Going down with the ship

(via freshphotons)

ikenbot:

Difference Between Astronomy and Astrology

by Carl Edward Sagan — From Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

There are two ways to view the stars, as they really are.. or as we might wish them to be. These, are the Pleadeas a group of young stars leaving their stellar nurseries, gas, and dust, and this.. is the Crab Nebula, a stellar graveyard where gas and dust are being dispersed back into the interstellar medium. Inside it lies a pulsar. Both the Pleadeas and the Crab Nebula are in a constellation where Astrologers long ago named Taurus The Bull, They imagined it to influence our daily lives. Astronomers say, that the Planet Saturn is an immense globe of hydrogen and helium and circled by a ring of snowballs 50,000 Kilometers wide and that Jupiter’s great red spot was a giant storm raging for perhaps a 1,000,0000 years.

But Astrologers see the Planets, as affecting human character and fate. Jupiter represent a regal baring and a gentle disposition and Saturn the gravedigger fosters they say, stress, suspicion & evil. The Astronomers Mars was as real as the Earth, a world awaiting exploration. But the Astrologers saw Mars as a warrior a creator of quarrels, violence, and destruction. Astronomy and Astrology were not so distinct, for most of human history the one encompassed the other. But there came a time when Astronomy escaped from the confines of Astrology. The two traditions became to diverge in the life and mind of Johannes Kepler. It was he who demystified the heavens by discovering that a physical force laid behind the motions of the Planets.

He was the first astrophysicist and the last scientific astrologer. Intellectual foundations of astrology were swept away 300 years ago and yet it is still taken serious by yet many people. You ever notice how easy it is to find a magazine about astrology? Virtually every newspaper in America has a column on Astrology. Almost none, have even a weekly column on Astronomy. People wore Astrological pendants, checked their Horoscopes before leaving the house, even our languages preserve some astrological consciousness. For example take the word, “Disaster” it comes from the Greek for “Bad Star” Italians believed disease was caused by the influence of the stars its the origin of our word “Influenza”. The Zodiacal signs used by Astrologers even ornament this statue of Prometheus in New York City.

Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods…

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pinebark:

wildunicornherd:

thinksquad:

Here is a Science fair project presented by a girl in a secondary school in Sussex . In it she took filtered water and divided it into two parts. The first part she heated to boiling in a pan on the stove, and the second part she heated to boiling in a microwave. Then after cooling she used the water to water two identical plants to see if there would be any difference in the growth between the normal boiled water and the water boiled in a microwave. She was thinking that the structure or energy of the water may be compromised by microwave. As it turned out, even she was amazed at the difference, after the experiment which was repeated by her class mates a number of times and had the same result.

It has been known for some years that the problem with microwaved anything is not the radiation people used to worry about, it’s how it corrupts the DNA in the food so the body can not recognize it.

Microwaves don’t work different ways on different substances. Whatever you put into the microwave suffers the same destructive process. Microwaves agitate the molecules to move faster and faster. This movement causes friction which denatures the original make-up of the substance. It results in destroyed vitamins, minerals, proteins and generates the new stuff called radiolytic compounds, things that are not found in nature.

So the body wraps it in fat cells to protect itself from the dead food or it eliminates it fast. Think of all the Mothers heating up milk in these ‘Safe’ appliances. What about the nurse in Canada that warmed up blood for a transfusion patient and accidentally killed him when the blood went in dead. But the makers say it’s safe. But proof is in the pictures of living plants dying!

NO, YOU PIG-IGNORANT ASSWIPES.

SOME KID’S CLASS PROJECT IS NOT REAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. YOU’VE HEARD OF “DOUBLE BLIND”, RIGHT? CALL ME WHEN IT’S PUBLISHED IN NATURE.

the structure or energy of the water

what the fuck does that even mean you realize that a water molecule is made up of three fucking atoms and if you rearrange it it isn’t water anymore and you would fucking notice

the problem with microwaved anything is not the radiation people used to worry about

Here is a handy diagram I drew of all the different types of radiation:

Microwaves != nuclear reactors, so calm your tits.

it’s how it corrupts the DNA in the food so the body can not recognize it

…do you understand what DNA is and how eating works? DNA is a jumble of protein in the middle of each cell and it tells the cells in that particular organism how to make more cells. Your body does not care about whether your food has any DNA in it or not. The chemicals it cares about are things like vitamins and sugars, as well as inorganic shit like salt.

(You can denature DNA by heating it or using chemicals like urea. It is like what happens when you fry an egg, which is basically a big glob of protein—the strands break apart and it looks like tiny white strings. Very cool.)

Microwaves agitate the molecules to move faster and faster.

I…just…that is the fucking definition of heat, whether you’re heating something over a flame or in a microwave or using the Sun. The difference is that microwaves mostly affect the water molecules in your food and they don’t need to use as much heat. Water boils at 100°C, which is just about as hot as water can get before it just turns into steam; but that’s like the lowest setting on your oven. Oven- or stove-cooked food tastes different partly because it uses higher temperatures and partly because heat is transferred in a different way.

This movement causes friction

That’s not what friction is.

It results in destroyed vitamins, minerals, proteins and generates the new stuff called radiolytic compounds, things that are not found in nature.

Let’s take these one at a time.

• Vitamins are classified as water-soluble or fat-soluble. So cooking things in water will dissolve the water-soluble vitamins (C and all the B’s). Just plain heat doesn’t do that, so microwaving veggies—which keeps the water in—is actually a healthier option.
• Proteins: Breaking the chemical bonds in proteins (denaturing) is a part of any cooking. However, denatured protein is still nutritious—that’s why you can meet your protein intake with foods like fried eggs and baked chicken.
• Minerals are just chemical elements, like off the periodic table—sodium, iron, potassium. (Vitamins and proteins are very complex combinations of elements.)

Which brings me to the “radiolytic compound” bullshit. When you talk about breaking apart, say, iron—you’re talking about breaking down the iron atoms themselves. Which is a whole lot different than breaking the bonds between atoms. It takes hella radiation. You need shit like gamma rays—the OOOH SCARY NUCULAR radiation—which we’ve already established do not come from your microwave.

things that are not found in nature

What the shit does that even mean? You all know radioactive elements occur in nature, right? In rocks and also in living cells. That’s right, you have this radioactive kind of carbon INSIDE YOU. You get it by eating those delicious plants. We can tell how long ago something died by how much of it is left.

Tons of shit that occurs naturally is horribly bad for you. And tons of shit that never existed until we cooked it up is great for you—like the chemical compounds in a lot of medications.

PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THIS SHIT ARE WHY CHILDHOOD DISEASES THAT CAUSED SERIOUS ILLNESSES AND/OR DEATH THAT WE NEARLY ERADICATED WITH VACCINES ARE NOW COMING BACK AND WHY CONSPIRACY THEORIST TWATS ARE ASKING CITY COUNCIL NOT TO FLUORIDATE THE WATER AND WHY GLOBAL WARMING WILL WRECK OUR FUCKING PLANET.

LERN 2 SCIENCE. Think before you reblog. And microwave your veggies.

Bless this takedown of a bullshit reblog.

ALMOST the perfect takedown. If only they had gotten the DNA details right. It isn’t just a mess of proteins.

(via waxjism)

jtotheizzoe:

uselaine:

Solar eclipse projected through the ‘pinholes’, made by oak leaves, on my shed door.

The tiny gaps between each leaf act as individual pinhole cameras, morphing the shadows of the tree with projections of the obscured sun. Next eclipse, you can witness this yourself, or even replicate it by crossing your fingers over on another in a waffle patter.

Ok. Maybe this one is my favorite.

YES! I was in the woods during an eclipse years ago and the ground was covered in tiny crescents of light. It was kind of magical.

sagansense:

You can zoom into this image to read in finer detail - here

(via scinerds)

pretendy:

“Draw me an atom”

This amazing gif by xverdxse is close to my idea of what an atom looks like. Far from the schoolbook picture of a clump of snooker ball protons and neutrons encircled by hoops of electrons the real picture of an atom is more like a vibrating cloud. A cloud? Yeah, a specific type of cloud called a probability density function. Woah maths alert! WEEOO-WEEOO, code red, code red!

Relax.

A probability density function (PDF) is just a measure (function) of how likely it is (probability) to ‘find’ the atom in a given region of space (density). The thickness of the cloud in a small region is proportional to the likelihood of finding the atom centered within that region. In the image above, it is most likely to be found in the center of the black region, and the likelihood of it being found further away gets smaller and smaller until it’s nearly zero outside.

Every frame of this image corresponds to making a single measurement of it’s position. If it weren’t on a loop and we waited long enough, we should expect it to sooner or later make a large jump to a grey or even white area.

This is how quantum tunneling works: a particle confined to a domain will at any given time have a small but finite probability of being found outside its confinement region! Even a tennis ball has a finite (but astronomically tiny) probability of tunneling through a solid wall.

So what do atoms actually look like? Well, they don’t. They area collection of volumeless point-particles that don’t have any physical shape that you can draw on a piece of paper. However they have an effective shape that is described by (amongst other things and depending on what kind of measurements you make) the PDF.

If you take a step back from your screen and look at the above ‘atom’, you can kind of consider it as a single solid entity even though it is an amorphous cloud of pixels. This is all we can say about the ‘true’ shape of the atom and is a visual approximation we have to make if we want to try to understand what atoms look like and not chew off our own faces in philosophical frustration.

AWESOME.

(via scinerds)

jtotheizzoe:

wired:

Craig Venter has been on a tear of invention and exploration. In 2004 he sailed around the world, discovering thousands of new species and sequencing millions of new genes. In 2007 he unveiled his own genome, unexpurgated (it revealed a predisposition for risk-taking, among other things). And in 2010 he announced the first successful synthesis of life—a unique critter borne from two distinct organisms, thus proving for the first time that it is indeed possible to create new organisms for specific purposes and functions. He is, in every respect, the epitome of an icon—a figure who has pushed science forward, sometimes by sheer force of will.

More @ Wired Science

Photo: Joe Pugliese

Everyone’s favorite genome cowboy, profiled at Wired Science.

To get your appetite going, here’s some of his words about how the human genome project panned out, and where we’re going from here (emphasis mine):

“… what most people think about when it comes to genetics is personalized medicine. If we sequence your genome or my genome, what can we interpret, what can we predict for the future, what can we change? That’s in its absolute infancy. We’re at the point where we don’t need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It’s only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We’re just at the start of trying to do that.”

Source:

freshphotons:

Poster by Klaas Wynne.

pleatedjeans:

anatomy of sea life

(via meltdowntown)

expose-the-light:

Top 10 Biggest Brain Damaging Habits

1. No Breakfast

People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level.This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.

2. Overreacting

It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.

3. Smoking

It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.

4. High Sugar consumption

Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.       

5. Air Pollution

The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.

6. Sleep Deprivation

Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain

7. Head covered while sleeping

Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.

8. Working your brain during illness

Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.            

9. Talking Rarely

Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.

10. Lacking in stimulating thoughts

Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.

3/10. Not too bad?

(via scinerds)

jtotheizzoe:

Mapping the Wonder Inside Every Cell

Behold the biochemical pathways of the cell. For decades, these wall charts have adorned the hallways and laboratories wherever biochemists are at work. They are at once both reference and art.

The version pictured above (click here for the holycraphuge version) is state of the art, a subway map of interacting pathways, intersecting reactions, and a road map for the journey to make any building block our cells need. Each node is an enzyme or product, separated by color into metabolic subdomains. You really must head over to KEGG and play with the interactive version, where each dot comes alive, an interactive chemical structure.

I’m also a big fan of Gerard Michal’s legendary wall charts of yesteryear. Watching the evolution in design from his 1974 version to a later 1993 map, his layouts are chock full of vintage German aesthetic.

SO GREAT. I just found a vintage copy of this chart I was planning to post in my new office.

sciencecenter:

A rare, 1-in-30 million calico lobster

My Saturday afternoon pick-me-up.

MUTANT! OMG, GENETICS!!! <3