Galactic Unite’s STEM Bytheway Scholarship
How much water is there on, in, and above the Earth?
This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.
(via unknownskywalker)
Have you ever eaten sushi? If so, the phenomenal growth in demand for sushi has come at a cost: overfishing has led to depleting fish stocks, which in turn has threatened the balance of the ocean’s ecosystems. Is the current sushi trade sustainable? What can be done to ensure that the prized Blue Fin Tuna exists for future generations to come? This timely documentary - winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Seattle International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the 2012 San Francisco Green Film Festival - poses some important questions that all sushi lovers should give thought to before placing their next order of sushi.
(via crookedindifference)
Why does this blue stone have yellow light coming out of it?
You’d expect this cloudy blue glass to throw a blue light onto its surroundings. The light it throws, though, is clearly a bright orange-yellow. Can you guess why?
How can a light change from blue to orange? The Tyndall Effect shines through.
Top Image: Optick
…don’t ever forget that!
And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.
「Neil deGrasse Tyson」
In case you missed it:
On Tuesday, March 20, 2012, over 5,000 people tuned in to the live stream of the 2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate from the LeFrak Theater at the American Museum of Natural History.
Hosted by Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson, this year’s debate pitted some of the experimentalists who claimed to have discovered faster-than-light neutrinos against their strongest critics, as well as other teams who are racing to test Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with unprecedented precision.
First Zero-G Wedding
Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan (above and below) became the first couple to get married in weightless conditions on June 20, 2009.
Only way to top this is a bachelor party aboard the ISS. Hmmm. Be right back.
Video: ‘100 Yen’ Trailer.
100 Yen is a historical documentary about the evolution of arcades and the culture surrounding it - from the birth of arcades to the game centers that still thrive today. With a predominant focus on the three major arcade genres, Shooting games, Fighting games and Rhythm games, 100 Yen explores the culture and evolution of arcades through the past and present. All filmed on location in Japan, Canada, and the USA featuring interviews with industry professionals, game programmers and designers, casual gamers and gaming icons.
100 Yen is currently seeking funding for the final stages of post-production. A minimum $15 donation gets you a digital copy of the film when it’s finished - check out the indiegogo page here to contribute.
(via 8bitfuture)
What Space Looks Like to Kids
It’s great to see how the kids pictured out the “Space.” Don’t forget to view the whole gallery here.
Images: Space Foundation
“Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade dies at 54
“One of the most successful artists of all time, prolific painter Thomas Kinkade - the self-described “Painter of Light” - died Friday at the age of 54. A spokesperson for the Kinkade family said the artist died at home in Los Gatos, Calif., apparently of natural causes. […] The painter once said that he had something in common with Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell: He wanted to make people happy.” - cbsnews.com
Thomas Kinkade has worked with Disney several times in the past, creating the Disney Dreams collection. The world has lost a beautiful artist.
Winner Art of Neuroscience 2012
Martijn Steenwijk is this year’s winner of the Art of Neuroscience competition, organized by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Click on the link to watch his movie.
Gallery shows four honorable mentions.
Calling Newt Gingrich:
Who uses food stamps and other welfare programs. And no, Newt, it turns out they’re not all African American.
From Charles Blow.
History Time!
Even though today Americans incorrectly associate welfare dependency with Black people, Black people were excluded from the welfare system for most of its history.
Welfare was meant for immigrant women. Proponents of the welfare system thought that urban immigrants threatened “the social order.” Welfare was seen as not only charity but also as a way of “supervising and disciplining recipients.” They felt that the cure for single mothers’ poverty was for these foreigners to “conform to American family standards.”
Black single mothers were not included in this effort. Welfare was intended for White mothers only. Administrators either set-up regulations that disqualified Blacks (such as eligibility standards that excluded domestic servants) or didn’t enact programs in areas that had large Black populations.
“As a result, in 1931 the first national survey of mothers’ pensions broken down by race found that only three percent of recipients were Black.”
In addition to this, other programs, such as those enacted in the New Deal, also excluded Blacks. When Blacks were able to gain access to some benefits, they were given less than Whites on the grounds that “Blacks needed less than Whites to live off of.”
Blacks only began to gain access to assistant programs through the Civil Rights era. As a result of lots of hard work by grassroots organizations, welfare benefits were secured for all.
However, this became a double edged sword kinda victory for Black America.
“As AFDC became increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile, it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels. Social Security, on the other hand, effectively transferred income from Blacks to whites because Blacks have a lower life expectancy and pay a disproportionate share of taxes on earnings. Meanwhile, a white backlash had decimated the War on Poverty programs within a decade.”
(via “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship” by Dorothy E. Roberts)
Very interesting.
Food stamps kept me alive.
WAY interesting.
Born to Learn: The Science of Early Learning | Queen Anne Science Cafe
From babbling to sentences, a child takes a fascinating journey as they begin to talk, read, and learn. At the December Queen Anne Science Café, join Gina Lebedeva, Ph.D., of the UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences to explore how our social interactions shape children’s brains and influence their capacity to learn.
(Source: youtube.com)
Musical pitch determines highs and lows of eyebrows
Eyebrows go higher when singers belt out high notes than they do when they sing low notes, a new study has revealed.
While that may not be an absolute physiological rule, a team of Danish and American researchers discovered that it happens quite consistently.
The eyebrow/high-note evidence comes from “an experiment lasting less than one minute.”
Sofia Dahl at Aalborg University Copenhagen, and David Huron and Randolph Johnson at Ohio State University, ran their experiment 44 times, each with a different volunteer, the Guardian reported.
They asked each person to sing, but purposely did not solicit any information as to whether anyone had musical training.
The experiment was simple and quick. To prompt each volunteer to sing, Dahl, Huron or Johnson used this script: “I want you to sing a comfortable pitch and sustain it while we take your picture. Sing whatever vowel you like. Now hold the note … [Take picture]. Now I want you to sing a higher [lower] pitch - the highest [lowest] pitch you can. Good. Now hold it. [Take picture]”
Strange Fireballs Light Up February Skies
A strange breed of fireball is streaking through the skies this month, and NASA is urging folks on the ground to take notice.
February’s fireballs — a term that describes meteors that appear brighter in the sky than Venus — aren’t more numerous than normal, but their appearance and trajectory are odd, experts say.
“These fireballs are particularly slow and penetrating,” meteor expert Peter Brown, a physics professor at the University of Western Ontario, said in a statement. “They hit the top of the atmosphere moving slower than 15 kilometers per second [33,500 mph], decelerate rapidly and make it to within 50 kilometers [31 miles] of Earth’s surface.”
(via mapmeoblivion)
