bisexuals are attracted both men AND women, whereas irish-americans have significant ancestry from and cultural attachment to ireland
Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!
Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.
Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.
Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.
What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.
Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA
Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.
OMG I WAS THINK ABOUT BLACK HOLES TODAY
(via kidsbop)
flower exposed to radiation from Fukushima nuclear facility Japan
(via kidsbop)
Opalized wood from Virgin Valley, Nevada.
The layered opalized wood structure (brown) contains “easter eggs” (3-5 mm) of fire opal that are open-space fillings of pipe-like vessels (seen in cross section) known as xylem that serve as avenues of water transport from roots to leaves.
(via witchydarling)
Why do we sleep? To clean our brains, say US scientists (The Guardian)
Scientists in the US claim to have a new explanation for why we sleep: in the hours spent slumbering, a rubbish disposal service swings into action that cleans up waste in the brain.
Through a series of experiments on mice, the researchers showed that during sleep, cerebral spinal fluid is pumped around the brain, and flushes out waste products like a biological dishwasher.
The process helps to remove the molecular detritus that brain cells churn out as part of their natural activity, along with toxic proteins that can lead to dementia when they build up in the brain, the researchers say.
Maiken Nedergaard, who led the study at the University of Rochester, said the discovery might explain why sleep is crucial for all living organisms. “I think we have discovered why we sleep,” Nedergaard said. “We sleep to clean our brains.”
Writing in the journal Science, Nedergaard describes how brain cells in mice shrank when they slept, making the space between them on average 60% greater. This made the cerebral spinal fluid in the animals’ brains flow ten times faster than when the mice were awake.
vaccines are cool and useful but when will science be able to give me cat ears
I really hate to be “that guy”, but for those of you living here in America, we’ve got something called the Human Chimera Prohibition Act
holy shit
wait the best thing about this is that a LOT of people are chimeras… about 60% of mothers have cells with their kid’s DNA floating around in them and other people are chimeras for other reasons.
These kids are amazing, they nailed iiitttt. My science classes were never this cool (except when Ms. Hunt took us on field trips! I can still identify all that lichen, Ms. Hunt).
Some really great things come out around Ada Lovelace Day every year, no?
(via slipstreamborne)
Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner—and his colleagues Ralph Erber and Paula Raymond—first began to systematically explore “transactive memory” back in the ’80s. Wegner noticed that spouses often divide up memory tasks. The husband knows the in-laws’ birthdays and where the spare light bulbs are kept; the wife knows the bank account numbers and how to program the TiVo. If you ask the husband for his bank account number, he’ll shrug. If you ask the wife for her sister-in-law’s birthday, she can never remember it. Together, they know a lot. Separately, less so.
Wegner suspected this division of labor takes place because we have pretty good “metamemory.” We’re aware of our mental strengths and limits, and we’re good at intuiting the memory abilities of others. Hang around a workmate or a romantic partner long enough and you discover that while you’re terrible at remembering your corporate meeting schedule, or current affairs in Europe, or how big a kilometer is relative to a mile, they’re great at it. They’re passionate about subject X; you’re passionate about subject Y. So you each begin to subconsciously delegate the task of remembering that stuff to the other, treating one’s partners like a notepad or encyclopedia, and they do the reverse. In many respects, Wegner noted, people are superior to notepads and encyclopedias, because we’re much quicker to query: Just yell a fuzzily phrased question across to the next cubicle (where do we keep the thing that we use for that thing?) and you’ll get an answer in seconds. We share the work of remembering, Wegner argued, because it makes us collectively smarter.
that’s an interesting article!
i never worried that technology was eroding my memory. i already knew my memory sucked, and having to remember things cut down on brainspace i could use for things i’d rather think about. knowing i can easily look something up frees me to use my personal memory on things a computer can’t help me with.
Yeah, I’ve known I was relying on the internet to be my backup brain for a while now, since I feel so gutted and uncertain when I can’t access it. But what’s really cool to consider is the part where humans are really good not at remembering information, but remembering where the information is. Like, we cache and store information. We let a partner or a book or the internet store something we need to know for us so we don’t have to drag it around, but we’ll still be able to go dig it up when we need it, and it’s not an acorn or a piece of meat, it’s knowledge. How cool is that?
(via witchydarling)
3 Smart Things About Flesh-Eating Bacteria (Wired)
CDC
1. The bacteria aren’t actually eating your flesh. The various species—including some that cause strep and staph—enter a wound, scrape, or bug bite and unleash a flood of toxic chemicals that kill surrounding tissue cells.
2. At least 650 cases crop up each year in the US—and about a quarter prove fatal. Flesh-eating bacteria have claimed the life of particle physicist Alexandru Marin, a chunk of the right leg of science fiction writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, and some of Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman’s right arm.
3. One common flesh-eating bacterium, Streptococcus pyogenes, has yielded a new kind of molecular superglue. This bug makes an ultrasticky protein that helps it invade human cells. But disassembled in the lab, that protein has been used to lock distant molecules together—even at high temperature and in acidic environments.
via freshphotons:
It’s wonderful that so many research papers and journals are moving to the open-access model. People should be able to read the research that their tax dollars fund.
But as a note of caution, not all open access is created equally. John Bohannon of Science magazine sent fake papers to 304 open-access publishers. 157 of them (at least) accepted it, despite the fact that it was 100% made up.
(via itsokaytobesmart)
The world’s fastest running robot is off the leash
A relative of Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot, which last year managed to outpace the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt on a treadmill, is now able to run outdoors untethered. Named the WildCat, the outdoor runner is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is being developed for military use.
(via blessphemy)
Even if you don’t think vaccines and autism are related … these are some staggering numbers!
YES THESE NUMBERS ARE STAGGERING I WOULD ALSO POSIT THAT HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THESE IMAGES AND TEXT ALSO
(via blessphemy)
In the early years of space flight, both Russians and Americans used pencils in space. Unfortunately, pencil lead is made of graphite, a highly conductive material. Snapped graphite leads and particles in zero gravity are hugely problematic, as they will get sucked into the air ventilation or electronic equipment, easily causing shorts or fires in the pure oxygen environment of a capsule.
After the fire in Apollo 1 which killed all the astronauts on board, NASA required a writing instrument that wasn’t a fire hazard. Fisher spent over a million dollars (of his own money) creating a pressurized ball point pen, which NASA bought at $2.95 each. The Russian space program also switched over from pencils shortly after.
40 years later snide morons on the internet still snigger about it, because snide morons on the internet never know what they are talking about.
(via degenerate-perturbation)
Fun guy chillin’ in South American rainforest finds plastic-eating fungi
Seriously, though this is kind of a big deal. Know that big problem we have? You know, the one involving a crapload of used plastic hanging around in landfills with nowhere to biodegrade for a couple million years? Well, Jonathan Russell might’ve solved that problem. See, Russell and his fellow Yale students went to Ecuador, where they found a new kind of fungus they’re calling Pestalotiopsis microspora. Big deal, you’re thinking. Anyone can find fungus anywhere! Well, something his fellow students found out after the fact is that this fungus can live on a diet of polyurethane alone — and even crazier, it doesn’t even need air to do so! In other words, we could potentially put it at the bottom of a landfill and cover it with plastic, and it would do the rest of the work. This might be game-changing if it works as advertised. (photo via Flickr user dbutt; EDIT: Updated with link to research abstract) source
(via blessphemy)
The Dino Pet - A Self Sustaining Night Light
Designed by Yonder Biology (“The DNA Art Company”), the Dino Pet is a dinosaur-shaped habitat for a species of bioluminescent marine algae that photosynthesizes during the day and glows at night. “Dino” is actually a play on words, as the actual organisms contained inside the dinosaur-shaped model are called dinoflagellates and are known for their ability to glow when physically agitated (shaken). You might have already seen them in action as they live on various shorelines that cause the waves to glow at night. The organisms can live for 1-3 months but can potentially live indefinitely if the algae are supplied with the proper food and right amount of sunlight. I have a feelings these are going to be very popular but they aren’t ready for sale yet. The Dino Pet is currently funding on Kickstarter.
(via witchydarling)