The outcome is only uncertain for those who disbelieve.

Credit: ESO.org

The body is only a combination of those simple elements, nothing more. We’re destined to be decomposed by bacteria and become nutrients for plants, and if you follow the process further, those plants nourish herbivores. And those herbivores nourish carnivores… Even others like us… And though we lose awareness, our lives keep moving through the system. The great flow that maintains the universe, we call it the cycle of life, course of nature. Each of us is just a small part of that current: One in the all. And with out all the individual ones, the all can’t exist. This world flows by following greater laws we can’t even imagine, to recognize that flow, and work within it, to decompose, and recreate…

Full metal Alchemist, 1.28.

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said fuck that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).

Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(via bansheewhale)

E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

Episode 13: Unafraid of the Dark, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey

new favorite old celebrity using twitter

Out of this world. 

@maybelline

-Kreia (via thecaptain31)

Gattaca, 1997  (via mer-se)

its a shame that in 6 or so billion years, any and all existence on earth will be wiped out by the sun’s expansion, and it’s almost scary to think about how even now the sun continues to grow bigger and hotter, sexy and hotter let’s shut it down. pound the alarm

Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via elucipher)

someone studying atoms is really just a bunch of atoms trying to understand themselves

what have you done