Posts tagged science
Lake Retba lies just north of the Cap Vert peninsula in Senegal. The coloring, which can change to purple depending on the time of day, is caused by bacteria that thrives in the high-salinity environment. - From Amusing Planet.
Photo by: SPL / Barcroft Media
Ed note: Lake Baikal and more of the weirdest lakes in the world.
the world is just awesome.
(via i fucking love science on facebook)
We can dream.
holy crap. if there was a Chief Science Officer in the executive branch, it would be a battle royale (with cheese)
in case you missed it…
This Ghost Nebula is No Fake Sandy Photo
Join Trace as he calls out the fake photos of Hurricane Sandy, gets creeped out by a ghost nebula and finally explains how the giant moai statues were moved around on Easter Island!
soldiers occasionally used pigeons to carry messages during WWII. This one has quite the morbid history.
Coded WWII Message Found on Dead Pigeon
British intelligence agents are working on deciphering a coded message that has remained a secret for nearly 70 years — attached to the leg of a hero World War II carrier pigeon.
Found in the chimney of 17th-century home in Bletchingley, Surrey, the bird’s skeleton was found in 1982 when the home’s current owner David Martin decided to restore the fireplace.
Almost certainly, the carrier pigeon was dispatched from Nazi-occupied France on June 6 1944, during the D-Day Invasions.
“We know it’s an Allied Forces pigeon because of the red capsule it was carrying — but that’s all we know,” he added.
The message was sent to XO2 at 16:45 and contain 27 codes, each made up of five letters or numbers.
even astronauts can cast a ballot!
How Space Station Astronauts Can Vote
Two U.S. citizens may be hundreds of miles above the nearest polling booth, but they still cast their ballots.
Astronauts residing on the orbiting lab receive a digital version of their ballot, which is beamed up by Mission Control at the agency’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. Filled-out ballots find their way back down to Earth along the same path.
This system was made possible by a 1997 bill passed by Texas legislators (nearly all NASA astronauts live in or around Houston). It was first used that same year by David Wolf, who happened to be aboard Russia’s Mir space station at the time.
NOTE: the real excitement hits about 2/3 of the way through!
trce:
I took this yesterday at Punkin’ Chukin’! Tune in on the Science Channel on Thanksgiving night at 8pm. Even Perez Hilton knows it’s not Thanksgiving without the Chunk.
This machine is crazy big and crazy fast, and if you look closely you can see Kari Byron!
it’s so fast… as is speeds up you can hear it slicing through the air… also there are people in that truck! look at the smoke! holy cow!
The centrifugals are my favorite division. Seriously, huge steel arms hundreds of feet long have a single pumpkin strapped to one end. As they begin to spin, slowly at first and then faster and faster the sound becomes a whistle and the ground shakes.
When the arm is flailing and the smoke pours from the exhaust we hear the official air horn and “Bad to the Bone’s” operator pulls the trigger, sending the pumpkin soaring downrange. How can you not get excited about these crazy contraptions!
the elephants must have had a meeting after that whale from last week. they couldn’t let themselves be one-upped.
An Asian elephant male named Koshik can imitate human speech, speaking words in Korean that others who know the language can understand.
The elephant’s vocabulary at present consists of five words: annyong (hello), anja (sit down), aniya (no), nuo (lie down), and choah (good).
annyong reminds me of arrested development.
As someone who occasionally enjoys a breakfast sandwich from our favorite faux-irish fast food hawker… Can One Drive-Through Breakfast Be That Bad? It turns out it can. In fact, just one Egg McMuffin-style fast food meal can hurt your arteries’ ability to increase blood flow under stress, researchers said in a new study.
Spooky Nebula Ghosts Rise into Space: Big Pic
Resembling characters from a Tim Burton movie, these eerie figures are part of a molecular cloud of gas and dust located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. First identified in 1966, the human-like shapes with ‘arms’ raised give the nebula its spooky nickname: the “Ghost Nebula”.
if you like creepy space stuff check these true horror stories from spaAaAaAaaaaAaccccee…
Voyager 1 Detects Weirdness at Solar System Edge
She may be old, but you can’t keep a good probe down.
Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object and is thought to have recently escaped the sun’s sphere of influence. The probe, launched 35 years ago, is therefore mankind’s first interstellar vehicle careening into the vast expanse of space between the stars.
Every minute we learn more about the unknown…
Our First Line Of Asteroid Defense? Paintballs!
Imagine: An asteroid has been discovered. Scarily, it’s a big ol’ hairy extinction-level asteroid. You know, the kind of asteroid that gave the dinosaurs a really bad day 65 million years ago. Astronomers think there’s a high probability that it will hit us in 20 years time. What do we do?
(Cue screaming people running through the streets, riots, looting, orgies, awesome doomsday parties…)
Once the inevitable panic has died down, no doubt the world’s population will start asking their governments what they intend to do about it. At that moment, as the horrid sinking sensation sets in, politicians will wish they’d invested more money into their space programs. “Whaddaya know. We needed that space infrastructure after all! What were we thinking all these years building bombs and war machines? It’s the UNIVERSE that’s going to kill us! What fools we’ve been…”
Fortunately, despite the lack of political will to spend more on space technology over the years, space experts do have some clue as to how to deal with an incoming asteroid threat. And if that threat is 20 years out, we may actually have a stab at preventing the space rock from hitting us…
i’m sure you’ve never thought about it before, but science has to probe to the very bottom of things…
Penis Worms Help Solve Unusual Evolutionary Puzzle
Yep, you read that right. This, enigmatic marine invertebrate known as a penis worm is shedding new light on the evolution of digestion by posing a curious question: which develops first, the mouth or the anus
Living in shallow waters and measuring up eight inches long, these worms are “living fossils” that have changed very little since their priapulid ancestors thrived on the ocean floor in the Cambrian period some 500 million years ago.
