his buildings, most of which bear the ‘Brutalist’ style. His own words, if his own, seem to reference the 1957 master plan of the UCSD campus and complex of partnerships, a consortium aggressively seeking to curate human experience in the name of Science by “holding aloft knowledge itself.” In our time, UCSD is “one of the world’s top 15 research universities and a leader in microgravity research” https://www.sierraspace.com/newsroom/press-releases/sierra-space-uc-san-diego-partner-to-develop-the-first-stem-cell-research-institute-in-space/
From this pool of bioengineering talent came people like Marc Guilianotti: “Prior to joining the ISS National Lab Marc spent 20+ years working in early drug discovery efforts at the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies. He received his BS in Chemistry/Biochemistry from UCSD, his MBA from SDSU and his PhD in Chemistry from USF.” https://worldstemcellsummit.com/marc-giulianotti-phd/
“The bioengineering adventure in UCSD began in 1965. Thirty years later… UCSD Bioengineering was rated as number 1 in Program and number 2 in Faculty” https://iem.ucsd.edu/_files/10th_Anniversary_BioE_Dept.pdf ; Bioengineering Program co-founder Benjamin W. Zweifach http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb267nb0r3&doc.view=content&chunk.id=div00073 Engineering students walk up and down the Snake Path, resting if they please, to contemplate Creation on an inscribed bench in the ‘Garden of Eden’ made by the looping snake-body. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb4779778g ; And here’s a 3-minute video orientation about Snake Path, dedicated in 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNeZvwsRPA&t=144s
…Follow the Water…
(Article) “Water of Crystallization, Unraveling the Mystery” : “Water of crystallization is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs when water molecules become an integral part of a crystalline structure. [Water] plays a crucial role in the formation, stability, and properties of various compounds… [In] the microscopic world of crystals, a captivating narrative unfolds revealing the symbiotic relationship between water molecules and crystalline structures. At its core, water of crystallization refers to water molecules that are structurally integrated…forming a unique bond that transcends the conventional liquid-solid interaction…One of the classic examples illustrating water of crystallization is hydrated salts… Glauber’s salt, or sodium sulfate decahydrate, is a textbook [example]… Each molecule of Glauber’s salt embraces ten water molecules within its crystalline matrix…[making] a marriage of chemical and physical forces…” https://medium.com/teach-chemistry/water-of-crystallization-unveiling-the-mystery-5e72eddf8799
The word choice of ‘marriage’ by the writer, knowingly or not, is evoking the ancient Sanskrit (Proto-Indo-European, PIE) root word for WATER, written “wed” or otherwise “wod”; “Linguists believe PIE had two root words for water: ap- and wed-. The first (preserved in Sanskrit apah as well as Punjab and julep) was ‘animate’, referring to water as a living force; the latter referred to it as an inanimate substance.” https://etymonline.com/search?q=water Also included by etymonline is the translation of <ma’> (“water”) meaning “measure of quality of a diamond, c1600, which is also used in the sense of luster, splendor.” –readers of Corona the Crow might remember the opening segment containing the anagram of ‘New Magenta’ as “want ma gene” (mentioned in conjunction with the Queen’s Jubilee tree-of-life-lighting) providing yet a second candidate from this piece for a “ma” gene. The first “ma” is Alan Mackay’s icosahedron formula adding Mackay (‘m’) and anti-Mackay (‘a’) packing spheres to begin each equation with “m+a” to determine ‘iss’ (icosahedral sphere structure).
Does our English word “water” come from the Old World water gods of creation?— Tiamat and Apsu (Mesopotamia), Ma’at (Egypt, Arabia), and the younger Yahweh (as the Tetragrammaton YHWH, ya-‘waw’or the written ‘vav’ suggesting ‘wave’) and Woden (Saxon/Norse):
“In Mesopotamian religion, Tiamat … is the primordial sea, mating with Abzû (Apsu), the groundwater, to produce the gods in the Babylonian epic Enûma Elish… In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, Tiamat bears the first generation of deities after mingling her waters with those of Apsu, her consort…Tiamat was the “shining” personification of the sea who roared and smote in the chaos of original creation. She and Abzu filled the cosmic abyss with the primeval waters. She is ‘Ummu-Hubur who formed all things.’…It was once thought that the myth of Tiamat was one of the earliest recorded versions of a Chaoskampf, a mythological motif that generally involves the battle between a culture hero and a chthonic or aquatic monster, serpent, or dragon… ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat
“Maat or Maʽat.. comprised the ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Ma’at was also the goddess who personified these concepts, and regulated the stars… The earliest surviving records indicating that Maat is the norm for nature and society, in this world and the next, were recorded during the Old Kingdom of Egypt…found in the Pyramid Texts of Unas (ca. 2375 BCE and 2345 BCE).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat ; These gods were handed up as male-and-female pairs, all except Yahweh. Another day, I’ll address Yahweh and Woden in detail, but a clue to their origin as “water vessels” is within the video clip of Rupert Sheldrake presenting at the 2019 Conference on Water (choose your version) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=water+conference+2019+Rupert+Sheldrake; or find the photographed water ‘phonon’ patterns shown below at minute 8 of the video from https://www.sheldrake.org/research/form-from-sound/
A phonon is “a unit of vibrational energy that arises from oscillating atoms within a crystal…[Its]own thermal energy or outside forces make the lattice vibrate. This generates mechanical waves that carry heat and sound through the material. A packet of these waves can travel throughout the crystal with a definite energy and momentum, so in quantum mechanical terms the waves can be treated as a particle, called a phonon. A phonon is a definite discrete unit or quantum of vibrational mechanical energy, just as a photon is a quantum of electromagnetic or light energy.” https://www.britannica.com/science/phonon
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WATER-based Nanomedicine – [Nov 2023] “Water molecules, by themselves (in vacuum), are diamagnetic but when organized into clusters, they become diamagnetic or paramagnetic. Also, biomolecules (DNA, collagen, clathrin, and other proteins) have non-covalent hydrogen bonds in their structure. The interaction, as well as signal transmission, between water and biomolecules is achieved through the vibrations of covalent and non-covalent hydrogen bonds, which determine the state and dynamics of conformational changes in biomolecules. Disruptive conformational changes in biomolecules, cells, and tissues lead to their dysfunctionality, so they are a frequent cause of many disorders and diseases. For example, the rearrangement of hydrogen bonding due to mitochondrial disease mutation in cytochrome bc1 disturbs heme bH redox potential and spin state. In order to prevent and repair the dysfunctional conformational changes, a liquid substance was developed based on the second derivative of the C60 molecule (SD-C60), which has classical and quantum properties… Observed effects can be ascribed to a machinery of hydrogen bonds, which are generated in SD-C60 and transmitted through water to biomolecules—a “water-based nanomedicine.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10745578/
“…Since fullerene C60 is insoluble in water and is toxic, it is not applicable in biomedicine and cosmetics. For this reason, the first derivative FD-C60 (fullerenol) was synthesized, which solved the problem of solubility in water and partially reduced toxicity. In order to maximally reduce the toxicity of fullerenol (the first derivative of C60, FD-C60), and increase its biomedical efficiency, the second derivative SD-C60 (3HFWC, Hyper-Harmonized Hydroxylated Fullerene Water Complex) was created…” https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/14/5/480
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“…Tetrahedral liquids [such as water, silicon and carbon] are often simulated by an energy potential called the SW model… [The] model accurately predicts anomalous liquid behaviors. The two-state property is controlled by the parameter lambda (λ) which describes the relative strength of pairwise and 3-body intermolecular interactions. The higher [lambda] λ is, the degree of tetrahedral order increases. [Paper co-author John Russo said,] ‘We realized that [lambda] λ, which is rather large for water, was key to the uniqueness of these liquids… Effectively, λ controls the degree of tetrahedrality: as λ increases, tetrahedral shells forming around each molecule become energetically more stable. Hence, these shells overcome the unfavorable loss of entropy that accompanies the creation of order.’ The local tetrahedra resemble solid-state structures which is why high λ liquids crystallize more easily…” https://www,pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1722339115 [paper: “Water-like anomalies as a function of tetrahedrality” Mar26, 2018] ; lambda upper case, Λ, is not used here but the lower -λ- and upper -Λ- have the same ancient meaning, www.greekalphabet.org/lambda/ , emphasizing “harmony, balance, liberty, law, and the dynamics of change.” –see Ma’at.
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…holding knowledge itself aloft…
(video) “SPACE the New Frontier for the Central Control Grid with Catherine Austin Fitts & Corey Lynn: CAF: “I think they’ve moved the offshore havens up into the suborbital platform, and we have to take a look at that…and you cannot understand the central control grid without understanding the role of space… We should point out that BIS [Bank for International Settlements] just announced that they’re building basically a [blockchain] database and Token system for 100% of the assets on the planet”… COREY: “Morgan Stanley estimated that the 350 billion dollar global space industry was going to rise to over a trillion [by 2040] and I would argue much higher than that based on research I’ve done… And our cell phones, we all know, is their weapon of choice [for data collection]…and eventually our bodies [so that] all ties together with digital currency, the QR codes, the biometrics, in order to click their whole system into place…” https://rumble.com/v3rnh3g-space-the-new-frontier-for-the-central-control-grid-corey-lynn-october-19-2.html
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…Recap and NOTES to follow soon… when I get back to this Saturnian subject!
Jennifer Lake's Blog 