subterranean homesick alien

These photographs document several of the various types of mould...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:45:09 -0700

These photographs document several of the various types of mould which can be found growing on your average loaf of bread, given enough time and neglect. I am interested in the inherent contradiction of finding aesthetic beauty in something almost universally perceived as disgusting. I was also fascinated by the extraordinary structure and microscopic nature of these life forms, something that those of us not involved in the biological sciences are probably only vaguely aware of.

things that should be allowed to be used in essays: i shit you not you feel me no but get this i’m...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:44:36 -0700

things that should be allowed to be used in essays:

i shit you not

you feel me

no but get this

i’m just sayin

let me explain you a thing

and yeah

Photo

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:58:36 -0700

Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a 'national tragedy'?

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:00:58 -0700

Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a 'national tragedy'?:

cs-k:

stfuconservatives:

“So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.

This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.”

One of the people who got shot was an antiviolence blogger. Somehow we aren’t seeing massive solidarity for New Orleans or the entire city going on police lockdown to find the perpetrators. Two reasons: 1) This mostly affected Black people, and we all know how much the media and the police give any fucks about Black people in New Orleans; 2) This was a gun crime, so we can’t criticize it because GUNS ARE FREEDOM!

Wait what…? I hadn’t even heard about this! The fuck.

electricspacekoolaid: Cassini Shapes First Global Topographic...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:00:04 -0700

electricspacekoolaid:

Cassini Shapes First Global Topographic Map of Titan

Image: Using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists have created the first global topographic map of Saturn’s moon Titan, giving researchers a 3-D tool for learning more about one of the most Earthlike and interesting worlds in the solar system

Scientists have created the first global topographic map of Saturn’s moon Titan, giving researchers a valuable tool for learning more about one of the most Earth-like and interesting worlds in the solar system. The map was just published as part of a paper in the journal Icarus.

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon - at 1,600 miles (2,574 kilometers) across it’s bigger than planet Mercury - and is the second-largest moon in the solar system. Scientists care about Titan because it’s the only moon in the solar system known to have clouds, surface liquids and a mysterious, thick atmosphere. The cold atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s, but the organic compound methane on Titan acts the way water vapor does on Earth, forming clouds and falling as rain and carving the surface with rivers. Organic chemicals, derived from methane, are present in Titan’s atmosphere, lakes and rivers and may offer clues about the origins of life.

“Titan has so much interesting activity - like flowing liquids and moving sand dunes - but to understand these processes it’s useful to know how the terrain slopes,” said Ralph Lorenz, a member of the Cassini radar team based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., who led the map-design team. “It’s especially helpful to those studying hydrology and modeling Titan’s climate and weather, who need to know whether there is high ground or low ground driving their models.”

Titan’s thick haze scatters light in ways that make it very hard for remote cameras to “see” landscape shapes and shadows, the usual approach to measuring topography on planetary bodies. Virtually all the data we have on Titan comes from NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, which has flown past the moon nearly 100 times over the past decade. On many of those flybys, Cassini has used a radar imager, which can peer through the haze, and the radar data can be used to estimate the surface height.

“With this new topographic map, one of the most fascinating and dynamic worlds in our solar system now pops out in 3-D,” said Steve Wall, the deputy team lead of Cassini’s radar team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “On Earth, rivers, volcanoes and even weather are closely related to heights of surfaces - we’re now eager to see what we can learn from them on Titan.”

Read

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/JHUAPL/Cornell/Weizmann

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Thu, 16 May 2013 23:50:16 -0700

nevver: Lift THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:59:33 -0700

nevver:

Lift

THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

laboratoryequipment: NASA Says Kepler’s Days are NumberedNASA’s...

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:56:25 -0700

laboratoryequipment:

NASA Says Kepler’s Days are Numbered

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is broken, potentially jeopardizing the search for other worlds where life could exist outside our solar system.

If engineers can’t find a fix, the failure could mean an end to the $600 million mission’s search, although the space agency wasn’t ready to call it quits. The telescope has discovered scores of planets but only two so far are the best candidates for habitable planets.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/nasa-says-keplers-days-are-numbered

Oh hai 🎹💚#fenderrhodes

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:00:00 -0700

Oh hai 🎹💚#fenderrhodes

fredericksbeenhere: GRIMES GRIMES GRIMES GRIMES GRIMES

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:01:23 -0700

fredericksbeenhere:

GRIMES GRIMES GRIMES GRIMES GRIMES

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:25:39 -0700

imjust-kyian: scroturn: i get really offended when someone doesnt sit next to me but im also...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:25:31 -0700

imjust-kyian:

scroturn:

i get really offended when someone doesnt sit next to me but im also relieved they didnt sit next to me

this is the most accurate thing i’ve ever read

“Probably no stars will physically hit each other. There’s just...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:16:24 -0700

“Probably no stars will physically hit each other. There’s just so much space between the stars, but when Andromeda collides with us it’ll have a huge impact on the Milky Way. Some things will get thrown into the black hole in the middle, some stars will get ripped off and thrown away into space, so it’ll be dramatic. And the entire night sky will change.” - The Universe S1E9 Alien Galaxies

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Wed, 15 May 2013 07:41:41 -0700

norsegays: astrolope: People being angry about ~dem gays~ on...

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:40:52 -0700

norsegays:

astrolope:

People being angry about ~dem gays~ on Target’s Facebook.

I just want to give my two cents on this and tell you a story.

A couple weeks ago, I was hired at Target. I have a job at Target. Not a big deal right?

It is a big deal because i’m a transman.

It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that it’s hard for me, my brothers, and sisters to get a job. There are legal restraints regarding the job and if you don’t pass, it’s hard to be taken seriously at a job interview.

Right on the application, it asks what your preferred name is. It also asks if there is anything that target should know. I put the fact that I am a transman, expecting not to get a call because usually when you put that down, people will throw out the application. I got TWO interviews.

At the interview, they asked me about it. I told them I am on hormones and they told me that they didn’t care. Not in the sense that they don’t emotionally care, but that it didn’t matter. I was male and that’s all that mattered. They also told me that they give sex same couples benefits in states that do not recognize them as a married couple.

At my job orientation, I was not misgendered once. Even my supervisors who weren’t sure of my gender avoided pronoun use, which I found only happens when you’ve had pronoun training. They gave me a name tag with my preferred name and didn’t ask questions. I felt safe and respected, which is huge for a trans* person.

TLDR: Target is amazing not just for the LGB, but also the T. Shop there for the rest of your life.

Just when I thought I couldn’t love target more

"If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness."

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:37:34 -0700

““If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.””

- A phrase that was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during WWII by a Jewish prisoner (via loveyourchaos)

distant-traveller: Hubble finds dead stars “polluted” with...

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:38:49 -0700

distant-traveller:

Hubble finds dead stars “polluted” with planetary debris

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.

The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.

Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.

Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, a major ingredient of the rocky material that forms Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System. This silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the stars. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which then funnelled the material inwards.

The debris detected whirling around the white dwarfs suggests that terrestrial planets formed when these stars were born. After the stars collapsed to form white dwarfs, surviving gas giant planets may have gravitationally nudged members of any leftover asteroid belts into star-grazing orbits.

Besides finding silicon in the Hyades stars’ atmospheres, Hubble also detected low levels of carbon. This is another sign of the rocky nature of the debris, as astronomers know that carbon levels should be very low in rocky, Earth-like material.

This new study suggests that asteroids less than 160 kilometres across were gravitationally torn apart by the white dwarfs’ strong tidal forces, before eventually falling onto the dead stars.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)

ruinedchildhood: miss frizzle don’t give a fuck some of the...

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:02:21 -0700

ruinedchildhood:

miss frizzle don’t give a fuck

some of the best miss frizzle clips from episodes 1-14 compiled by urs truly

i never realized just how weird this show was….

My heroine.

How the fuck did ms frizzle not get fired?

thecuratorsprints: Set of Constellation

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:54:30 -0700

thecuratorsprints:

Set of Constellation

"There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice."

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:51:56 -0700

“There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald (via m-as-tu-vu)