I can’t believe all of you can fit inside my computer
Tags:
#it’s bigger on the inside! #the power of science
the power of science
The science witch trials
“#science!#I actually have no idea what this is#and I’m too sleepy to google#but cool eh”
It’s sand that has been scotchgarded to make it water-repellent! The brand name I know is “moon sand”, and I am told it’s hilariously fun to play with. (As Stephen Fry demonstrates. :D)
Tags:
#hydrophobic sand! #the power of science #I’ve watched so many other people play with this stuff on TV #someday I want to do it myself
First photograph ever taken by phosphorescent light. The face is that of Mr. Tesla, and the source of light is one of his phosphorescent bulbs. The time of exposure, eight minutes. Date of photograph January, 1894.
Tesla was just a cool photo machine, eh?
Here he is with his friend Mark Twain:
And here he is with his friend electricity:
Tags:
#Nikola Tesla #the power of science #*actual photograph* of *actual alien time period* #here he is with his friend electricity
What’s better at facial recognition, Facebook or your brain?
Ever wonder how your brain can recognize and remember so many faces? Ever wonder how we train computers to do the same? Vanessa from BrainCraft looks the science of recognizing faces square in the… face?
Bad: It joins in that annoying way that many things about relatively-unusual conditions have of assuming their audience doesn’t contain anyone who experiences it (a falsely-inclusive “we” to refer to “normal” people).
Good: Finally a non-proso who’s noticed that facial recognition technology cries out to be used in assistive tech. (I swear to god, it’s like the people in charge of this sort of thing are deliberately trying to come up with every possible use for artificial facial recognition except the obvious one.)
(Come on, The Future, you’ve been a good home to me. You’ve given me those lovely photographs of Martian desert, full of colour and detail, the next-best thing to being there. You’ve given me multiple pieces of tech that are literally out of Star Trek. Give me a glasses-mounted HUD that flags passing acquaintances with their names. I know you can do it. Google Glass has been dancing around the edge for, what, a year now? I’d prefer an attachment to the glasses I already have, but as long as I can get them in prescription and they cost less than, oh, say twice as much as regular prescription glasses, I’ll settle for buying a new pair. Please, let me have this.)
Tags:
#prosopagnosia #(cell phones and e-readers) #(and I suspect you could turn a smart-watch into something very like a combadge without much tinkering) #the power of science #with power comes responsibility #and that responsibility takes many forms
Here’s PHD Comics with a great explanation of the HUUUUGE physics news this week.
Tags:
#the power of science
High above the oasis of Earth, your belly reflecting
The dappled azure glow of oceans rolling far below,
You are waiting patiently for your final pilgrims to arrive.
Soon they will climb to you on twin pillars of fire-
Hauling themselves up out of Terra’s gravity well
By their bleeding fingernails – to find you sailing
So serenely through the void, your mighty wings
Outstretched, shining mirror-bright, reflecting
The diamond-dust light of a million distant suns…Then, dressed all in fresh-snow white, the bravest acolyte
Will float to your side in reverent silence struck dumb,
By the heart-stopping sight of you hovering there, silhouetted
Against the hazy, air-brushed band of the Milky Way,
Bathing in the luxurious light of ten times ten billion alien stars,
And with the world watching far below, trembling with fear and love…– Stuart Atkinson, from “The Final Pilgrims”, images from NASA’s gorgeous “Gravity” Flickr gallery
Tags:
#poetry #the power of science #the brightest star in our sky
Mars. In true colour.
Just so you know, a lot of images of Mars which you’ll see have been manipulated. A lot of them have boosted contrast and saturation. So if you’ve ever wondered – images like this one are what Mars actually looks like.
Why does this not have more notes?!?
YOU ARE LITERALLY LOOKING THROUGH THE EYES OF A ROBOT ON ANOTHER FUCKING PLANET
If you don’t think that’s the tightest shit, you can get out of my face.
i wanted to reblog this so that everyone who sees it can realize just how amazing this is. you are looking at a photograph taken on an entirely different planet. an entire world that has been completely untouched by humanity until only recently. no human in the history of mankind has ever look at those rocks, the soil, the mountains, and the sky until now. and until we finally manage to set foot there for the very first time, no human has ever seen mars from this perspective with their own two eyes or feel the texture of the martian soil on the bottom of their boots. this was only possible by creating a robot, an actual robot, and shooting way out of the reaches of earth and with extremely careful calculations, have it safely land and deploy right where they want it. it’s a robot on another planet being controlled 225 million kilometers away, seeing and studying and sending information for us.
this is the sort of thing you would see in science fiction movies that are only a few decades old. what was only imagination and possibilities back then is now all in this photograph. im looking forward to see what happens in the coming decades
There is nothing about this that is not awesome.
Tags:
#Mars #the power of science #awesome #this blog is a Mars appreciation blog #this blog especially appreciates pictures that look like you could reach out and run your fingers through the alien sand
Pictures of Mars : The Empty Quarter
From the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website: “Rover tracks disappear toward the horizon like the wake of a ship across the desolate sea of sand between the craters Endurance and Victoria on the Meridiani Plains. Opportunity took the image while stuck in the sand ripple dubbed Purgatory for over a month. This panorama (only partly shown here) was named Rub Al Khali after the “Empty Quarter” in the Arabian Desert.”
Part of the ”Spirit & Opportunity: 10 Years Roving Across Mars“ exhibit.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University
Tags:
#Mars #the power of science #*actual photograph* of *actual alien world* #proud citizen of The Future
The bullhorn acacia is kind of sad as acacias go. You know how most acacias produce alkaloids that taste nasty and keep things from eating them? Well, bullhorn acacias don’t. It’s like, get on the bus, bullhorn acacias.
Of course, bullhorn acacias are not hearing your noise, because they’re thinking outside the metabolically-expensive-poison box.
And what they’re thinking is that maybe if you like eating them, you’re really gonna like this face full of motherfucking ants they’ve got for you.
Yes, you read that right. Instead of playing fair and making their own toxins to keep everything and their brothers off of their leaves, this plant outsourced that shit to ants. Presumably this is because ants are easily bribed with food, generally looking for a fight, and, most importantly, can run really fast. Acacias in general, while also easily bribed and kind of ornery, are not known for their speed and mobility.
You’re probably looking at that picture and going “Man, I am just not seeing a real place for those ants to live. This plant is a terrible employer if it’s not even going to provide housing. Also, those thorns are kind of nasty-looking, but they’re awful big. I bet I could just avoid them and not step on the ant mound and be fine.” And this is not an unreasonable thing to think! Which is probably why the acacia already thought of it, and decided to keep its ant legions in its thorns.
Yup. This plant has evolved a way to shoot stinging insects out of its thorns, just in case stabbing you didn’t get the point across. This is because this plant is hardcore.
Now you may be sitting there going “I don’t know, ants are pretty metal, and that ant looks pretty metal even by ant standards. Maybe they just really liked the idea of living in hollowed-out thorns and did this all on their own.” And I can see why you’d say that, because it totally sounds like something ants would do, but you’d be tragically wrong. You know how some ants will properly farm or half-assedly shepherd aphids because they suck out plant juices and process and concentrate the sugars in their waste, which the ants then treat like gatorade?
The acacia tries to cut out the middle man there. They produce little bundles of protein and fat called Beltian bodies and then stick them on their leaflet tips, which is basically just mocking herbivores at this point, and then on the leaf stalks they’ve got these fancypants glands that produce nectar, to further rub it in. I mean, seriously. This plant is just hanging out going “Oh, yeah, my leafy greens taste like cake, assholes. You want this? Hope you like ants, too, because that’s what else is there.”
So the ants are getting a super fucking sweet deal here, and it’s like, man, this plant is going way out of its way to keep these sons of bitches around. Is it sure it wouldn’t be easier to just pony up with the alkaloids and taste gross? Because it seems like it wouldn’t be nearly so cool, but it would be way simpler than growing these ant apartments and ant cafeterias and whatnot, and this plant probably isn’t vain enough to evolve based on sheer coolness.
Well, ants aren’t stupid, but they are pretty fucking territorial. Remember how acacias are generally just not capable of getting up and wandering around? The ants do that for them. Any vines and shit trying to climb on the acacia get ant-murdered the same way herbivores trying to eat it get all face-stung, and the ants will go the extra distance of killing anything that tries to grow around the base of the tree. They send out fucking ant doom-patrols looking for weeds. And then they kill the shit out of them.
So, fucking bullhorn acacias, right? They really hit on a cool scheme. Surely they are the only plants that could pull this off. Nope! There’s a bunch of plants that have figured out how to make deals with ants, to the point where there’s a name for them: myrmecophytes. (“Myrmecophyte” is Greek for “Yo, dawg, there may have been a slight miscommunication after you said you liked plants.”). Some of them don’t even do anything for ants except make a nice living space, because that way when the ants die and start their little ant graveyards in random unused spaces, the plant can use their little tenant corpses as fertilizer. (Note: Do not trust plants. Ever.)
This is beautiful, in every way.
It gets better/worse. Acacia nectar permanently alters your* digestive system. Once you eat it, you can never eat any other food again.
*If you’re an ant, anyway.
Tags:
#the power of science #we must not look at acacia trees #we must not buy their fruits #(or) #(acacia: not even once)
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.
So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.
Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.
So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)
Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.
This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be?
Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?
By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.
are you telling us astronomers have discovered something which is literally fucktuple the size of anything else previously estimated to exist
Anything that fucking rewrites all of what we know about the universe needs to get its ass on my blog. It’s giant, glowy, black hole filled ass.
Wondering how many times I can use the word “fucktuple” today without arousing suspicion. :)
much pretty so big fucktuple wow
Tags:
#the power of science #pretty things #that artist’s conception looks like the Prophets’ wormhole
Brinens and Things 