Posts tagged science!
“Open people everywhere tend to have more liberal values,” said psychologist Robert McCrae, who conducted voluminous studies on personality while at the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.
Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open — less exploratory, less in need of change — and more “conscientious,” a trait that indicates they appreciate order and structure in their lives. This gels nicely with the standard definition of conservatism as resistance to change — in the famous words of William F. Buckley Jr., a desire to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”
Life begins at conception.
The reason that scientists would declare that life exists on this world if a living cell were found is because it would be a single-celled organism. A complete living creature. It is an independent lifeform, not a— and I mean this in the strictest sense of the word— parasite that cannot survive without its host. A “single living cell” inside a woman is a potential life, not yet a life on its own. Is a seed life?
(I will also point out that miscarried fetuses are not issued social security numbers or death certificates, so, even legally, fetuses are not considered alive.)
(Also also— We are on a planet in a pretty young star system barely ten thousand light years from the edge of the galaxy. It’s almost another thirty thousand to the center of the Milky Way. Read up on the Drake Equation. Statistically, Earth cannot be the only planet with life on it in this galaxy, we just haven’t found it yet. Earth is in the deep south of the Milky Way, it might take a while to discover it. This is ignoring the multitude of other galaxies in our universe.)
When I grow up, I want to be Neil deGrasse Tyson.
(Source: inkednurse)
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Didn’t even think of that but this is marvelous. And true.
Spectacular Aurorae Erupt Over Norway
Over the weekend, the Earth’s magnetic field was struck by a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME — a vast bubble of solar plasma that had erupted from the sun on Jan. 19 — took longer than expected to travel through interplanetary space, but on Sunday it made contact.
1. Wicked!
2. Ignoring the color, anyone else think this kinda looks like the Phoenix Force?
Oh, hell. It IS the Phoenix.
That’s a hell of an Avengers Vs. X-Men tie-in, Marvel.
First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?
And so when someone says, “We don’t have enough money for this space probe,” I’m asking, no, it’s not that you don’t have enough money, it’s that the distribution of money that you’re spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.
You remember the 60s and 70s. You didn’t have to go more than a week before there’s an article in Life magazine, “The Home of Tomorrow,” “The City of Tomorrow,” “Transportation of Tomorrow”. All of that ended in the 1970s. After we stopped going to the Moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.
And so I worry that the decision that Congress makes doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow’s gone. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, and the rest of the world is going to pass us by.
”Neil deGrasse Tyson (via david)
This is brilliant and sad. It’s the end of dreams time.
(via discoverynews)
(Source: kateoplis)
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Miss USA 2011 Contestants on Evolution
I made it to Miss Florida before my face started melting from all the stupid. Ugh. This is the kind of American ugliness that makes me want to renounce my fucking citizenship.
LADIES. GET IT TOGETHER.
Also while we’re at it, let’s replace all science classes with MAGIC CLASSES!
I made it to Miss Alabama.
Seven hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet.
The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water. These stellar embryos shoot jets of material from their north and south poles as their growth is fed by infalling dust that circles the bodies in vast disks.
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