we were just pretending
~ Miranda July
Mayim Bialik: Blossoming To Science (by NOVASecretLife)
Whoa you guys, Blossom grew up to be a total badass.
Tears in Space (Don’t Fall) (by canadianspaceagency)
There is some really great Morrissey song to be written about this.
Spider Building Spider Decoys Discovered in Peruvian Amazon
“The spider is believed to be a new species, and crafts a larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. The genus Cyclosa includes other sculpting spiders, but this is the first that has been observed to build a replica with multiple legs and to use a web-shaking behavior.”
Oh jesus fucking christ. We’re all doomed.
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
NASA announced on Thursday that three scientific lines of enquiry have led them to conclude that water ice and organic molecules are present on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, and the smallest planet in the solar system.
The presence of ice and organic material adds more weight to the widespread theory that icy comets bombarded the rocky worlds of the inner solar system aeons ago. That bombardment could have brought the oceans to Earth, and supplied our planet with the organic molecules needed to trigger the origin of life.
npr:
Epochs last an awfully long time. We’re talking millions of years. Well, some scientists are kicking around the idea that the earth has entered a new one. Technically, we’re still in the Holocene period. But perhaps, these scientists say, humans have so influenced the direction of the planet that we should think of this as a new epoch called the anthropocene. Check out the above video for a nice visualization of this idea.
In connection with the NPR Cities Project today, NPR Blogger and astrophysicist Adam Frank suggests that the anthropocene is really the epoch of the city. Just look at the east coast from way up in an airplane, he says.
-Franklyn Cater
Whoa.
New monkey species identified in Democratic Republic of Congo
Glad there’s still a frontier out there.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on how unrepresentative our representatives are
(via crookedindifference)
The Higgs Boson Explained (by minutephysics)
I…kind of get it now?
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.
This is crazy interesting. Stories!
