Extremely Good Paragraph From An Article Exploring The Concept Of Sentience In Invertebrates

Galaxies

Unimaginably huge collections of gas, dust, stars, and even planets, galaxies come in many shapes and sizes. Some are spirals, such as our own galaxy, others are like squashed balls, and some have no shape at all.

From the book Knowledge Encyclopedia Science! (DK)

another paper I love is about how play behaviour, not tool use, is related to brain mass in birds, and how we draw false conclusions about tool use and cognitive ability when we should be considering play behaviour…i just love that and it’s implications actually

Periodic Videos on YouTube discusses the creation of the element darmstadtium and pays a visit to where it was discovered. 

Romanticizing studying/education

While I am not currently enrolled in college, something I found incredibly helpful when it came to studying and taking notes was fully romanticizing it. And by that I mean going all the way in— I would put on a classical music playlist and set my LEDs to a warm orange tone and pretend I was a young scholar in ye olden days studying by candlelight, and a couple hours later I’d have half a notebook filled with color-coded notes. Another time I put on some film noir jazz and rain ambience and imagined I was a tired, grizzled detective working tirelessly on a cold case that just wasn’t making sense. And sure enough, I would have pages upon pages of notes and work completed by the end of the night. It sounds really silly but I shocked myself with how well it worked, and I wanted to share my experience with it in case it can help anyone else!

I find this Antonov An-74 plane hilarious. Not just because of the weird engine placement, everyone finds that hilarious. This (and the related AN-72) are nicknamed "Cheburashka", after this cartoon character:

But no, the even funnier thing, to me, is how they've labeled this plane. Lemme zoom in:

THEY PUT THE PLANE'S FAX NUMBER ON IT

who sees a fucking plane and goes "hey, maybe I should send that plane a fax"?

phys.org

Dark matter could make our galaxy's innermost stars immortal

Stars near the center of our galaxy are acting kind of weird. Dark matter may be the explanation.

Stars near the center of our galaxy are acting kind of weird. Dark matter may be the explanation. A team of scientific detectives (so to speak) have discovered a potential new class of stars that could exist within a light-year of the Milky Way's center that could be operating according to an unusual mechanism: dark matter annihilation. This process would produce an outward pressure on the stars other than hydrogen fusion, keeping them from gravitationally collapsing—and making them essentially immortal, their youth being refreshed constantly. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server. Collectively, the dark matter–powered stars would inhabit a new region of a long-established diagram that classifies stars by their temperature and luminosity, placing them away from the so-called main sequence where the vast majority of stars exist.

Continue Reading.

This is a fascinating cosmic scene captured by Hubble: jets firing out from the rotational poles of a newly-ignited star illuminate gas and dust inside the Orion B cloud, 1,350 light-years away, forming what's called a Herbig-Haro object. 

Credit: Jason Major

A unique view of Mars and its scarred surface!

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart