Drunk Science Is HERE!!! Our First Episode Explains The Mystery Of Slime. It Also Makes Drunken Attempts

Black Hole Caught Devouring Star For An Entire Decade

“Normally lasting weeks or months, a new record has just been set for TDEs. XJ1500+0154, 1.8 billion light years away, is the largest, longest-lasting one ever seen. First detected in July of 2005, the X-rays from this distant source brightened by a factor of 100 over 3 years. They remain bright even today. Although dozens of TDEs have been observed since the 1990s, none have lasted this long. It may be caused by the most massive star ever observed creating a TDE.”

When any object passes too close to the event horizon of a black hole, the tidal forces acting on it can become so strong that they’ll tear the entire object apart in a spaghettification disaster. While most of the matter will get ejected from the encounter, a significant fraction can be accreted, absorbed and used to fuel the black hole’s growth. These tidal disruption events have been seen numerous times since the launch of our X-ray observatories, and are now known to come in a wide variety of magnitudes, at a variety of distances and to last a variable amount of time. So when you see the largest, longest-lasting one ever, you sit up and take notice! That’s exactly what’s happened with XJ1500+154, which is now in its second decade of X-ray signals.

Come get the full story on this amazing object, and learn how it might solve the puzzle of supermassive black hole growth on today’s Mostly Mute Monday!

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Buckle up, everyone. Tomorrow at 10:30, we learn about density. Look at my serious face. This is serious stuff. Subscribe to our channel so that you don't miss a beat! Link in bio! #drunk #drunkscience #funny #stem #blerd #blackwomenatwork #jokes #experiment #science http://ift.tt/2oiHOG8

Dolly at 20

Twenty years ago today on February 22, 1997,  Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute, announced the existence of a 7 month old sheep named Dolly, the product of cloning.  She was cloned using and adult cell and born on July, 5, 1996 and raised under the auspices of the UK Ministry of Agriculture and Scottish company PPL Therapeutics.  A Dorset Finn sheep, Dolly lived for six and half years before she was euthanized due to illness.  Dolly was created with a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a donor cell (in this case and adult cell from another sheep) has the nucleus removed that is then transfered into an unfertilized egg cell (an oocyte) which in turn has had its cell nucleus removed to make way for the donor nucleus.  The host cell is then stimulated and implanted into a host sheep for gestation.  Although other animals had been cloned before Dolly, Dolly is celebrated as the first ‘clone’ because her donor cell came from an adult cell. 

The word clone entered English as a noun used in botany in 1903 from the Ancient Greek word klon (κλον) meaning a twig or spray, related to klados (κλαδος) meaning a sprout, young offshoot, branch.  Botanists used the word to describe the results of the techique of grafting a shoot of one plant or tree onto another.  The word clone (verb) wasn’t used until 1959, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that clone was used in connnection with animals and humans.  Since Dolly, scientists have successfully cloned many other animals, including pigs, horses, goats, and deer.  

Image of ‘v’ graft courtesy ghadjikyriacou, via flickr, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

The Earth at night. Photographs taken by NASA.

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nsfw (not safe for water)

alkali metals

Ancestor of all vertebrates was a big mouth with no anus

A tiny fossil from China could be the earliest of all deuterostomes, creatures that eventually led to evolution of all vertebrates, including humans

The ancestor of all vertebrates, including fish, reptiles and humans was a big mouth but apparently had no anus.

The microscopic creature named Saccorhytus, after the sack-like features created by its elliptical body and large mouth, lived 540 million years ago. It was identified from microfossils found in China.

“To the naked eye, the fossils we studied look like tiny black grains, but under the microscope the level of detail is jaw-dropping,” says team member Simon Conway Morris, of the University of Cambridge, in the UK.

Researchers believe it was about a millimetre in size, lived between grains of sand on the sea bed and had a large mouth relative to the rest of its body.

They also think the creature was covered with a thin, relatively flexible skin, had some sort of muscle system which could have made contractile movements and allowed it to move by wriggling.

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