rb this with ur opinion on this shade of pink:

This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.

TL;DR this color is fake (and also I hate it)

w

what

im

Wait til you learn about Stygean Blue

Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.

So I googled Stygian Blue and…

Yall.

FORBIDDEN.

HOW TO SEE THE FORBIDDEN COLOURS

A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

This has been a rant and I apologize for that. 

As a microbiologist, I think the main advice here is to take into account real diseases and conditions before you make up a fictional disease or condition.

Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.

There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically. 

Play your cards right, do your research and you will have hordes of readers in the scientific and/or biological community cheering, screaming and crying because they love your work.

@biologyweeps, this feels up your speculative alley - anything to add?

Ohhh.

I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.

While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable. 

Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.

And while we’re at it… there are symptoms that aren’t immune responses. For example the cramps that accompany tetanus are caused by a toxin the bacterium produces that damages/destroys nerve cells. Viruses can cause tissue damage when they insert in cells, replicate in there and destroy the cell on exit. Think of how HIV can wreak havoc on the human immune system by killing of a specific kind of cell. Depending on where your viruses likes to replicate it can massively impact the look of it. Something that destroys liver cells will look different (and if survived may come with different long term damage) than something that prefers skin or muscle cells. If it’s alien also consider how it might behave differently in its original host. 

Fantastic post, I can relate to OP 100%. More points:

Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.

So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:

 "Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)

Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:

- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed. - Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)

- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.

- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..

- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)

- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.

And many more things if you do some research for inspiration! Pathogens are scary, fascinating things, and I really wish we had more realistic fictional representation of them than “virus which causes zombie behaviour in 3 seconds flat” (looking at you, 28 Days Later) and “virus which can MIND-CONTROL people who view the main carrier through a COMPUTER SCREEN” (wtf???) (looking at you, Jessica Jones).

Here's an article on it from MIT news, if anyone would like to read further!

@torchflies

oh,

oh this is absolutely beautiful

I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

that was everything I was hoping it would be. marvelous

I love this because you know exactly where it's going and you're not disappointed

I was so looking forward for the Jupiter gravity and it didn't disappoint and THEN THE SUN GRAVITY MADE ME HOLLER

Astronomy I-

Archaeology: it is mandatory, it is ritualic.

Fun fact about archeology!

if it's a rock and you lick it, your tongue got a little dirty.

If it's a bone, it sticks to your tongue.

Bones remember being inside a body where they could be wet all the time, and they want to return to that state.

Cheers science side of Tumblr. Never say that again though

Pretty interesting, actually

Can I just share this graph from the original paper:

BEHOLD………. THE EGGNESS OF EGG

"Decrease the increase" is actually a completely reasonable thing to say, but it feels like it shouldn't be.

this makes me think about how 'rate of change' stats are inherently infinitely nested

hold on i promise this is interesting

so, you have position. that's where you are. we figured that one out early by being places.

then you have velocity, which is how fast you go from where you are to somewhere else. we figured that one out too the first time somebody had to run away from a bear.

the rate of change of velocity is acceleration, which is a thing that presumably got coined the first time somebody stumbled upon the bear from a standing start still and suddenly it matters a lot how fast they could get fast.

everyone knows this.

but what about the rate of change of acceleration? this was something that didn't matter for the majority of human history, because the rate was never really fast enough in any situation where somebody was going to sit down and do math about it. wagons and trains can get by knowing just their acceleration rate. most situations where rate of change of acceleration mattered were usually terminal, i.e. falling off a thing and very suddenly experiencing deceleration at the bottom.

but then we invented planes, and planes go fast and turn fast. so fast than when you rapidly change direction, it emulates the effects of gravity and pulls the blood in your body in unexpected ways. World War 1 pilots (as in, canvas biplanes with motorcycle engine motherfuckers, people who rarely broke 200 kilometres an hour) started noticing that if they held a hard turn for a while at speed, they'd started to get dizzy. if they pulled hard out of a dive and their wings stayed on, their vision would start to go grey. and if they nosed down quickly, it fucking sucked 1

through the interwar period, we learned a bunch of stuff about acceleration and the effects on the human body. using this cool information, we invented things like autopilots that pull people out of dives that might knock them out (through GLOC, g-induced-loss-of-consciousness caused by the blood flowing into your feet when you pull up super hard) or masks that use air pressure to make it easier to breathe when you weigh eight times more than you should.

That all makes sense and is cool.

then planes started to get real fast, and some fucking asshole invented the jet fighter. during and after WW2 we started doing a bunch of very, very detailed testing into g-forces because now a pilot can literally kill themselves if they pull the stick too hard.

it doesn't take long before somebody points out that how quickly the onset of gs occur is important to the survival of pilots; slow gs are way different than fast gs. so you need a stat for the rate of change. so we coined 'jerk', the rate of change of acceleration. physicists knew about it as a concept, but had never really needed to care about it before this

then, when we started doing rocketry and fucking around with ejection seats, which subject the pilot to tremendous forces in the course of yeeting the pilot out of the plane with a barely controlled explosion, somebody in the big science lab presumably asked

'hey boss, what do i call the rate of change of jerk?'

so after sighing and probably pinching the bridge of their nose in frustration, the king of science or whatever was like, okay we're doing this, that's snap now. then, some smartass asked what the rate of change of snap is. and some even smarter ass went "its crackle. and before you ask, the rate of change of crackle is called pop."

so, to recap, pop is the rate of change of crackle which is the rate of change of snap which is the rate of change of jerk which is the rate of change of acceleration which is the rate of change of velocity which is the rate of change of position

we have not yet formerly defined what the rate of change of pop is, presumably because whenever somebody tries all the physicists and engineers get together to draw and quarter them 1 yes this post has footnotes. this distinction is positive gs (blood going to your feet) and negative gs (blood going to your head). human beings can handle shocking amounts of positive gs before passing out from lack of blood (and thus, tasty oxygen) in the thinking zone. by contrast, a very small amount of negative gs can just mcfucking kill you as the blood pressure in your brain spikes and all the delicate tissue take issue with that

ever stand up too fast and get dizzy? positive gs. wonder why being upside down for too long kinda sucks a lot? negative gs.

this is why planes always roll over onto one wing and turn 'up' into turns. turning 'down' into turns with any real force can literally make your eyeballs explode.

if you enjoyed learning about this distinction you will love reading my roleplaying games because its basically the only thing i ever talk about

Apparently Serbia, and especially Belgrade, has a huge problem with air pollution.

Ms. Francine Pickup, Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Serbia, explained that: “It is estimated that cities are the source of as much as 75% of total CO2 emissions in the world, of which the largest percentage comes from traffic and cooling and heating in buildings”. She later continued to explain that 59% of the Serbian population lives in urban areas and that the number is constantly increasing. Because the population density is so high, creating green areas and planting trees – which represent natural air purification in urban areas– is a complex goal to achieve, as there is a lack of free areas for landscaping.

The microalgae replace two 10-year-old trees or 200 square meters of lawn. The function of the LIQUID 3 is practically an imitation of it. Both trees and grass perform photosynthesis and bind carbon dioxide. However, the advantage of microalgae is that it is 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees. The team behind LIQUID 3 has stated that their goal is not to replace forests or tree planting plans but to use this system to fill those urban pockets where there is no space for planting trees. In conditions of intense pollution, such as Belgrade, many trees cannot survive, while algae do not have a problem with the great levels of pollution.

The project is designed to be multifunctional. LIQUID3 is also a bench, it has chargers for mobile phones, as well as a solar panel, thanks to which the bench has lighting during the night.

Dr. Ivan Spasojevic also explained that “the Institute used single-celled freshwater algae, which exist in ponds and lakes in Serbia and can grow in tap water, and are resistant to high and low temperatures. The system does not require special maintenance – it is enough to remove the biomass created by dividing algae, which can be used as an excellent fertilizer, in a month and a half, pour new water and minerals, and the algae continue to grow indefinitely. This project aims to popularize and expand the use of microalgae in Serbia, because they can be used in wastewater treatment, as compost for green areas, for the production of biomass and biofuels, as well as for air purification from exhaust gases from the factories”.

[Image ID. Screenshot from twitter. User @pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (with an icon of a pixelated boat) wrote: “My goal is to be the first person dead inside one of these.”

pixelatedboat is responding to a tweet from the account @yupthtexists who wrote: “Scientists create Liquid Trees; a tank full of water and micro-algae that could be an alternative to trees in urban areas.”

Underneath is two photos of the tank in question: a rectangular green tank in a black frame of about human height. There is also an ivory bench attached to the tank. In the background is a street scene with cars, businesses, bike racks and trees. End ID.]

This is lovely.

Trees require dirt with good nutrients. One of the problems with “plant trees in cities” is that trees in cities are drinking water full that includes street runoff, and the dirt is soaked with exhaust fumes, oil, cleaning solutions, and random toxic chemicals.

Trees need sunlight - a stable amount of it, at the right times of day, at the right times of year. (Algae needs sunlight but it’s a lot less picky about it.) Trees have leaves that get shed… do you sweep them into the garbage? Try to gather them as mulch for plants that are nowhere near the trees? They grow branches that need to be trimmed for safety reasons - but not trimmed too much, because that can severely damage the tree. …And so on. Trees require conditions maintenance that an urban center may not be able to provide.

“Space that’s in the light sometimes and is big enough for a vat of green sludge” is much more available, and cities should be all over this.

so uhhhhhh i know this is a plant blog but realtalk lads im a little freaked out by that wild ass new organ discovered in our bodies according to a paper published literally yesterday am i right my lads, my bois, lmao hhaha

(as of 3/28/2018, paper was published in the reputable international research journal “Nature” on 3/27/2018, publication here, study was started in 2013) ok so like uhhh this is my rough translation of the paper they published using my current level of biological knowledge, if anyone else has a more in depth understanding with human anatomy things and would like to add on with anything i might have missed feel free to add but this is my takeaway: 

-scientists were looking at some stuff in the inside of a bile duct they were studying in a live patient (this will be important later) using a laser that lets them see the cells in real time. they injected some stuff into the duct and saw the spaces inbetween the cells fill up with fluid in strange, tube-like structures that didn’t correspond with what they expected to be there, so they sectioned and froze them to study them closer; they realized that upon closer inspection, the fluid-filled places were VERY small collagen tubes forming a complex matrix of bundles surrounded by a weird cell covering that seemed to connect them to one another. they called this the Interstitium. 

-they sectioned some more places where squeezy things might happen, like the inner linings of the bladder, lungs, lymph nodes, and the soft tissue enclosing our muscles, filled them with the same indicator, and hyper froze them like they did to the first sample and found the same weird matrix of fluid-filled tubing:

they concluded from what they found from this that: 

1. our previous thought of the space inbetween the cells in these parts of the body, which we thought were just kinda like, there or whatever doing nothing (a series of spaces that were already called the Interstitium that were largely ignored), are actually full of complex tubing running through a ton of very important parts of your body

2. when the structures they’re chilling around (like your bladder and bowel) contract, the fluid moves around all weird

3. the reason this wasn’t discovered before is because when the tubes are squished too hard- like when scientists are cutting into them- they have a tendency to collapse really easily, especially when being treated with chemicals for microscope use, giving the impression of the kind of tissues that we’ve traditionally seen in specimens and thought of being in these sensitive areas (closely compact and dense cell mats). it turns out that in living people, these tubes run between the cells carrying fluid; the scientists were able to see this initially in live patients using the above mentioned laser technology, and then took live biopsies by quickly freezing the cells in place before removal to prevent their collapse.

4. yes, these can move cancer cells around, which is HUGE seeing as they seem to enclose a LOT of important and delicate muscles in our bodies in one giant, complex system. when they looked at it in cancer patients, the tumors they found seemed to kind of be….leaking….into them…..because the tumors were putting pressure on the fluid tubes….which easily collapse…..and move things that fall into the fluid around….

5. the scientists also explored things like hernias and colon damage in relation to these, but unfortunately this is where my translation powers run out as non-plant-related terminology starts being used lmao im so sorry im like this

tl;dr: the membranes that surround some really important parts of squishy things like our stomach, bowels, colon, lungs, muscles, etc are full of very delicate and complex tubing that runs in a weirdly complex system to other important squishy things throughout our bodies and looks like a weird organ that we didn’t know was there before (or like, we knew about it, we just didn’t know it was so…connected and uh…organy). also it seems to have an impact on the spread of cancer throughout these regions

here’s the paper again if you want to have a read and see pics of the tubing itself and draw more in depth conclusions from it lmao 

Graduate of Biomedical Science here; this paper is pretty much understandable to me.

You’ve picked out the main stuff, but here’s some things I think is very interesting:

Basically, THIS IS FUCKING HUGE AND COULD POTENTIALLY CHANGE THE GAME IN A BIG WAY.

Thank you OP for sharing this, I haven’t nerded out and been so fascinated by a study in a long time.

ALSO GOOD ON YOU NATURE FOR MAKING THE FULL ARTICLE FREE. HONOUR ON YOU AND YOUR COWS.

Right on.

Holy SHIT

HOLY HELL

THIS IS AMAZING UNBELIEVABLY IMPORTANT

Y'all ironstrange is just a more acidic stevetony like move over cap there’s a new Steven in town and he comes with a pH

Are you calling Captain America…basic?

How dare you make this funny

Bottle rocket under ice

rad 

I’m pretty sure that the reason the ice fractured into six slices is the same reason snowflakes are often six sided and it has to do with the shape of a molecule of water and I just think that’s so freaking cool.

How would it even stay lit though?

!!!!! it IS actually because of the structure of water molecules! Water molecules are fuckin weird, as are lots of other liquid substance molecules, because theyre shaped like fuckin HEXAGONS! hexagons are those weird, six-sided shapes that re very sturdy, but they dont tend to sit very well when stacked together. thats why, when you fill up a glass of water to its full capacity, it can go OVER the brim a little and not spill over. It’s also why water beads.

anyway, so since water is essentially made up of a gazillion little hexagons, it tends to gather into larger hexagons as it shapes together. this is not visible unless the water is in a solid form, aka ice. when the water is split, it tends to crack around the established hexagons. that bottle rocket exploded in the PERFECT place to show this phenomenon and its geeking me out.

ALSO! the bottle rocket stays lit because the fuse was definitely waterproof and made with magnesium and an oxidizer of some sort. this means that they will burn underwater because they dont need the oxygen from the air to stay lit. thats so fucking weird isnt it. im tipsy and its the 4th of july. sorry for the science haha

Don’t you dare apologize for science

 #actually it's the other way around #younger brothers are more likely to be gay

True.  It's called the fraternal birth order effect.