What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?

My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually

Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire very very slowly.

What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.

I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.

@brainsforbabyjesus

okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.

The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).

This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.

OH HOW I LOVE THIS POST. It makes me so much happier about being alive. I AM BURNING VERY SLOWLY. *hugs it*

“this baby came out of you but im not 100% sure its yours”

Funny thing - a woman who applied for welfare after her husband left her hadto supply DNA evidence he was actually the father. The results: he was definitely the father, but she wasn’t the mother. Her children were removed from her custody and she was sued for fraud, even though she insisted they were her children. 

Turns out, she wasn’t a surrogate or a kidnapper (the two most obvious explanations) - she was a chimera. As an embryo, she fused at a very early stage with her twin, forming one individual. Her ovaries apparently developed from cells that had originally belonged to her vanished twin. Later on more tests showed that while the woman’s skin and hair DNA did not match her childrens, DNA taken from her cervix did. 

WHAT THE FUCk

This went from stupid to really interesting in point 5 seconds.

There’s multiple cases of this very thing

Idk weird stuff man

Science doing random shit to fuck with your head

We don’t actually know how many human chimeras there are because most of the time you can’t tell.

However, some cases of intersex and even some trans individuals may be chimeras that result from the fusion of two embryos that have different genetic sex. This may also explain why some female athletes fail a sex test. (Other possibilities include genetic transcription that resulted in the loss of the SRY gene from the Y chromosome. The SRY gene is the actual switch that results in the development of a male phenotype).

Chimerism is also seen in animals.

This is Dunbar’s Gold. As you can see he looks like a brindle dog.

At one point he was bred to a mare called Sharp One, who also had the same brindle pattern, in the hope that they could breed more brindle horses - which are vanishingly rare.

Both horses are Quarter Horses, and the breeder sent in a gene sample from the foal for typing to allow him to be registered.

The test showed that the foal was related to neither his sire nor his dam.

They even did the test twice. Most cases of failed genetic testing are a sample mixup (either the hair or the semen used to produce the foal).

It turned out Dunbar’s Gold had had to be tested three times to get a good sample - and the third time was a blood test not the hair follicle test normally done. On top of that, when they looked at his gene type again they realized something rather important to a stallion was missing - he had no Y chromosome.

It was eventually established that both horses were chimeras and that in Dunbars Gold two different gene types existed in his skin and coat (one male, one female, just to prove that happens). Each gene line had a different set of color genes, but both matched properly to his parents. His foals, of course, all matched to the male gene line.

When they tested Sharp One’s other foal they discovered she was producing eggs from both of her gene lines. (Something which could also happen with a human chimera).

Science. Is. Fun.

SCIENCE.

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

They fell into the Pacific ocean in 1992, and have been washing up ever since. Scientists use them to model ocean currents. Some of them have managed to travel 17,000 miles, washing up in the UK after spending years frozen in Arctic ice. Via AsapSCIENCE.

Analytical Papers

So I’m in the process of writing a paper on engineering field comparisons and their relation to my goals and interests as a student.

The first question I was asked in the prompt was

“How do/did you know that [type of] Engineering was for you?”

I feel like I could write one sentence about my interest in Civil Engineering it would be enough.

“*Wide, sweeping gesture to the literal shelf of bridges sitting in my dorm.*”

I love that this works whether you like coconut or not.

fun fact, microwave ovens were invented by a radar technician who accidentally melted the chocolate bar in his pocket with radiation and then proceeded to be like “holy shit nice” instead of “wow that seems dangerous”

Theory: Nobody who writes a physics textbook gives any fucks

Evidence:

Update: Legolas’ pupils are about 3.5 cm wide each. Now drawing kawaii Legolas on physics assignment.

And they told you science was no fun.

Science!

I’m going to do it. I’m going to hand it in.

Legolas’s pupil size isn’t the problem here, though. 5 leagues is 17.262 miles. The curvature of the Earth means that for a person of average height, the visual horizon is less than three miles away. Even if your vision is telescopic and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, you can’t see around the planet. If they were standing on a hill, it would have to be at LEAST 198 feet above sea level in order to see the horizon at 17.2 miles away, with nothing tall in between. Which, knowing Rohan, isn’t impossible.

But consider: Elven satellite eyeballs.

you mean like

@sidereanuncia it’s back, the post that I can only imagine haunts your nightmares 

I shall never find peace.

Also, for what it’s worth, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the curvature of Middle Earth is the same as that of Earth.

There’s no evidence that Middle Earth curves.

Yeah there is.  The Silmarillion states that the world was curved after the fall of Numenor (I believe), preventing access to Valinor.  But Elves (among others) can travel the straight path across it.

So middle earth is round, but not for Elves because magic.

So wait, the reason he can see that far is because Elves just have the ability to ignore the curve of the earth? That’s awesome. It also means that no matter how good your optics got, you would always want elf eyes manning the spyglass because they can see arbitrarily far while everybody else is limited by this ‘horizon’ bullshit.

Oh thank God, my poor elf prince has seen too much in this post

Researchers at King’s College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine – the mineralised material under the enamel.

Teeth already have the capability of regenerating dentine if the pulp inside the tooth becomes exposed through a trauma or infection, but can only naturally make a very thin layer, and not enough to fill the deep cavities caused by tooth decay.

But Tideglusib switches off an enzyme called GSK-3 which prevents dentine from carrying on forming.

Scientists showed it is possible to soak a small biodegradable sponge with the drug and insert it into a cavity, where it triggers the growth of dentine and repairs the damage within six weeks.

The tiny sponges are made out of collagen so they melt away over time, leaving only the repaired tooth.

That is by far the coolest thing I’ve heard this year.

‘Okay so guys we’re still working on that whole alzheimer’s thing, but along the way we kind of accidentally regrew everybody’s teeth.’

Happy Halloween!

Here is a comic about the great attractor!

http://www.space.com/33579-will-the-great-attractor-destroy-us.html

Carl telling us how (not) to science.

“conclusion: dinosaurs” is still my favorite rebuttal to just about anything tbh.

Second perhaps only to “Therefore: aliens”

I’m serious

Okay so this is one of the WEIRDEST FUCKING THINGS humanity has stumbled upon in science and it gives me a nerd boner that can be seen from Alpha Centauri.

mark my words this fucking thing is going to REVOLUTIONIZE the design of satellites and scientific probes

and just think of the potential it might have if its thrust increases proportionately to the power fed into it

THIS IS FUKCIN HUGE MY DUDES

Reblogging this just to restate how fucking huge this is.

Imagine you blow air into a balloon and tie it off. Then when you untie it, you let the balloon go and it flies all over the place. This is how propulsion works. This is what Newton’s Third Law is based on. That the air is coming out and pushing the balloon forward.

The EM drive is moving forward when the balloon is still tied off at the end.

I heard about this theorized not some time ago and thought it was amazing!

The fact that it’s been thoroughly peer-reviewed and still stands up is nothing short of absolutely astounding.

This device works, and no one is quite sure how or WHY it does. It defies our current understanding of why physics work the way the way they do. Which mean basically means that we need to re-evaluate and refine our laws of physics because we have discovered empirical evidence that we’ve got something wrong. And trying to fix our math to accurately describe the universe is going lead to new discoveries about the fundamental nature of reality. IT’S MIND BLOWING.

Not to mention this device itself, if we can elaborate and expand on it, will change how we do propulsion. This might the next stage of propulsion technology. To the people a few decades in the future, combustion engine propulsion technology will seem as silly, outdated, and quaint as steam propulsion or horse-drawn carriages seem to us.

THE FUTURE APPROACHES.

god I’m such a nerd

This is hugely important stuff. A lot of reports on this thing talk about how it “breaks the laws of physics,” but this is an inaccurate oversimplification. The reality of it is much more profound. If this thing indeed works, and the results we’ve gotten thus far can’t be explained by some sort of experimental error, it will redefine our understanding of physics. In other words, the laws of physics aren’t being “broken,” we’ve just been wrong about physics the entire time.

@izzymar !

Continue Reading.

Science!

@bloodthreadsaltglassandtears your time has come

i have already registered an account and begun looking at penguins

#the title reads like a joke article#but this is a genuine science emergency!