It's Okay To Be Smart

On being entitled to our own facts.

Or not.

(via Doonesbury)

• • #facts
  • #denial
  • #science
• 2 hours ago
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thekidshouldseethis:

Parabolas (etc.) from Radiolab, which has the co-curator running around looking for parabolas everywhere we go.

“A video inspired by the mathematician, Steve Strogatz. At the age of thirteen, Steve was astonished to find that pendulums and water fountains had a strange relationship that had previously been completely hidden from him.” 

It was pointed out in some comments on vimeo that many of the shapes in the video are not parabolas but are actually catenaries. Since I won’t explain it best, you can check out more on parabolas vs catenaries next!

Thanks, @mindfulmimi

“… I suddenly understood what people mean when they say there’s a law of nature.”

Can’t believe I’ve never seen this one before. From the great folks at Everynone, who were behind the Symmetry video for Radiolab.

• • #everything
  • #geometry
  • #math
  • #physics
  • #shapes
  • #parabola
  • #catenary
  • #video
  • #radiolab
  • #science
• 2 hours ago > thekidshouldseethis
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Zebra stripes evolved to keep biting flies at bay . .  at least in part. Biting, blood-sucking flies were shown to be less attracted to the kinds of polarized light reflected off of white or striped horses (even fake ones) than dark ones. Although it’s probably not the only evolutionary pressure behind the development of zebra stripes (lions, anyone?), it certainly is an interesting reason to put plastic horses in a field for science.

(via BBC Nature)

• • #science
  • #nature
  • #zebras
  • #stripes
• 3 hours ago
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staceythinx:

We’ve all seen macrophotography of insects before, but never quite like this. These are photos of bugs after they’ve been peeled off the windshield of a car.

Photographer Voker Steger describes his method:

“The speed is important. The right speed is about 70km/h (43 mph). Flies that get hit by a car at that speed look like fallen angels in the electron microscope.”

• • #science
  • #macro
  • #photo
  • #photography
  • #macrophotography
  • #electron microscope
  • #insect
  • #insects
  • #bugs
• 4 hours ago > staceythinx
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carlzimmer:

Farewell, silver bullet. Gonorrhea is becoming untreatable. Details at Scientific American: bit.ly/zZHyQt

[Image: Wikipedia]

Valentine’s Day is next week.

You’ve been warned.

• • #science
  • #medicine
  • #sex
  • #gonorrhea
  • #news
  • #valentine's day
• 18 hours ago > carlzimmer
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What’s the weirdest or most interesting thing you’ve ever learned about biology, in fifteen words or less?

• • #science
  • #questions
• 23 hours ago
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Heart Stop Beating: The Story of the First Man WIth No Pulse

If we were to walk outside and ask the first hundred people on the street what criteria someone would have to possess in order to be “alive”, I am guessing that a heartbeat would be at or near the top of the list.

In most of our bodies, that electrochemical muscle machine works without fail. But others aren’t so lucky. Doctors are left with two choices then: Repair the heart, or replace it outright.

This film by Jeremiah Zagar tells the story of Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier, two visionary surgeons from the Texas Heart Institute, and their quest to save a man’s life by taking away his heartbeat. 

You may remember the groundbreaking device from this stunning movie from last year. Science does mighty amazing things.

(by Focus Forward Films)

• • #science
  • #medicine
  • #heart stop beating
  • #video
  • #amazing
• 23 hours ago
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Beatrice the Biologist: Biology Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage Bans

When there’s such ravenous effort out there to classify marriage as only between a man and a woman, don’t you think we’d have a better definition of exactly what a “man” and a “woman” were? When you dig down into the alignments of and X and Y sex chromosomes, you come up with more gray area than black and white. Check out Beatrice’s full post for more.

Sex is not the binary system we think it is, and we can’t go around making rules about what people can and can’t do based on what anatomy happens to be between their legs. So on top of the fact that gay marriage bans are unconstitutional, unnecessary, and downright petty, they are also terribly unscientific.

Love the cartoons in this post:

• • #science
  • #sex
  • #glbtq
  • #gay marriage
  • #biology
  • #beatrice
  • #prop 8
• 1 day ago
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shortformblog:

A poster inspired by yesterday’s amazing marshmallow cannon situation. Obama’s mouth has never been so agape.