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Just got done making this.

SCIENCE IS COMING.

In honor of the release of Game of Thrones Season 6 today, check out these amazing House designs made by students from the Albert Einstein Institute. Each Game of Thrones inspired sigil celebrates a different changing project in physics and space exploration. 

House Hubble - Hubble Space Telescope

House ISS - International Space Station

House ITER - Nuclear Fusion Project 

House LHC - Large Hadron Collider

House Curiosity - Mars Science Laboratory

House LISA - Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

House JWST - James Webb Space Telescope

House VLA - Very Large Array

I’m super torn because while I’m #teamradioforever, I’m also a lifelong #hubblehugger. I guess if I’m forced to chose, it might have to be House VLA. 

- Summer

[HT Charee Peters]  

You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say "there's the bad guy."

Tony Montana

Where Could Life Exist?

When NASA scientists announced earlier this year that they had found evidence of liquid water on Mars, imaginations ran wild with the possibility that life could exist somewhere other than here on Earth.

Scientists continue to explore the possibility that Mars once looked a lot like Earth — salty oceans, fresh water lakes, and a water cycle to go with it. That’s exciting stuff.

So where else are they looking? What exactly are they looking for?

There are nine places in our universe where scientists say life is a possibility. The locations range from a smoking hot planet like Venus to a moon that orbits Saturn called Enceladus, which looks a lot like a massive, tightly-packed ball of ice.

All of these places show signs that water is, or at least was, a possibility. They also appear to feature some kind of energy that could produce heat.

full resolution

"Watch the birdie!"

Gus Grissom and fellow astronauts in a candid moment. This photo does not seem to have made it past NASA PR screens.

That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ.

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (via teentaal)

Aggression causes new nerve cells to be generated in the brain

A group of neurobiologists from Russia and the USA, including Dmitry Smagin, Tatyana Michurina, and Grigori Enikolopov from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), have proven experimentally that aggression has an influence on the production of new nerve cells in the brain. The scientists conducted a series of experiments on male mice and published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Researchers from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ICG SB RAS), MIPT, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, and Stony Brook University and School of Medicine studied the changes that occurred in the brains of mice demonstrating aggressive behaviour, which attacked other mice and won in fights. After a win, these mice became even more aggressive, and new neurons appeared in their hippocampus - one of the key structures of the brain; in addition to this, in mice that were allowed to continue fighting certain changes were observed in the activity of their nerve cells.

Dmitry A. Smagin, June-Hee Park, Tatyana V. Michurina, Natalia Peunova, Zachary Glass, Kasim Sayed, Natalya P. Bondar, Irina N. Kovalenko, Natalia N. Kudryavtseva, Grigori Enikolopov. Altered Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Amygdalar Neuronal Activity in Adult Mice with Repeated Experience of Aggression. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2015; 9 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2015.00443

Mouse hippocampal neurons labeled with GFP. Imaged with a 20X objective on Zeiss 710, Dr. Fu-Ming Zhou

There isn’t much to Rachel, Nevada (population: 54), the town closest to the secretive Area 51 military base. Not even a gas station. And there’s very little else to see along the Extraterrestrial Highway until you arrive here, so the lights of the Little A’Le’Inn are all that illuminate this desolate stretch of Nevada outback. 

Area 51 itself is difficult to find, as it’s not listed on maps, and the faint roads leading to its encircling barrier fences are rough and muddy. A traveler can only hope to spot something unexplained in the sky, but all we saw that day were thunderclouds carrying in a heavy rainstorm. 

All the Enterprises.

I do believe – and I may still be in a minority on this – that Trump and the rise of an authoritarian government has changed the rules of engagement, and that journalists are going to need to figure out a more aggressive, albeit creative, response. I’m eager to work on new ways to fight back. But journalists aren’t going to save ourselves from the Trump onslaught. In launching this war, Trump and his right-wing allies know that the media can look embarrassingly defensive when we’re under attack. Indeed, they’re hoping to goad the media into the kind of responses they believe will whip up even more anger among their core supporters. If the 1st Amendment survives this threat, it will only be with support from everyday people. Journalists just aren’t going to march for our rights that way that women, immigrants, and even scientists have done or will do under Trump, but regular citizens can pick up the slack to remind the government – and their neighbors – that a free press is a fundamental American right and that regular people even support the 1st Amendment as enthusiastically as Elk County hunters back the 2nd. The president’s remarkable words of the last few days are essentially asking you, the American people, to choose a side. That doesn’t mean loving everything the media does; God knows I’ve used Attytood as a platform to criticize the New York Times, CNN and others – but only because I want a tough and fair-minded press to do better. That 1st Amendment ideal is tonight facing its gravest threat yet. The months ahead will determine whether an independent media will be the ones working, imperfectly, toward finding and sharing a real and objective truth, or whether the terms and conditions of reality will be set by an all-powerful Trump government.

Journalists can’t save a free press in Trump’s America. Only you can

(via  dendroica)

This is not hyperbole. Never in history has it been more clearer a time for collaboration and agreement on what kind of future we must commit to fight for.

(via sagansense)