Wait, beneath the sea floor?

OUGHGH??

OIUOHGHHVOIH!!!!!

HOLY SHIT

So I looked this up and there's three things I think should be mentioned:

So basically we thought hydrothermal vents were these distant isolated islands of weird habitat and everything dependent on them was always either unique to that one vent or had to send eggs and larvae drifting out into the sea until those find a vent.

And that's likely the case for many species, yes, but apparently there's also just vast interconnected networks of toxic bathwater between vents and that's just what we know from the tiny sliver of one that we got to peek in on. There's probably much more to it we may never be able to see, and probably many many undiscovered species that spend their entire life cycles down there.

Up here on the surface there's caves full of weird creatures isolated for millions of years....what the fuck could there be UNDER the fucking FLOOR of the ABYSS that we'll never know.

What if there's like one single little species of trilobite that's still around but that's the kind of place where it is. 😡

there are many unexpected hierarchies to being a marine biologist

general relativity for babies

babies? Hell, I’m an adult this is the clearest and most understandable explaination I’ve ever seen. This book is for anyone

I’m glad the folks at NASA are having fun with XKCD too.

Fun fact of the day

Overly Honest Methods in science.

ooh this version has some ones i haven’t seen before, priceless

  #we chose macrocystis because every other kelp was rotting at that time of year    #we kept the crabs 12 to a sea table because we were sharing the space and couldnt use more    #the crabs were subject to a non-natural light cycle because other researchers kept leaving the lights on overnight (via Dicrocoeliumdendriticum)

Archaeologist. We sometimes choose places to dig because our gut says “this is nice, I’d settle here”. I’ve had field directors say “this has paleo energy” about areas. Often we see big hill in our dig area, we dig on big hill. 

Most recently, I’ve found two sites because I was walking to my next hole and saw some petrified wood I wanted. Started picking up pieces and saw a half buried biface lmao. 

Other site, I was walking and imagined a little native girl running along the ridge. I had a gut feeling to dig like 5m from where the hole was. Found a utilized petrified wood flake. Could’ve written it off as a plow fact, but due to all the pet wood I’d been collecting throughout the area (I’m a greedy little thing who wants pretty rocks), I knew the was it was broken was inconsistent to how the pet wood naturally breaks. 

What sealed the deal for me was cleaning the mud off, and it cut me so, yup, definitely utilized. 

So glad you commented this because I was looking for the term for “people saw a pretty rock and took it with them” forEVER now and couldn’t find it. Fuckin love manuports

eternal human urges:

We found our T. rex last summer by just walking around and sticking a very long, thin stick in the mud until we hit something hard, then we dug.

@katy-l-wood PLEASE tell us about your t-rex

Here’s the article/press release I wrote about it!

https://www.rmdrc.com/post/25-years-and-thousands-of-miles-walked-to-find-a-t-rex

reading a textbook for class and i’m going insane. why is this just poetry. what. this is a STEM class what’s going on.

HELLO????? HELLO?????

no one can write truthfully about evolution and leave out the poetry, etc.

dont you just love capitalism..  

Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die

my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.

For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb.  Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.

Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.

But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)

Off the top of my head?

Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.

Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.

Trust me.  The paperwork haunts my nightmares.

So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”

But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions. 

A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.

Nice work, college boy. :p

Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student.  She developed this in her product design class.  And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars. 

‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.

ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis​ – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33

@curlicuecal

I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.

Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable.  Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”

The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets. 

I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in

And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.

And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.

We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?

Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.

I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.

every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp. 

which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.

my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)

anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW. 

not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)

People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.

Your kind aren’t welcome here.

Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!

I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.

What the fuck is wrong with you.

??? We’d have probably had cellphones sooner given the amount of inventors, theorists and artists the nazis killed. We’d have been to the moon sooner if we didn’t have segregation. God only knows where we’d be if women were given the opportunity to invent sooner. Disabled people come up with cool stuff too. It’s a whole new world of creation if you value human life equally!

*the sound of a thousand nuclear physicists laughing* Buckle up kids, today we’re talking about why the Nazis never invented the atom bomb. We’re gonna do this

to white supremacist minds. Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys. Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS. The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.

“Ugh, GROSS.” -Nazis Jewish nerds who wanted to study physics & engineering had to settle for theoretical physics. And boy did they ever. Niels Bohr, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Epstein, James Franck, Rudolf Kompfner, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf , Eugene Wigner, Frank and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and some dude named Albert Einstein among others were all turning their lemons into sweet, sticky theoretical physics lemonade in 1920s Germany. Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom. 

*artist’s rendition 

Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936. The few Gentile nuclear physicists Germany had managed to produce– Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Arnold Sommerfeld– were persecuted just for being into Jewish stuff. Like, “were called out in the official SS newspaper for being ‘White Jews’” and “Heisenberg’s mom called Himmler’s mom and told her to tell Himmler to make the Nazis stop being mean to her boy”-level persecuted. That’s right, these badass Reich science dudes couldn’t even do their job without their moms running interference. THAT’s how fucking great the Nazis were at science. Meanwhile the bright lights over in Deutsche Physik were talking about how there’s actually been a bunch of moons and when of the last ones fell down it buried Atlantis and also the sun’s gravity suddenly stops at 3x the orbital radius of Neptune. Like… thank God for those Nazi scientific advances, amirite?

Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.

“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere. A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.

Director of Los Alamos weapons lab and Jewish American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, seen in profile as he oversees final assembly of the Trinity test bomb. Trinity was the first test detonation in the US nuclear weapons program. (x) Is this a post in support of atom bombs? No. This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you, will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had. 

Thank you, Science Tumblr, for that deconstruction of Nazi bullshit.

This is excellent as is, but, I need to point out that the USA political situation is in many ways falling into this same hole now. We are becoming xenophobic and anti science at our top political level. The GOP is practically anti reality at this point. We need to fix this.

Holy shit, this is the best addition to any of my posts. 

“This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had.”

Circuit Scribe is a rollerball pen that writes with conductive silver ink. It makes creating circuits as easy as doodling.

@punyhoomans

This is actually magic (… electromagnetism is basically magic) and I love it incredibly.

oh dear god this is stunning 

holy

Women in STEM fire back at Nobel laureate who thinks they’re too distracting

72-year-old British Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt has a distinct opinion about female scientists’ role in the lab: Namely, that they are distracting, emotional and shouldn’t work alongside men. Thankfully, Vagenda and others on Twitter are here to show him how wrong he is.

Nigerian Student Solves 30 Year Old Math Equation and Breaks Academic Record at Japanese University

Nigerian student Utof Ekong has just become the first Nigerian to earn a “First Class Degree” and become the best overall student at Tokai University in Tokyo, Japan since 1965! 

The last time anyone graduated with a grade point average similar to Utof Ekong was over 50 years ago. Utof, who put himself through school by working two jobs has won many other academic awards at the university; totaling to about six awards. On top of all his academic excellence, Utof also solved a 30 year old outstanding mathematical equation in his first semester! 

Utof speaks English, Yoruba, French and Japanese. 

Now that’s young, brilliant and black at it’s FINEST!

file this under the shit-load of under appreciated people who you never learn about in school

By fucking hand, bro.

you always hear about the first man on the moon but never this 

MAY 21 - NICOLE TICEA

At just fifteen years old, Vancouver high school student Nicole Ticea developed an early-stage HIV test that’s as easy to use as an over-the-counter pregnancy test. Unlike current rapid response tests which rely on testing antibodies, Ticea utilized a technique known as isothermic nucleic acid amplification, making it possible to detect the virus as early as one week after infection. The disposable device does not rely on electricity, provides results in under one hour and should cost less than $5.00 to produce.

“Nicole’s work really made me realize what a big difference a fast easy-to-administer test for early stage HIV infection could make in prolonging, if not saving, thousands of lives in developing countries,” said Gursev Anmole, the graduate student mentor who assisted Nicole on her research at Simon Fraser University.

Ticea was recently awarded the 2015 Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award for her groundbreaking work. After starting her own company, she received a $100,000 grant to continue developing this technology in the hopes of bringing it to low-income communities in need.

This is amazing!

If you didn’t know, HIV is extremely hard to catch early on. Initially, an infected person would display flu-like symptoms for a short time and then be completely asymptomatic for months while the virus reproduces inside their body. This means that infected people most often will go on without treatment and unknowingly infect others. Being able to catch HIV within one week of transmission is HUGE. It means higher survival rate, less transmission, increased care affordability, and less fatalities. This girl is, without a doubt, going to save millions of lives and I am so so so proud.

Oh my God

wow, fucking awesome.

sixpenceee:

Chinese scientists have created the world’s lightest material.  

nuclearpoweredpuppy

SCIENCE MAGIC.

this substance was created at zheijiang university. the lead scientist’s name is gao chao.