Venus ring of fire 2004
The Badass Women of Space, Physics, and Maths
1. Eileen Collins - The first women to pilot the Space Shuttle (1995)
2. Marie Curie - Nobel Laureate in Physics for her pioneering work on radioactivity. (1903)
3. Ada Lovelace - Designated first programmer in the world (1815-1852)
4. Valentina Tereshkova - First woman in space, ever (1963)
5. Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Nobel Prize for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus (1963)
6. Peggy Whitson - First female to command the ISS (2008)
(Images via; NASA; universetoday.com; prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com; astrocollection.com; us.edu.p)
Never-Before-Seen Photos From the Early Days of Space Exploration
The Gemini astronauts also took some of the most memorable photos in NASA history. You’d think we would have seen them all by now. But with Nasa’s help and funding, a team of researchers at Arizona State University led by lunar scientist Mark Robinson has retrieved from the archives dozens of outtakes that never made it into wide circulation.
Photos: NASA
Ed note: Check out our friends at Air & Space for more stunning photos from the Gemini mission.
life:
From The Mind, a LIFE Science Library Book, by John Rowan Wilson and the Editors of TIME-LIFE Books. (1964, reprinted in 1971)
I would have been obsessed with this book if I’d had it as a child.
“Routes for Musical Messages
The picture on the opposite page is a photograph of a pianist. On it have been sketched the two hemispheres of the brain, a network of nerves throughout the arms, and a connecting length of spinal cord. The system of billions of cells and miles of fibers can relay many messages at once…”
Just another Wednesday, informing our Tumblr followers about science.
Retrograde: 14-billion-years-later: crownedrose: cambriankin: Tumblrs to follow :...
cambriankin: Tumblrs to follow : Science - Updated 2012
Because science is awesome, and you need to follow them!
Miscellaneous
Its Full of Stars* (Different from the astronomy one)
Chemistry
Astronomy
Biology
Geology
Christopher J* (I just put you under geology because it’s mostly your blog but you seem to be interested in all sorts).
Palaeontology
Dr Kris Lynn** (palaeoanthropology)
Physics/mathMatthen* (maths!)
I feel I should reblog this and add my own 2 cents, I’ll put * next to them in case anyone is wondering what my recommendations are (although I recommend all the blogs on this list I know). I also probably forgot a lot. I also strongly suggest Mission to Mars.
I’m reblogging this because it’s got some sweet science blogs listed, and also to say thank you for featuring me! Now go check out those other blogs, and spread the knowledge :)
Reblogging again to update the change in my blog name and to add some new blogs to the list (check the **). And in case anyone missed it first time round, a chance to follow some pretty cool blogs
Wow, I’m on this! Thanks so much for including me on this awesome list, and you should all be checking these amazing blogs out as well!
I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS FOR AGES.
Thanks so much for the mention. I apologize for my blog. Its kind of a mess today. It’ll be more science filled tomorrow…probably. XD
Sweet list by the way. :)
Thanks as well for including geologise on here! To all the followers out there, check out this list of amazing people who continually bring awesome stuff to dashboards everywhere. Thanks again for the mention as well!
Awesome stuff; thank you. Woo, science! For everyone following scinerds, here is a list of blogs to check out for your daily dose of science.
Why We Dream: Real Reasons Revealed
The slumbering mind might not seem like an apt tool for any critical thinking, but humans can actually solve problems while asleep, researchers say. Not only that, but one purpose for dreaming itself may be to help us find solutions to puzzles that plague us during waking hours.
Dreams are highly visual and often illogical in nature, which makes them ripe for the type of “out-of-the-box” thinking that some problem-solving requires, said Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard University.
Barrett’s theory on dreaming, which she discussed at the Association for Psychological Science meeting here last month, boils down to this: Dreaming is really just thinking, but in a slightly different state from when our eyes are open.
“Whatever the state we’re put in, we’re still working on the same problems,” Barrett said. Although dreams might have initially evolved for a different purpose, they likely have been refined over time so they can serve double-duty: help the brain reboot itself and problem-solve.
Dreams and evolution
A theory to explain dreams, or any human behavior for that matter, needs to take into account evolution, Barrett said. But many early theories of dreaming either didn’t address evolution at all, or downright contradicted it, she said.
For instance, Sigmund Freud proposed dreams exist to fulfill our wishes. But such gratification in an imaginary world would do little to help us adapt our instincts to the physical world, which is one key point of evolution, Barrett said.
Others have proposed dreams are more of a side effect of the sleep cycle. Dreams usually occur during Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, sleep. This stage is thought to serve several functions: to rest a part of the brain (since some areas are active while others aren’t) and to replenish brain chemicals, such as neurotransmitters.
This has led some to say that dreams happen simply because REM sleep happens, Barrett said. The psychologist Steven Pinker once likened dreams to computer screen savers, saying that it perhaps “doesn’t really matter what the content is as long as certain parts of the brain are active.”
However, Barrett disagrees. “My opinion is that, evolution just isn’t wasteful, that when things evolve for one purpose, that generally they don’t continue throughout time to have only that purpose, but anything else that may be useful about them gets refined,” she said in a telephone interview with LiveScience prior to the convention.
She also noted that REM sleep has been around for quite some time, since mammals evolved some 220 million years ago. “The longer something has existed during evolutionary history, the likelier it is to have other functions overlaid on it,” she said at the convention.
Problem-solving
Barrett has studied problem-solving in dreams for more than 10 years, and documented many examples of the phenomenon.
In one experiment, Barrett had college students pick a homework problem to try to solve in a dream. The problems weren’t rocket science; they were fairly easy questions that the student simply hadn’t gotten around to solving yet. Students focused on the problem each night before they went to bed. At the end of a week, about half the students had dreamed about the problem and about a quarter had a dream that contained the answer, Barrett said.
So at least in the cases where problems are relatively easy, some people can solve them in their sleep.
Barrett has also extensively reviewed scientific and historical literature, looking for examples of problems solved in dreams.
She found examples of almost every type of problem being solved in a dream, from the mathematical to the artistic. But many were related to problems that required individuals to visualize something in his or her mind, such as an inventor picturing a new device.
The other major category of problems solved in dreams included “ones where the conventional wisdom is just wrong about how to approach the problem,” Barrett said.
Dreams might have evolved to be particularly good at allowing us to work out puzzles that fall into those two categories, she said.
“I think that dreams and REM sleep have probably further evolved to be useful for really as many of the things that our thinking is useful for,” Barrett said. “It’s just extra thinking time, so potentially any problem can get solved during it, but it’s thinking time in the state that’s very visual and looser in associations, so we’ve evolved to use it especially to work on those kinds of problems.”
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
Glass gem corn makes a huge splash on the internet
These ears of corn, grown from seeds readily available online, are a great way to teach Mendelian genetics, and also to study transposons, genetic “jumping” elements which have garnered researchers a Nobel Prize. But mostly, they’re just stunningly gorgeous. Read the full story here.
