Galaxies

NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix

In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center. (source)

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

IC 1795, Fish

Long Tail of Comet Pons-Brooks ©

A little gif of a paw dissection done at the Art Academy of Cincinnati

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!

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

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

Volcano Eruptions seen from Space photos: NASA

Caecilians’ teeth are so metal. Nothing you will expect from what looks like a gummy worm when it has its mouth closed.