HIV Virus Particle, Budding Influenza Virus And HIV In Blood Serum As Illustrated By David S. Goodsell. 

death of a star by a supernova explosion,

and the birth of a black hole

I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Alison 

Coursera

FutureLearn

open2study

Khan Academy

edX

P2P U

Academic Earth

iversity

Stanford Online

MIT Open Courseware

Open Yale Courses

BBC Learning

OpenLearn

Carnegie Mellon University OLI

University of Reddit

Saylor

IDEAS, INSPIRATION & NEWS (websites which deliver educational content meant to entertain you and stimulate your brain)

TED

FORA

Big Think 

99u

BBC Future

Seriously Amazing

How Stuff Works

Discovery News

National Geographic

Science News

Popular Science

IFLScience

YouTube Edu

NewScientist

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

wikiHow

Wonder How To

instructables

eHow

Howcast

MAKE

Do it yourself

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

OpenStax CNX

Open Textbooks

Bookboon

Textbook Revolution

E-books Directory

FullBooks

Books Should Be Free

Classic Reader

Read Print

Project Gutenberg

AudioBooks For Free

LibriVox

Poem Hunter

Bartleby

MIT Classics

Many Books

Open Textbooks BCcampus

Open Textbook Library

WikiBooks

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

Directory of Open Access Journals

Scitable

PLOS

Wiley Open Access

Springer Open

Oxford Open

Elsevier Open Access

ArXiv

Open Access Library

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

Duolingo

BBC Languages

Learn A Language

101languages

Memrise

Livemocha

Foreign Services Institute

My Languages

Surface Languages

Lingualia

OmniGlot

OpenCulture’s Language links

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

Codecademy

Programmr

GA Dash

CodeHS

w3schools

Code Avengers

Codelearn

The Code Player

Code School

Code.org

Programming Motherf*?$%#

Bento

Bucky’s room

WiBit

Learn Code the Hard Way

Mozilla Developer Network

Microsoft Virtual Academy

3. YOGA & MEDITATION

Learning Yoga

Learn Meditation

Yome

Free Meditation

Online Meditation

Do Yoga With Me

Yoga Learning Center

4. PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMMAKING

Exposure Guide

The Bastards Book of Photography

Cambridge in Color

Best Photo Lessons

Photography Course

Production Now

nyvs

Learn About Film

Film School Online

5. DRAWING & PAINTING

Enliighten

Ctrl+Paint

ArtGraphica

Google Cultural Institute

Drawspace

DragoArt

WetCanvas

6. INSTRUMENTS & MUSIC THEORY

Music Theory

Teoria

Music Theory Videos

Furmanczyk Academy of Music

Dave Conservatoire

Petrucci Music Library

Justin Guitar

Guitar Lessons

Piano Lessons

Zebra Keys

Play Bass Now

7. OTHER UNCATEGORIZED SKILLS

Investopedia

The Chess Website

Chesscademy

Chess.com

Spreeder

ReadSpeeder

First Aid for Free

First Aid Web

NHS Choices

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites. 

*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I’m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ most useful.

Jupiter’s Galilean Moons

Io - Jupiter’s volcanic moon

Europa -  Jupiter’s icy moon

Ganymede - Jupiter’s (and the solar system’s) largest moon

Callisto -  Jupiter’s heavily cratered moon

Made using: Celestia, Screen2Gif & GIMP Based on: @spaceplasma‘s solar system gifs Profile sources: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/joviansatfact.html

5 Vital Lessons Scientists Learn That Can Better Everyone’s Life

“4. Following your intuition will never get you as far as doing the math will. Coming up with a beautiful, powerful and compelling theory is the dream of many scientists worldwide, and has been for as long as there have been scientists. When Copernicus put forth his heliocentric model, it was attractive to many, but his circular orbits couldn’t explain the observations of the planets as well as Ptolemy’s epicycles – ugly as they were – did. Some 50 years later, Johannes Kepler built upon Copernicus’ idea and put forth his Mysterium Cosmographicum: a series of nested spheres whose ratios could explain the orbits of the planets. Except, the data didn’t fit right. When he did the math, the numbers didn’t add up.”

There are a lot of myths we have in our society about how the greatest of all scientific advances happened. We think about a lone genius, working outside the constraints of mainstream academia or mainstream thinking, working on something no one else works on. That hasn’t ever really been true, and yet there are actual lessons – valuable ones – to be learned from observing scientists throughout history. The greatest breakthroughs can only happen in the context of what’s already been discovered, and in that sense, our scientific knowledge base and our best new theories are a reflection of the very human endeavor of science. When Newton claimed he was standing on the shoulders of giants, it may have been his most brilliant realization of all, and it’s never been more true today.

Come learn these five vital lessons for yourself, and see if you can’t find some way to have them apply to your life!

Starfish larvae, like other microorganisms, use tiny hair-like cilia to move the fluid around them. By beating these cilia in opposite directions on different parts of their bodies, the larvae create vortices, as seen in the flow visualization above. The starfish larvae don’t use these vortices for swimming – to swim, you’d want to push all the fluid in the same direction. Instead the vortices help the larvae feed. The more vortices they create, the more it stirs the fluid around them and draws in algae from far away. The larvae actually switch gears regularly, using few vortices when they want to swim and more when they want to eat. Check out the full video below to see the full explanation and more beautiful footage.  (Image/video credit: W. Gilpin et al.)

All the times science fiction became fact

I don’t usually go for these really-big-ads-disguised-as-infographics (Really? Sci-fi ink & toner?), but this one was too cool to pass up.

Unfortunately, no hoverboards yet. But we’ve still got 15 months before time runs out on that one:

Bonus: Why are some science fiction authors so good at predicting the future? Check out this episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart where I talk all about that:

(via io9)

Comet ISON appears to have broken up and mostly evaporated as it travelled around the Sun, but something has made it around. It will be seen how much and in what condition. (Source of images) UPDATE: It is now confirmed that the comet is gone. Rest in pieces, ISON!

New Supernova Results: Is The Universe Not Accelerating?

“There actually is a nice result from this paper: it perhaps will cause a rethink of the standard likelihood analysis used by teams analyzing supernova data. It also shows just how incredible our data is: even with using none of our knowledge about the matter in the Universe or the flatness of space, we can still arrive at a better-than-3σ result supporting an accelerating Universe. But it also underscores something else that’s far more important. Even if all of the supernova data were thrown out and ignored, we have more than enough evidence at present to be extremely confident that the Universe is accelerating, and made of about 2/3 dark energy.”

Just a few days ago, a new paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports claiming that the evidence for acceleration from Type Ia supernovae was much flimsier than anyone gave it credit for. Rather than living up to the 5-sigma standard for scientific discovery, the authors claimed that there was only marginal, 3-sigma evidence for any sort of acceleration, despite having statistics that were ten times better than the original 1998 announcement. They claimed that an improved likelihood analysis combined with a rejection of all other priors explains why they obtained this result, and use it to cast doubt on not only the concordance model of cosmology, but on the awarding of the 2011 Nobel Prize for dark energy. Despite the sensational coverage this has gotten in the press, the team does quite a few things that are a tremendous disservice to the good science that has been done, and even a simplistic analysis clearly debunks their conclusions.

Dark energy and acceleration are real and here to stay. You owe it to yourself to find out why and how!

1976 … space station colonies

by x-ray delta one