I Visited Nantes’ Natural History Museum.

The latest from Brock Davis - love his work! 

In the garden. Värmland, Sweden (October 23, 2015).

The making of Polylion

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Learn the latest on Cassini’s Grand Finale, Pluto, Hubble Space Telescope and the Red Planet.

1. Cassini’s Grand Finale

After more than 12 years at Saturn, our Cassini mission has entered the final year of its epic voyage to the giant planet and its family of moons. But the journey isn’t over. The upcoming months will be like a whole new mission, with lots of new science and a truly thrilling ride in the unexplored space near the rings. Later this year, the spacecraft will fly repeatedly just outside the rings, capturing the closest views ever. Then, it will actually orbit inside the gap between the rings and the planet’s cloud tops.

Get details on Cassini’s final mission

The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2016

2. Chandra X-Rays Pluto

As the New Horizon’s mission headed to Pluto, our Chandra X-Ray Observatory made the first detection of the planet in X-rays. Chandra’s observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system’s outermost regions.

See Pluto’s X-Ray

3. … And Then Pluto Painted the Town Red

When the cameras on our approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it before, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it. After analyzing the images and other data that New Horizons has sent back from its July 2015 flight through the Pluto system, scientists think they’ve solved the mystery. Charon’s polar coloring comes from Pluto itself—as methane gas that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and becomes trapped by the moon’s gravity and freezes to the cold, icy surface at Charon’s pole.

Get the details

4. Pretty as a Postcard

The famed red-rock deserts of the American Southwest and recent images of Mars bear a striking similarity. New color images returned by our Curiosity Mars rover reveal the layered geologic past of the Red Planet in stunning detail. 

More images

5. Things Fall Apart

Our Hubble Space Telescope recently observed a comet breaking apart. In a series of images taken over a three-day span in January 2016, Hubble captured images of 25 building-size blocks made of a mixture of ice and dust drifting away from the comet. The resulting debris is now scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail, larger than the width of the continental U.S.

Learn more

Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

We’re Way Below Average! Astronomers Say Milky Way Resides In A Great Cosmic Void

“If there weren’t a large cosmic void that our Milky Way resided in, this tension between different ways of measuring the Hubble expansion rate would pose a big problem. Either there would be a systematic error affecting one of the methods of measuring it, or the Universe’s dark energy properties could be changing with time. But right now, all signs are pointing to a simple cosmic explanation that would resolve it all: we’re simply a bit below average when it comes to density.”

When you think of the Universe on the largest scales, you likely think of galaxies grouped and clustered together in huge, massive collections, separated by enormous cosmic voids. But there’s another kind of cluster-and-void out there: a very large volume of space that has its own galaxies, clusters and voids, but is simply higher or lower in density than average. If our galaxy resided near the center of one such region, we’d measure the expansion rate of the Universe to be higher-or-lower than average when we used nearby techniques. But if we measured the global expansion rate, such as via baryon acoustic oscillations or the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, we’d actually arrive at the true, average rate.

We’ve been seeing an important discrepancy for years, and yet the cause might simply be that the Milky Way lives in a large cosmic void. The data supports it, too! Get the story today.

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!

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.

Nearly every day Cassini sends back something amazing to sit and wonder at.

1) Saturn’s rings, 15 July 2014

2) Tethys / Saturn’s rings 14 July 2014

3) Disk of Saturn 14 July 2014

4) Prometheus / F Ring 13 July 2014

5) Pan in the Encke Gap 13 July 2014

All raw and unprocessed images from saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

Uneasiness in Observers of Unnatural Android Movements Explained

It has been decades in the making, but humanoid technology has certainly made significant advancements toward creation of androids - robots with human-like features and capabilities. While androids hold great promise for tangible benefits to the world, they may induce a mysterious and uneasy feeling in human observers. This phenomenon, called the “uncanny valley,” increases when the android’s appearance is almost humanlike but its movement is not fully natural or comparable to human movement. This has been a focus of study for many years; however, the neural mechanism underlying the detection of unnatural movements remains unclear.

The research is in Scientific Reports. (full open access)

Celebrating 10 Years of Revolutionary Solar Views

Twin spacecraft give humanity unprecedented views of the entire sun at one time, traveling to the far side of our home star over the course of a 10-year mission.

These two spacecraft are called STEREO, short for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory. Launched on Oct. 25, 2006, and originally slated for a two-year mission, both spacecraft sent back data for nearly eight years, and STEREO-A still sends information and images from its point of view on the far side of the sun.

STEREO watches the sun from two completely new perspectives. It also provides information invaluable for understanding the sun and its impact on Earth, other worlds, and space itself – collectively known as space weather. On Earth, space weather can trigger things like the aurora and, in extreme cases, put a strain on power systems or damage high-flying satellites.

Because the rest of our sun-watching satellites orbit near our home planet, STEREO’s twin perspectives far from Earth give us a unique opportunity to look at solar events from all sides and understand them in three dimensions.

We use data from STEREO and other missions to understand the space environment throughout the solar system. This helps operators for missions in deep space prepare for the sudden bursts of particles and magnetic field that could pose a danger to their spacecraft. 

STEREO has also helped us understand other objects in our solar system – like comets. Watching how a comet’s tail moves gives us clues about the constant stream of particles that flows out from the sun, called the solar wind.

STEREO is an essential piece of our heliophysics fleet, which includes 17 other missions. Together, these spacecraft shed new light on the sun and its interaction with space, Earth, and other worlds throughout the solar system. 

To celebrate, we’re hosting a Facebook Live event on Wednesday, Oct. 26. Join us at noon ET on the NASA Sun Science Facebook page to learn more about STEREO and ask questions. 

Learn more about how NASA studies the sun at: www.nasa.gov/stereo

Follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com