way to plagarize verbtim from wikipedia, image included

ichthyologist:

Marrus Orthocanna

A colonial animal composed of a complex arrangement of zooids, some of which are polyps and some medusae.

"The cultural idea of a scientist is someone who sets up an experiment and then when it doesn’t happen the way they expected says, ‘Oh my experiment is a failure.’ No scientist actually thinks like that. Any experiment that yields data is a viable experiment. Information is key, not what you expected the outcome to be."

Adam Savage - MythBusters  (via thescienceofreality)

Actually, I think every scientist “thinks like that”. It is almost always the case that when you don’t get the results you expected the most likely explanation is that you messed something up.

Once in a great while there is “valuable information” in unexpected results that refuse to go away, but that is a pretty rare situation. Most of the time an unexpected result is only providing “valuable information” about your own competence.

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Breaking news: “These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals.”
So a dog that’s been trained to sit still in a brain scanner and wait for a signal indicating whether or not it will get a treat will “respond to human signals” in the “reward center of the brain”. Is there anything the tiniest bit interesting or surprising here?

Brain scans reveal dogs’ thoughts
Research indicates that dogs are aware of and respond to human signals, especially in terms of the reward center of the brain.

(Source: mothernaturenetwork)

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sfmariner:

Somali piracy in one cool graphic. Full graphic is here.

Wow. I hate this. Where to begin? The trivialization of the subject matter with the cartoonish design? The implication that an equal number of schooners vessels where attacked in 2010 and 2011?

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ulaulaman:

Batman Physics

Isn’t the entire point of the bat wings to exert some aerodynamical force so that he doesn’t hit the ground at 15 m/s?

First Kid Picked →

jtotheizzoe:

 The Science of the Cinnamon Challenge

Apparently this is a thing? Where people try to eat spoonfuls of cinnamon (or really cassia bark)? And then they fail miserably, choking it up in a cloud of rusty smoke?

Well that’s because, being made of tree bark, common cinnamon is extremely hydrophobic (it’s the cellulose). So instead of your saliva coating it an making it possible to swallow, you just choke like a fool on video.

(via Boing Boing)

Cellulose is not hydrophobic, it is hydrophilic. It’s not water soluble, which is what the quoted chemist is refering too, but I’m not even convinced that’s particularly relevant. I think the effect has more to do with the surface area of the fine powder, plus the irritation from the cinnamon.

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kidaidan:

My local bar knows how to market their pie of the day. 

Arg! This totally wrong thing just keeps popping up.

(Source: vstheabsurduniverse)

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Why this is wrong. Compare the stellar lifetimes (millions of years) to the distances to stars within the milky way (less than a million lightyears).

How I made the plot:

blondiesbrain:

This is the kind of pessimistic quote I like!

Grump: This keeps getting passed around, but it’s almost totally wrong. Most stars visible to the naked eye are probably within a few hundred light years. Stellar lifetimes are millions of years, so it’s exceedingly unlikely that a random star you’ve picked has died in the last few hundred years.

(Source: semicola)