a friend of mine is a science educator. not a classroom teacher – he does the kind of programs you see in museums, fun experiments with lasers and dry ice and shit.
yesterday, a young girl asked him why he was allowed to pour liquid nitrogen all over his own arm but he didn’t want her doing it. I braced myself for some dumb “well I’m an adult so I’m allowed” non-answer, but instead he surprised me by giving some of the best science (and life) advice I think you can give a young person:
“well, it’s one of those rules designed to keep you safe. and following the rules really can help you stay safe, but they’re not perfect. sometimes, usually because they’re too simple, the rules let you do things that aren’t safe, or don’t let you do things that are safe if you know how to do them. one of the reasons I’m good at what I do as a scientist is I try to understand how things work so I can figure out my own rules for keeping myself safe. and sometimes my rules are little more complicated than what I might hear from other people, but they work better for me. like, I let myself play with liquid nitrogen, but only in really specific ways that I’ve spent time practicing. you should follow the rules you’re given at first, but if you take the time to understand how things work, maybe you can make your own, better rules.”
I loved this response. it’s a great encapsulation of two really important things I think people need to learn and re-learn all the time: on the one hand, listen to genuine authority figures; when someone knows more than you about a subject, don’t treat their expertise as “just another opinion” and act like your ignorance is just as good as their knowledge. but on the other hand, don’t obey anything or anyone blindly. recognize that rules and systems and established ideas are never perfect. question things, educate yourself, question things more.
and then, of course, a parent had to butt in and spoil this wonderful lesson by saying:
“but not the rules mom comes up with!”
everyone in the room laughed. except me. I gave her a death glare I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice.
because no. no. your rules are not above reproach if you’re a parent. the thing about the dictates of genuine authority figures – people who deserve to have power, and to have their positions respected – is that they are open to question. genuine authority figures are accountable. governments can be petitioned and protested and recalled. doctors must respect patients’ right to a second opinion. journalists have jobs terminated and credentials revoked if they fail to meet standards of integrity and diligence. scientists, to bring us back full circle, spend their entire careers trying to disprove their own hypotheses! you know who insists on being treated as infallible? megalomaniacal dictators, that’s who. oh, and parents.
I’m beyond sick and tired of this “my house my rules, this family is not a democracy, I want my child to think critically and stand up for themselves except to me ha ha” bullshit. my friend gave this kid the kind of advice that doesn’t just help people become good scientists – if enough people adopt the mentality he put forth to that girl, that’s the kind of advice that helps societies value knowledge and resist totalitarianism. and her mother shut it down because, what, she didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of having someone question her edicts about whose job it is to wash the dishes on Mondays?
we already know you’re more likely to be a Trump supporter if you’re an authoritarian parent – and that this is a stronger predictor of your views on the current president than age, religiosity, gender, or race. I’ll say this another way in case you didn’t catch the full meaning: people who believe in the absolute, unquestionable authority of parents are more than two and a half times as likely to support Trump as people who don’t, and that’s just among Republicans. we can’t afford to treat the oppressive treatment of children or the injustice of ageist power structures in our society as a sideshow issue any longer. the mentality that parents should be treated by their children as beyond reproach and above dispute is a social cancer that has metastasized into the man currently trying to destroy the foundations of democracy in this country.
in short: parents, get the hell over yourselves before you get us all killed. and kids, learn as much as you can, and then make your own rules.
It’s way too late for this, but it’s important to note that NASA didn’t discover the new earth-like planets. It was a group of astronomers lead by a dude name Michaël Gillon from the University of Liège in Belgium. Giving NASA credit for this gives the United States credit for something they didn’t do, and we already have a problem with making things about ourselves so. just like…be mindful. I’d be pissed if I discovered a small solar system and credit was wrongfully given to someone else.
This is valid. NASA’s involvement in this was predominantly in the use of of Spitzer data to validate findings from a primarily European funded program (TRAPPIST). There were Americans (or at least, an American) on the team, but beyond it being a collaborative and data-sharing arrangement this isn’t primarily an Agency achievement.
I’m here for the Belgians in the tags and also…totally didn’t know trappist was the name of a beer, I fucking love learning shit on my own posts.
From the press release: “The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.”
“nasa gone rogue” sounds like they’re stealing rockets and going to the moon illegally or something
but nope, “rogue” these days is a word that means “posting real climate change facts that your president doesn’t want you to know”
like if you support nasa posting real climate change facts that the orange dictator doesn’t want you to know. reblog if you support nasa stealing rockets and going to the moon illegally.
There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system.
We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are getting ready to launch three satellites the size of coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone apps.
Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck.
In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on your phone, because this is the present time and these things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.
That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.
Use the rear view mirror for its true purpose. If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash. Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of its identification. I’m not even touching the web, wifi, mobile broadband, cloud computing, electronic cigarettes…
Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.
To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.
Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.
Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.
fun fact! mirrors reflect each color equally, except for green. if you have ever seen a mirror perfectly aligned in front of another mirror, a.k.a. an infinite mirror, you can look through it and see that it becomes greener and greener. therefore, mirrors are technically green!
holy shit
The glass is greener over here. Not a typo.
If you look edgewise through a sheet of glass you see that it’s green because of iron impurities (Google for it). Reducing the iron reduces the green.
Perfectly aligning mirrors to multiply reflections also multiplies the apparent thickness of the glass, and the green tint becomes more apparent the “deeper” each reflection seems to be.
Science is like history: it was never this interesting at school. 🙂
Yep! And this is because – I’m sorry to say – mirrors are not a unique or separate substance with magical properties. Mirrors are silvered glass. They have two colors: the color of the silver, and the color of the glass. The “silver” doesn’t have to be silver, though it usually is because mirrors are traditionally made with silver nitrate, because it’s a whitish metal. You can have mirrors silvered in gold or black or red. You take literally any piece of glass, pour a coating of silver on it, seal it, and call it a mirror.
You have to seal it because otherwise it tarnishes and spots. Even though the glass protects it from air, the silver oxidizes just like any other silver, which is why antique mirrors have that funky age-spotted look.
Mirrors used in science are usually pure clear glass with no impurities (so the glass has no color) and are silvered in gold or aluminum, so they are white or gold. A warm-toned mirror would have a pink glass and would make things have a rose-gold look. Phryne Fisher, in the books, has a mirror with pink glass.
(Mirrors silvered in silver – that is, most mirrors you’ve seen – are probably faintly grey from the silver and faintly green from the cheap glass, but it doesn’t need to concern you at all – even if you noticed a strong color, you’re often so used to looking in them that your brain edits out any discrepancy – like how your nose doesn’t get in the way of your vision even though it’s right in front of your eyes all of the time.)
My grandmother had a mirror that was silvered in gold. It was a little disconcerting. The silver in mirrors is why vampires don’t have reflections. (And why the cutlery at Castle Dracula was made of gold.)
IS THAT TRUE ABOUT THE REFLECTIONS BECAUSE IF SO THAT CHANGES ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING???
It’s true! (Source is The Journal Of I Read It Somewhere One Time, so take it with a truckload of salt, but I’m pretty sure it was a published book and not the internet, so like, only a pickup truck, not a dump truck.)
Watsonian explanation: Silver as an entity and/or concept was upset about being used to pay Judas, so as some kind of compensation God gave it evil-fighting powers, and this is why vampires don’t have reflections in silvered mirrors as well as why werewolves are killed by silver bullets. (Also works for vampires not showing up on film, because silver nitrate, although obviously that isn’t part of the ~*~original folklore~*~ and also doesn’t explain digital cameras.)
Doylist explanation: A lot of things that are traditionally anti-vampire turn out to have antibacterial properties- the only ones I remember are garlic and silver, but I think there were others- so supposedly when anti-vampire treatments helped somebody out of a decline or whatever they were actually helping fight off an infection.
Does that mean that a vampire would see themselves in a gold mirror but not a silver one?
What about a gold mirror with antibacterial soap or something sprayed on it?
And if it’s the silver in the cameras that made them not show up on film, that means that digital is entirely different (unless they use silver in the manufacturing – which i’m pretty sure they don’t – or if some rich person has a silver encased camera – but that still probably wouldn’t work because the lense couldn’t be encased in silver otherwise it wouldn’t work) so basically we need a modern story where the Vampires are having to come up with clever things to stay out of photos where possible because DIGITAL, but there’s that one vampire who photobombs everything and is famous on the internet for it because he’s literally everywhere.
malachite is a poisonous mineral. please do not fuck the malachite stalactite
@lizaleigh do you know any rock people that can confirm/deny because I am very curious and really don’t feel like getting into a conversation with my geophysicist brother that MAY somehow get back to the fact I saw a malachite that looked like a weird dildo.
…sadly, I am not on good enough terms with any of our partner geologists to just attach this to an email with the subject line: “EXPLAIN.”
Although I think @mollisaurus is a mineral person. Thoughts?
oh geeze, i’m kinda rusty on minerals but malachite is just copper carbonate and is really common in both antique and modern jewelry so i think like if you were really gun-ho about it you could go ahead and put it wherever you want?
It’s really only a problem if you’re polishing or cutting it. The particles would be bad to breathe. It’s rather porous too, so I would worry about bacteria growing. Well, being literal anyway… Better to leave the poor thing alone. ._.
I mean it kinda depends on where you stick it because malachite does not like acidic environments very much and the malachite will degrade and also might dye your bits blue-green as the copper dissolves out.
So use a condom when fucking rocks is the takeaway here.
Oh my god guys it’s poisonous
It is super poisonous
There is a reason we do not use it in make up any more
Not even with a condom, do not fuck the rock
Try this one instead.
malachite literally explodes in water does it not?
I… no… I think you’re thinking of pure sodium?
Malachite is however water soluble, which really just means it will poison you quicker
This is both hilarious and cool as fuck because you’re getting all this information on minerals and rocks. You’re also watching people argue over wether or not you can fuck this rock
I go on hiatus for a week and come back to find tumblr molesting my post, but hey, at least we all learned something so yay tumblr, you just keep on being you.
I’m still not sure if I can fuck this rock.
I’m looking into it.
UPDATE:
Today in “I’m so sorry, coworkers, it’s for Tumblr,” I brought this post to the attention the science reporters at BuzzFeed. Dan Vergano did a some research and weighed in on the question “Can you use malachite as a dildo or is it toxic?”
The answer is “It’s probably fine, just wash it first and maybe use a bunch of lube.”
Oh man this got so much better than the last time I saw this post
This is my favourite. Science side of tumblr: asking the REAL questions
*biologist crashes through the underbrush*
Ok so here’s the thing though
Malachite is not poisonous to YOU. BUT fucking this stalactite will probably wreck your vaginal flora and leave you with a gruesome infection within a couple days.
Want details? SO GLAD YOU ASKED, ‘CAUSE HERE THEY ARE.
• Malachite is not copper oxide. It’s Cu2CO3(OH)2. Like most carbonates it’s water soluble– that’s how it became a stalactite in the first place! And technically any given chunk of “malachite” isn’t just malachite– it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. This will become important later.
• When malachite dissolves it makes a bunch of copper (Cu++) ions. Cu++ is GREAT at killing bacteria and fungi– so good at it that sprays with Cu++ get used a lot as a spray in agriculture to stop plant disease. It takes such a large dose to harm larger organisms that copper sprays are used a lot in organic agriculture (like Bordeaux mixture).
So bottom line, yes malachite is technically nontoxic to humans. But it kills bacteria when it dissolves and releases Cu++.
• Malachite dissolves somewhat slowly in water– but vaginal secretions aren’t just any water. A healthy human vagina has a pH of 3.8-4.5 and a salinity of about 0.9%. It’s also warmer than your average underground cave at 37°C (or 98.5°F in American meat units). As luck would have it, acidity, salinity, and warmth all make malachite dissolve faster.
• In other words, the human vagina dissolves malachite.
• I have no deeper explanation for why human females can dissolve rocks with our genitals. It simply is.
• Gonna to take a quick moment to point out that sex toys that dissolve when you use them are maybe not the best investment.
• Anyway the key question now is “how fast does the human vagina dissolve malachite?” Are we talking geological timescale, a Nazis-in-Indiana-Jones situation, or something in between? If the reaction kinetics of dissolution are very slow, then there’s nothing to worry about. An encounter with a stalactite would have to last years for enough Cu++ to leach out to cause problems. If it’s quick then we’re in trouble.
• Unfortunately it looks like nobody really knows. One of the best sources on how malachite dissolves & precipitates in water– an EPA document on how to avoid too much Cu++ in municipal drinking water systems– helpfully says “The kinetic constraints on the formation of these solids in water systems are largely unexplored” (p. 42) because end equilibrium points is all you need to run a city water system safely. In other words, the experiments that would tell us how fast malachite dissolves in various types of water just don’t exist because nobody’s ever needed to know before. So we’d better assume it’s going to happen reasonably quickly, #for safety.
• So in best scientific fashion, we’re just going to bullshit our way ahead using what facts we DO have on hand: endpoint equlibria.
That orange box is how many moles of dissolved Cu++ Scaife got from sticking malachite in some water that had 0.171 moles NaCl/L (body salinity is about 0.154 moles NaCl/L so this is slightly less salty than people) at 30°C. He’s got no acidity in there, and again the salinity and temperature are slightly lower than people. But this is probably the closest we’re going to get to data on how malachite behaves in vaginas anytime soon, folks. From this we can take away that if you leave malachite alone in a vagina you’ll get AT LEAST 9.12 x 10^-4 moles/L, or 5.8 ppm, of Cu++ at equilibrium.
• Recall from above that most “malachite” isn’t actually pure malachite, it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. The EPA document elaborates: “[T]raditional ‘eyeball’ identification of malachite by its blue-green color is extremely
unreliable, because almost all cupric hydroxysulfates, hydroxycarbonates, hydroxychlorides,
and even fresh cupric hydroxide can be some shade of blue-green. … Thus, the uncertainty in the computed copper
concentration in equilibrium with malachite is at least about a factor of 2 … until further experimental data focusing on this problem is generated.”
In other words, “do your math and then double how much Cu++ you think is going to be in the water, just in case.” So that gives us 11.6ppm Cu++, at equilibrium, with malachite in a (til now!) healthy vagina.
• Next step: do we have any idea what happens to bacteria in acid conditions with copper? OH MY GOD WE TOTALLY DO. Gyawali et al 2011 checked this out in the context of “so what if we rinsed tomatoes with a solution of lactic acid and copper, because that would be a safe & organic way to get rid of E. coli?” So now this post has officially ruined stalactites, vaginas, and tomatoes.
^This would happen. These are the counts of 4 E. coli strains exposed to various levels of lactic acid & Cu++ for 8 hours. This table only shows the end counts but it represents the death of 99.7% of bacteria*.
• Losing 99.7% of your vaginal flora is seriously bad news. You’re looking at really good odds of a yeast infection, bacterial vaginosis, and/or other infection issues. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to not be in the 4% of the population or so that’s sensitive to skin contact with copper.
• The good news? Biochemically speaking, you’re probably ok to put it in your butt. It’s not as acidic or salty in there, plus there’s a huuuuuge stockpile of gut microbes right upstream that can quickly repopulate the colon after spelunking is complete. However this stalactite is not flared at the base so it is the wrong shape for putting in your butt. Do not put this stalactite in your butt.
• This all looks like fun and games, but I think it’s really interesting that the internet’s mistake in concluding that this stalactite is fuckable is very similar to the mistake made by the Flint water management system. Hear me out.
• Central to the Flint lead poisoning crisis is that authorities only looked at & tested Flint’s water in its central treatment plant before it went out through the pipes. Not after it went through the pipes. They did not consider what would happen biochemically as it went through the pipes and metals started dissolving.
• Similarly, in concluding that the stalactite is fuckable, the internet only considered the stalactite itself. Not the biochemical processes that would happen to it as it, welp, went through the pipes.
• Media frequently reports that the Flint River’s water is “corrosive,” leading many to believe the river is full of industrial waste. This ain’t the case. You’d need industry to fill a river with industrial waste, and industry left decades ago. That’s why Flint’s so poor. So what IS in the water? Road salt. Plain old stupid road salt. The old Detroit-based source didn’t have salt because it came from Lake Huron which has a large, mostly rural watershed. Meanwhile the Flint River runs through a lot of towns, making it slightly salty as everything melts down in spring. And as we recall from the stalactite experience, a little salt is all it takes to get metals to dissolve.
• Information on this engineering problem was not coming through clearly from the engineering or chemistry sides. It took a biologist, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha, to document the real-time results and provide the data to kick-start a high-level investigation.
• Morals of the story: when dealing with a biological system pls consider asking a biologist, your vagina and/or city could depend on this
• Pls use a condom when fucking any water-soluble material
• Still don’t put the stalactite in your butt -3/10 do not recommend
OK, I haven’t reblogged this before now but the final post takes it to a whole new level and I can no longer resist.
fuck I love the internet
Oh my God you guys, the malachite dildo thing is still being debated. I love Tumblr.
A Nigerian student has achieved the highest grades at a Japanese university for the past 50 years, while solving a mathematical equation which was unsolvable 30 years ago, in his first semester.
Ufot Ekong achieved a first in electrical engineering at Tokai University in Tokyo, scoring the best marks since 1965, CCTV Africa reported.
Ekong, from Lagos, also plays the saxophone, and runs a retail wears and accessories shop in Japan called Strictly African Japan.
The Nigerian speaks English, French, Japanese and Yoruba, his country’s native language, and paid his way through university himself.
He currently works for Nissan and has already patented two products, as well as making an electric car which reaches up to 128 kmph.
During his time at university, Ekong has won six awards for academic excellence.
Vera Rubin, the astrophysicist responsible for confirming the first existence of dark matter, died on Sunday night at the age of 88.
Carnegie Institution president Matthew Scott called Rubin “a national treasure as an accomplished astronomer and a wonderful role model for young scientist.”
Rubin and her colleagues observed galaxies in the 1970s, they learned the motion of stars is a result of a “material that does not emit light and extends beyond the optical galaxy” — also known as dark matter.
Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky proposed the idea of dark matter in 1933, but Rubin’s groundbreaking work subsequently led to the confirmation of the material.
This finding is what led to the discovery that 90% of the universe is made up of dark matter, a finding some colleagues felt was overlooked and deserving of a Nobel Prize. Read more
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