happy star wars

i hope you habilis a wonderful holiday

great women of science

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) - British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934) - Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist, famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. 

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) - Chinese American physicist with expertise in the techniques of experimental physics and radioactivity.

Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749) - French mathematician, physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment.

Mae Jemison (1956) - American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.

Vera Rubin (1928) - American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She is famous for uncovering the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) - English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) - German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator, a descendent of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family, founders of one of Europe's largest publishing houses in the 17th century.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) - Austrian, later Swedish, physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. 

the meaning of life

Druids, pagans and revellers gather in the centre of the famous Stonehenge circle for winter solstice

A woman wearing a unicorn mask watches as druids, pagans and revellers gather, hoping to see the sun rise. Despite the rain and wind, a large crowd gathered at the famous historic stone circle to celebrate the sunrise closest to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year – an event claimed to be more important in the pagan calendar than the summer solstice, because it marks the 'rebirth' of the sun for the new year.

classic pin up and rockabilly hair styles

Uganda Passes Anti-Gay Bill That Includes Life In Prison

Uganda's Parliament ignored Western criticism and passed a bill on Friday that punishes acts of homosexuality with prison terms that can include life in prison.

The bill has been a source of controversy for years. Western governments and leaders, including President Obama, have criticized the measure, which President Yoweri Museveni must sign for it to take effect.

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, it's actual name, also makes it a crime to "promote" homosexuality, which could mean simply offering HIV counseling.

It also makes it a crime punishable by five years in prison for renting an apartment to an LGBT person and not informing on your tenant to authorities.npr

fort de soto park

i want to learn to kite board (and windsurf)!

work computer background

Happy holidays, dino lovers! Our theme has had a winter wonderland makeover! It’s a combination of an idea I got from this amazing holiday sweatshirt on etsy, clip art found here, some snowflake brushes, and way too much time on my hands! We hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to use it as your background, click here for the seamless version and be sure to throw us some credit.

apopo

adorable

someone in the world is maimed or killed by a landmine every hour. apopo is a not for profit ngo that has spent the last twenty years developing and implementing “hero rats” to clear affected areas of their landmines - over 1500 in tanzania, where apopo is headquartered, 2,728 in mozambique, and 657 in thailand. there also ongoing operations in angola and cambodia. 

rats are known to be amongst the most sensitive animals when it comes to smell, with more functional genes for their olfactory system than any other mammal. a rat’s nose is constantly active and moving, and is always close to ground where vapour concentrations are highest and wind speeds are lowest.

the african giant pouched rat, being highly sociable and native to sub saharan africa, is specifically trained to detect tnt and mine casing minerals. using a combination of click training and food rewarding that begins shortly after birth and lasts nine months, the rats are able to cover 100 square metres of land in 20 minutes - something a human would need an entire day to do.

weighing just over a kilogram, the rats are too light to set off a landmine, and not one has died from the work. apopo adheres to very strict animal welfare protocols, and the rats are treated with the greatest of care and attention, with most meeting their expected eight years of life. 

photos by sylvain piraux. consider adopting a rat, where you’ll get real time updates on your rat’s training and life saving work. you can also chose to instead have your rat trained to sniff out tuberculosis in sub saharan african villages (apopo has trained rats to do in ten minutes what it takes lab technicians a day to detect)

Ringed Doris

Ringed Doris (Diaulula sandiegensis) in love. Nudibranchs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, possessing both male and female genitalia. When they encounter each other, both transfer sperm to the other mate.

More about nudibranchs: Encyclopedia of Life

knobbed whelk

PREDATORY SEA SNAIL Busycon carica (Gmelin, 1791)
Female Depositing Egg Capsules
East Branch of Westport River, Massachusetts
8/27/2008 | Digital image by Amy Tripp

The knobbed whelk, Busycon carica, is a species of very large predatory sea snail. They are marine gastropod mollusks in the family Buccinidae. The knobbed whelks are the second largest species of busycon whelks, ranging in size up to 12 in (305 mm). [Wikipedia]

The egg capsules  seen in the bottom image are 600 mm long. They were collected on the Florida coast of North America.

SOURCE  Busycon carica (Gmelin, 1791) Female Depositing Egg Capsules)

California Grunion (Leuresthes tenuis)

Grunions are two species of fish found off the East coast of the United States and Mexico. They are known for their unique mating ritual, which is referred to as a ‘grunion run’.

Californian grunion spawn from 2-6 nights after the new or full moon soon after high tide. These tides are exceptionally high.

The female rides the wave as far up on the beach as possible, and excavates the semi-fluid sand by twisting her body into the ground. This causes her body to be buried in the sand.

After she is buried, up to 8 males attempt to mate with her by curving around her and releasing their milt as she deposits her eggs in the nest 4 inches below the surface. The milt flows down her body and fertilises the eggs in the sand. After this, the female twists free and returns to the sea.

The eggs incubate a few inches in the sand, above the level of the subsequent waves. They are not immersed in water, but kept moist by residual water in the sand. They will only hatch when the next series of exceptionally high tides reaches them 10 or more days later. If the tide is not high enough, they can delay hatching for an extra 4 weeks.

The mechanical action of the wave is the environment trigger for hatching. The process takes less than 1 minute and the fry return to the ocean through the wave.

ladylike behavior

Hydrogen squeezed from stone could be new energy source

The method promises a new green energy source, providing copious hydrogen from a simple mixture of rock and water.

It speeds up a chemical reaction that takes geological timescales in nature.

In the reaction, the mineral olivine strips one oxygen and hydrogen atom from an H2O molecule to form a mineral called serpentine, releasing the spare hydrogen atom.

                               

The results were discussed at this week's meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, and have been published in the journal American Mineralogist.

The researchers heated olivine minerals in water to a couple of hundred degrees Celsius, and added a little bit of ruby (aluminium oxide) to the mix to provide a source of aluminium atoms.

The whole mix was placed into a miniature pressure cooker, formed of two diamonds, that squeezed the mixture to 2,000 atmospheres pressure.

The transparent diamonds allowed the scientists to watch the reaction take place.

The process occurs, albeit very slowly, in the rocks that form the ocean floors around the globe. In these natural settings it is thought that the hydrogen that is produced either reacts with carbon to form methane, or is used by microbes that live deep in the rocks to sustain life deep beneath the Earth's surface.

It is not yet clear exactly how much of this non-biologically generated methane is being produced within rocks across the planet.

Olivine is a common green mineral, sometimes mined as the semi-precious stone "peridot". The serpentine mineral that forms from it is beloved of sculptors and is often used as a decorative facing stone for buildings.

                                          Natural serpentinisation is the way that olivine "rots"

The mineralogists at Lyon were expecting the reaction to take weeks, if not months, so having set the experiment running one afternoon they were shocked to discover that half of the olivine crystal had already reacted when they took a look at it the next morning.

They realised that the addition of aluminium, dissolved from the ruby crystal, was key, speeding up the rate at which the olivine crystals dissolve in water and new serpentine minerals grow. Any source of aluminium could be used, and at the lower temperature experiments the researchers also used bauxite.

Describing their finds, Dr Isabelle Daniel told BBC News: "Serpentinisation is very common in nature and occurs along mid-ocean ridges.

"Hydrogen is measured at all the hydrothermal vents from these places and a huge amount of hydrogen and methane is produced: it is a general feature of the mid-ocean ridges. It is a major source of energy for chemo-synthetic bacteria in rocks." read more: bbc

Yellowstone supervolcano 'even more colossal'

A study shows that the magma chamber is about 2.5 times bigger than earlier estimates suggested.

A team found the cavern stretches for more than 90km (55 miles) and contains 200-600 cubic km of molten rock.

The findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Prof Bob Smith, from the University of Utah, said: “We’ve been working there for a long time, and we’ve always thought it would be bigger... but this finding is astounding."

If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to blow today, the consequences would be catastrophic.

The last major eruption, which occurred 640,000 years ago, sent ash across the whole of North America, affecting the planet’s climate.

Now researchers believe they have a better idea of what lies beneath the ground.

The team used a network of seismometers that were situated around the park to map the magma chamber.

Dr Jamie Farrell, from the University of Utah, explained: “We record earthquakes in and around Yellowstone, and we measure the seismic waves as they travel through the ground.

“The waves travel slower through hot and partially molten material… with this, we can measure what’s beneath.”

The team found that the magma chamber was colossal. Reaching depths of between 2km and 15km (1 to 9 miles), the cavern was about 90km (55 miles) long and 30km (20 miles) wide.

It pushed further into the north east of the park than other studies had previously shown, holding a mixture of solid and molten rock.

“To our knowledge there has been nothing mapped of that size before,” added Dr Farrell.

The researchers are using the findings to better assess the threat that the volatile giant poses.

“Yes, it is a much larger system… but I don’t think it makes the Yellowstone hazard greater,” explained Prof Bob Smith.

“But what it does tell us is more about the area to the north east of the caldera.”

He added that researchers were unsure when the supervolcano would blow again.

Some believe a massive eruption is overdue, estimating that Yellowstone’s volcano goes off every 700,000 years or so. read more: bbc

Sashay the Pacific Giant Octopus Gets Released

Hatfield Marine Science Center:

Sashay, our stunning and extremely friendly Visitor Center octopus was released back into the wild on November 26th. After being gently introduced into the Yaquina Bay, she temporarily crawled onto land. This gave her human fans a final opportunity to say goodbye.

This type of behavior has not been seen at any of our previous releases and was an unforgettable moment for all who witnessed it. While it was difficult to bid this beautiful animal adieu, we want our octopuses to have the opportunity to reproduce and finish their lives in the wild. We hope you enjoy these photos!

Photos by Volunteer James Upton

19th century ships tracks show the outlines of the continents

october 2013 unemployment rates by state

How the Blind Cave Fish Lost Its Eyes

by Joseph Bennington-Castro

Pictured above is a very peculiar fish that lives in a few North American caves. It looks very much like other fish, except in one respect: it has no eyes. The story of its adaptation to life in pitch blackness is one of the weirdest stories in evolutionary history.

Mutations vs. Cryptic Variation:

When people think about how evolution occurs, the classical modelgenerally comes to mind. According to this view, species experience random genetic mutations that confer novel traits when they move to a new environment. The most beneficial traits — those that help individuals better adapt to their new habitat — get passed along to subsequent generations and eventually spread throughout the population.

It’s a relatively simple, easy-to-digest model, but it’s not able to explain all cases of evolution. “Imagine if you had a quick change in the environment,” said Nicolas Rohner, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “This evolutionary process would take too long.” To rapidly adapt to a sudden shift in environment, a population would have to have some kind of standing genetic variation already available, which nature then selects for.

But how can this “cryptic variation” be maintained and accumulate in a species without actually affecting individuals before the environmental shift occurs? Scientists proposed that something must keep the genetic variation silent under normal conditions; then, when a species relocates to a new, life-threatening environment, it becomes physiologically stressed and that silencing mechanism stops or breaks down somehow.

The Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, is a freshwater fish found mainly in the rivers throughout central and eastern Mexico, as well as in a few rivers in the United States. At some point in the fish's distant past, populations of A. mexicanus got trapped in pitch-black, underwater caves. In their new — and vastly different — habitats, the fish lost their pigmentation and their eyes, and became better able to store energy and detect changes in water pressure (to find prey and each other).

The trait the cavefish are best known for — their eyeless sockets — was an adaptive change, Rohner explained. Without eyes, the fish can put more energy towards growth and reproduction, rather than using that energy to maintain the useless structures. Additionally, the eyes are easy points of entry for infections. "In that environment, losing your eyes gives you a little bit of an edge," he said.

Interestingly, there are still many surface populations of the Mexican tetra. These fish and their blind counterparts are still considered the same species, and can even interbreed. In effect, A.mexicanus was the perfect model to study, Rohner said.

(read more: io9)

new hand carved cranky man box

new cabinet

nerdy friends, be jealous :)

House of Cards season 2 is coming!

NPR's Top 100 Listener Picks For 2013

1. Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires Of The City

2. Arcade Fire, Reflektor
3. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
4. The National, Trouble Will Find Me
5. Lorde, Pure Heroine
6. Chvrches, The Bones Of What You Believe
7. Kanye West, Yeezus
8. HAIM, Days Are Gone
9. Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
10. James Blake, Overgrown
11. Volcano Choir, Repave
12. Phosphorescent, Muchacho
13. Queens Of The Stone Age, ...Like Clockwork
14. Kurt Vile, Wakin On A Pretty Daze
15. The Avett Brothers, Magpie And The Dandelion
16. The Civil Wars, The Civil Wars
17. Janelle Monáe, The Electric Lady
18. Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience - 1 of 2
19. David Bowie, The Next Day
20. Local Natives, Hummingbird
21. Atoms For Peace, Amok
22. Sigur Rós, Kveikur
23. Foxygen, We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace & Magic
24. Rhye, Woman
25. The Head And The Heart, Let's Be Still
26. Tegan And Sara, Heartthrob
27. My Bloody Valentine, m b v
28. Typhoon, White Lighter
29. Phoenix, Bankrupt!
30. Jason Isbell, Southeastern
31. Iron And Wine, Ghost On Ghost
32. Disclosure, Settle
33. Laura Marling, Once I Was An Eagle
34. Chance The Rapper, Acid Rap
35. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
36. Kacey Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park
37. Daughter, If You Leave
38. The Flaming Lips, The Terror
39. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Push The Sky Away
40. Elvis Costello & The Roots, Wise Up Ghost
41. Savages, Silence Yourself
42. Death Cab For Cutie, Transatlanticism (10th Anniversary Edition)
43. Frightened Rabbit, Pedestrian Verse
44. Earl Sweatshirt, Doris
45. Nine Inch Nails, Hesitation Marks
46. Yo La Tengo, Fade
47. M.I.A., Matangi
48. Lucius, Wildewoman
49. The Lone Bellow, The Lone Bellow
50. Josh Ritter, The Best In Its Tracks
51. Deerhunter, Monomania
52. Deafheaven, Sunbather
53. Patty Griffin, American Kid
54. Junip, Junip
55. Okkervil River, The Silver Gymnasium
56. MGMT, MGMT
57. Mikal Cronin, MCI
58. Jim James, Regions Of Light And Sound Of God
59. Drake, Nothing Was The Same
60. Youth Lagoon, Wondrous Bughouse
61. Paul McCartney, New
62. Washed Out, Paracosm
63. Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2
64. Boards of Canada, Tomorrow's Harvest
65. Valerie June, Pushin' Against A Stone
66. Bill Callahan, Dream River
67. Jay Z, Magna Carta Holy Grail
68. Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, We The Common
69. Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt
70. Danny Brown, Old
71. The Strokes, Comedown Machine
72. Dr. Dog, B-Room
73. Childish Gambino, Because The Internet
74. Darkside, Psychic
75. The Knife, Shaking The Habitual
76. Bonobo, The North Borders
77. Franz Ferdinand, Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action
78. King Krule, 6 Feet Beneath The Moon
79. San Fermin, San Fermin
80. Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe
81. Run The Jewels (Killer Mike & El-P), Run The Jewels
82. The 1975, The 1975
83. Jon Hopkins, Immunity
84. Frank Turner, Recovery
85. Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, Love Has Come For You
86. Death Grips, Government Plates
87. Jake Bugg, Shangri La
88. The Beatles, On Air - Live At The BBC, Vol. 2
89. Unknown Mortal Orchestra, II
90. Best Coast, Fade Away
91. Dave Grohl & Friends, Sound City: Real To Reel
92. Superchunk, I Hate Music
93. Pusha T, My Name Is My Name
94. Bombino, Nomad
95. Sleigh Bells, Bitter Rivals
96. Grouplove, Spreading Rumours
97. Moon Hooch, Moon Hooch
98 Laura Veirs, Warp And Weft
99. She & Him, Volume 3
100. Ty Segall, Sleeper