three--rings reblogged
HOLY SHIT.
Click through and watch (and hear!) the meteorite hit.
three--rings reblogged
Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad
lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)
Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around
Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram
My dude, we hit rocks with hammers out in the field! (“Tell me your true nature,” I whisper to the brown-ish weathered surface of the outcrop before me, and bring down my hammer with all the strength of my conviction that this is NOT the Madison Limestone.)
In the lab I broke samples up with a hand-cranked hydraulic press. Igneous rock is tough stuff. These rocks didn’t sit around for almost two billion years, three supercontinents, and the best efforts of the Amazon River to wear them away, just to get broken up by some sissy with an Estwing. Nope, it took a hydraulic press, FIVE TONS of pressure, and a five-foot-two undergrad who was very glad to be wearing hearing protection.
Meanwhile, in archaeology:
Archaeologist #1: I’ve gathered this carbon sample with a perfectly clean trowel from a carefully selected stratum whilst wearing gloves. Time to wrap it carefully in chemically-neutral air-tight packages to avoid modern C-14 contamination before it gets to the lab!
Archaeologist #2: Hey how about this 150-year-old fire brick? Should I just chuck it on the back of the truck with a quick label so that we can hose it off later and then maybe break it open? Cool.
Archaeologist #3: Not sure if this is a bone or a rock. Guess I better lick it to find out. Oh cool, it’s a bone, bag it up!
Ok but also keep in mind all three archaeologists are probably on the same dig
For real the test I was taught when I was working an archeological dig to determine whether a rock was historically significant or not was to try to break it. If it broke...not important. If it didn't...pass it up the chain. But do not use this test on pot sherds.
three--rings reblogged
June 2019 - Protesters in Hong Kong use traffic cones to contain the gas from tear gas grenades, then drown them in water. [video]
goldenxtongued
reblogging for uh. pure scientific purposes
three--rings reblogged
The human talent for pattern-recognition is a two-edged sword: We’re especially good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t really there — something known as false pattern-recognition.
We hunger for significance — for signs that our personal existence is of special meaning to the universe. To that end, we’re all too eager to deceive ourselves and others.
In the third episode of his fantastic Cosmos series, Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us of how pattern-recognition both fuels our creativity and makes our minds mislead us. (via explore-blog)
Hey, I remember saying something very similar somewhere recently. Wonder where that could have been.
three--rings reblogged
It’s that time of year again! Check out these incredible images of snowflakes under a microscope by Alexey Kljatov.
A happy Friday to our follows - each of them a unique snowflake!
Nature never ceases to amaze me.
three--rings reblogged
Rosette Nebula NGC 2237