Flying Spaghetti Code Monster

This is how STEM makes me feel; we’re not killing the magic, we’re creating it.

(Source: kitten-little, via ikenbot)

scinerds:

only orbit I’m doing is around you

entangling doesn’t only occur at the quantum level, I do say

those relativistic motions attract me ever so

you make me feel like cholorophyll the way I urge your luminous energy

I wonder what’s the name of this heavenly body

I think all my reaction GIFs will be from Django Unchained, from here on out.

earth-song:

The blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) is a deep sea fish of the family Psychrolutidae. Inhabiting the deep waters off the coasts of mainland Australia and Tasmania, it is rarely seen by humans. Blobfish live at depths between 600–1,200 m (2,000–3,900 ft) where the pressure is several dozen times higher than at sea level, which would likely make gas bladders inefficient for maintaining buoyancy. Instead, the flesh of the blobfish is primarily a gelatinous mass with a density slightly less than water; this allows the fish to float above the sea floor without expending energy on swimming. Its relative lack of muscle is not a disadvantage as it primarily swallows edible matter that floats in front of it. Blobfish eat invertebrates like crabs and sea pens^. Blobfish can be caught by bottom trawling with nets as bycatch. Such trawling in the waters off Australia may threaten the blobfish in what may be its only habitat.The blobfish is currently facing extinction due to deep-sea fishing or bottom trawling.

“Nature is so beautiful”

Saving this for the next time someone says that.

(via scinerds)

New favourite tumblr.

http://youwillnotgotospacetoday.tumblr.com/

nayx:

this is what a frog looks like when it falls past a leaf

Also, the way I get into bed.

(via scinerds)

sciencesoup:

Badass Scientist of the Week: Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) was a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the National Medal of Science, and one of the most creative challengers of mainstream Darwinian thinking. She was born in Chicago, and after just two years of high school, she began studying at the University of Chicago. It was here that, aged 16, she met the infamous Carl Sagan, whom she married two years later. After completing a Master’s degree in Genetics and Zoology and a PhD in Genetics, she and Sagan divorced, and Margulis moved to Boston to teach fulltime at Boston University, continue to research, and raise two children at the same time. It was at this time that she began to challenge what she called “ultra-Darwin orthodoxy”, downplaying the traditional natural selection idea of competition and instead suggesting that symbiosis is equally important feature—i.e., cooperation. Her idea was considered evolutionary heresy and her findings were rejected by 15 academic journals—as were her grant applications. One read: “Your research is crap. Don’t ever bother to apply again.” Margulis, however, continued to collect data and finally published her paper in 1967. Soon, data to support symbiosis accumulated and it became an orthodox theory, and Margulis came to be regarded as a respected researcher. Her expertise in microbes also led her to the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, with whom she developed the concept of “Gaia”, which proposes that the Earth is a self-regulating living ecosystem, all life locked in a symbiotic relationship. Margulis was committed to helping the public understand science, and she lectured, produced videos and reviews, and wrote a range of popular science books all throughout her life. She passed away at 73 following a stroke. Without creative, persistent rebels like her, science would never progress.

(via scinerds)

anticapitalist:

‘Time cloak’ hid event in experiment, physicists say

A team of physicists at Cornell University have created a wrinkle in time. Inside it things can occur that are entirely undetectable, at least to ordinary observers. It’s as if they never happened.

This phenomenon, known as “temporal cloaking,” shows how researchers can manipulate the perception of time.

Temporal cloaking is not magic. It follows all the ironclad laws of physics. Whether it will have a use isn’t known, as the hole in time created by the Cornell team lasts only 50 trillionths of a second.

In their experiment, detailed Tuesday in the journal Nature, the Cornell team sent a laser beam down a fiber-optic cable. At the starting end of the cable, they pulsed the beam with a second laser that changed the light from a single wavelength to a range of wavelengths, essentially different colors.

The beam then entered a section of cable that had the property of carrying light of different wavelengths at different speeds, specifically blue light faster than red. As a consequence, the two colors separated until there was a space between them with no light at all. This blip of total darkness — one centimeter wide and lasting 50 picoseconds — is what the researchers called a “time gap” or “time hole.”

To show that an event occurring in the “time gap” was undetected, the researchers pulsed a ray of light through it.

When the ray went through the time gap and then the beam was reassembled successfully, the detector at the end of the cable perceived no change.