inoue-takehiko:

evilscum:

deenoverdami:

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

his name is Ibn Khaldun

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history

Also – Arab scholars are the major reason that the great classics of the Greek and Roman world still exist – they were preserved by Arab scholars, where they were largely destroyed in Europe by the crazy that was the Dark Ages.

Some of the best signs from the science day march.

why-animals-do-the-thing:

fyanimaldiversity:

Mutations in Plains Zebra (Equus quagga)

Nicknamed Marble, this zebra has an area of small scrambled stripes on it’s back, giving it a marbled look. [x]

A reconstructed quagga-like animal, it’s legs clean, and it’s rump and belly nearly free of markings. The stripes it does have are fairly narrow for a plains zebra. It’s tail and mane are much lighter, and has a faint brown wash along it’s back.[x]

Two reduced striped animals, the middle with a few stray stripes on it’s rump and legs, the one on the right has a nearly all white body and legs. Both have a fewer number of facial markings as well.[x]

A diluted, brown striped adult zebra. Zebra foals are born brown and white, but this one didn’t seem to lose it’s baby colors. [x]

An erythristic, gingery-brown striped beauty. [x]

Blonde is a term applied to leucistic zebras. Albino is sometimes used for the really light animals, like this blue eyed and creamy tan striped one, however I keep reading that true albinism has not been recorded in equines, so I’m hesitant to use that term.[x]

This abundistic has stripes that thicken and meld together on it’s back and neck, forming white spots.[x]

Dotted and dashed with white on a black background, this heavily abundistic zebra has a very unique and striking look.[x]

The back of this abundistic Burchell’s (E.q. burchellii) is so densely marked, it’s a nearly solid blanket of color ticked with a bit of white. The rest of it’s stripes and brown shadow stripes are jagged and messy.[x]

Unfortunately, without the help of the naturally camouflaged striped coat, this extremely dark abundistic foal was an easier target for predators and didn’t make it into adulthood. Still in it’s dark brown baby coat, it probably would look very similar to number 8 but with a darker face, smaller spots, and wider white stripes on it’s rump.[x]

This chart from MessyBeast is a great example of the differences in color morphs. While the graphic is specific to big cats, much of it does transfer to other species.

Stones Have Been Popping Out of People Who Ride Roller Coasters

kawuli:

kawuli:

kawuli:

1. Doctor finds anecdotal evidence that people are passing kidney stones after riding on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney World

2. Doctor makes 3-D model of kidney, complete with stones and urine (his own), takes it on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 60 times

3. “The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: ‘Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.’”

4. “Some rides are going to be more advantageous for some patients than other rides. So I wouldn’t say that the only ride that helps you pass stones is Big Thunder Mountain. That’s grossly inaccurate.”

5. “His advice for now: If you know you have a stone that’s smaller than five millimeters, riding a series of roller coasters could help you pass that stone before it gets to an obstructive size and either causes debilitating colic or requires a $10,000 procedure to try and break it up. And even once a stone is broken up using shock waves, tiny fragments and “dust” remain that need to be passed. The coaster could help with that, too.”

SCIENCE: IT WORKS

Update:

“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters,” Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.”Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn’t allow it to pass.“The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements,” he said.

MSU Today

I just love this because it’s HILARIOUS and yet also a perfect archetypal example of The Scientific Method:

1. Hypothesis

2. Experiment

3. Results

4. Discussion

5. Conclusions

6. GOTO 1 (the scientific method is iterative, don’t forget that part)

syntheticorange:

the-future-now:

An audience member stopped World Science Festival host Jim Holt from speaking over physics professor Veronika Hubeny

follow @the-future-now

From Marilee Talkington’s post:

So, after thinking about this over night, I’ve decided to share something that happened at the WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL yesterday afternoon in NYC that changed me. Or rather made me step into who I am in a larger way.

As some on my feed have seen, I was live-feeding the beginning of the panel discussion on FB. That panel was made up of some of the greatest and most famous minds in the world in Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Cosmology and Physics based Philosophy. The panel was made up of 5 men and 1 woman. And the moderator was a science writer and journalist for The New Yorker.

In the first hour of the panel discussion you can see clearly, if watching the video, that Veronika Hubeny, the only woman on the panel is barely given any opportunity to speak. And the Moderator, Jim Holt even acknowledges this.

In the last 20-30 minutes of the 90 minute discussion Jim Holt finally pushes the conversation to Hubeny’s field of expertise, string theory, and this is what ensued:

He asked her to describe her two theories of string theory that seem to contradict one another.

And THEN, without letting her answer, proceeded to answer for her and describe HER theories in detail without letting her speak for herself.

We could clearly see that she was trying to speak up. But he continued to talk over her and dominate the space for several minutes.

I should say that this panel was taking place in a large auditorium as it is an extremely high-profile and always sold-out event. And the panel discussion was being live-streamed across the world and they say that millions of people watch these videos after they are made public. (Which they already are).

So at this point, after seeing very clearly that she was not going to be given space to speak and in fact having her own theories described to the audience by the moderator, I am in full outrage. My body is actually beginning to shake. The sexism is beyond blatant. It is happening on stage and NO ONE, not a single other physicist or panelist is stepping in to say anything about it. And I can hear other audience members around me, both men and women becoming more and more agitated with what is happening. Jim Holt, even at one point, asks Veronica a question and she laughs because he has been answering his own questions about her work…and he makes fun of her for ‘giggling’.

So at some point while he is Still talking about Her theories, I just can’t handle it any longer.

With my hands shaking,

I finally say from my seat in the 2nd row of the audience, as clearly, directly and loudly as possible;

“Let. Her. Speak. Please!”

The moderator stops.

They all stop.

The auditorium drops into silence.

You could hear a pin drop.

And then the audience explodes with applause and screams.

Jim Holt eventually sat back, only after saying I was heckling him
And he let her speak.
And of course, she was brilliant.

———————–

So, the panel discussion ends.

My hands are still shaking. I’m still upset by the incredible sexism that has been demonstrated this afternoon. But I also realize that I just spoke up in an auditorium full of people that are listening to people that are considered gods in the international science world. I was just overwhelmed by it all

We get up to leave.

And then it happens.

Person after person come up to me. Both men and women.

The first woman, right behind me, reaches over and embraces me and says, “Oh my god. what you said was the most important thing that was said all day. Thank you. Thank you.”

And then people start filing out of their aisles and wind their way over to me:

“Was that you? Thank you so much for speaking up. Thank you.”

“Was that you? Oh god, what he was doing was horrific. Thank you. I wanted to do something but didn’t know how”

“Was that you? I wish I had the courage to say something, thank you! Thank you so much”

“Was that you? You said what everyone here was thinking. Look I had even been writing in my notebook what you eventually said (shows me his notebook with ‘let her speak’ written over and over.) But you said it. You said it. Thank you.”

“Was that you? Thank you! I felt so powerless to do anything.”

And on.

So we were all thinking this.

—-
So I walked out. And my friend who was sitting about 8 rows behind me, came up to me with a huge grin and said
“That was you, wasn’t it? Of course it was. YES!!!!! I will be telling this story for years.”

And the whole time, my hands are still shaking. And I’m felling light-headed. And I just want to scream out into the lobby “WHY IS THIS SEXISM STILL HAPPENING? WHY, does someone like me, with No status in that room, have to be so extraordinarily bold and speak up? And why was it so frightening to do so?”

And I’m thinking. “God, please god let this be an opening for those that were here today and the tens of thousands that watched the live-streaming of the panel yesterday and the hundreds of thousands that will watch the video this year- to speak up when we see this happening. And please let me not be afraid to do this again
…and again
…and again”
Because it was scary.

Please keep giving me courage.

thistherapylife:

bastlynn:

prettyarbitrary:

senkirowolf:

witwitch:

adinfinitumxx:

2p-germanys-blog:

spinosaurus-the-fisher:

funkylittlefang:

spinosaurus-the-fisher:

perspectiverelativity:

buddha-fett:

red-dirt-roads:

alessariel:

brainsforbabyjesus:

alessariel:

bitter-bi-witch:

datneeks:

socialjusticeichigo:

shadowthorne:

mizushimo:

mauridianhallow:

fangirlingoverdemigods:

drtanner:

suicunesrider:

uneditededit:

Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?

not gonna lie that still looks intimately real

I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.

Fucking witchcraft, man.

fucking look at this shit though

Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:

THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.

amazing

And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.

They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.

One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.

(link to said post about malfunctioning t-rex)

Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.

So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.

This is getting better and better.

I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI

I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.

@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?

Realism comes at a cost, it seems.

i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:

It’s a three piece raptor suit.

Old movies had the best special effects

The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.

@jurassicparkandrecreation

@shepfax

Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Padian

This post just gets better and better with time

alithographica:

Science Fact Friday – Tapetum lucidum!

So why don’t all vertebrates have this adaptation? It’s an advantage to animals that are active in the dark – cats, dogs, owls, raccoons, crocodiles, and so on – but it makes everything slightly blurry. Many daytime vertebrates (including humans and most other primates) do not have one and instead have better day vision.

chillwhiskey:

chillwhiskey:

chillwhiskey:

…you guys wanna know abt the nerdiest thing i’ve ever done…

ok so i was in physics class my freshman year and my prof was trying to do a fun start to the lecture and she was like “who here knows what the secret to a perfect slap shot is?” and she obviously expected no one to know and someone from like the back of the lecture hall shouted out “swinging the stick fast!” and before she could even respond i blurted out “you make sure your stick hits the ice just behind the puck so your stick torques back and snaps forward just as you’re hitting the puck” and my prof was like “oh. yeah. how do you know that?” and i was too busy burying my face in my book to answer that my high school science fair project was “Taking the Perfect Clapper”

the project was so extensive and i literally made my brothers blow their arms out taking clappers as i sat and clocked them like,,,, i did one trial where put a camera above them and studied the distance between where their sticks hit the ice and the puck and what the perfect distance is and whether a slower swing from a more precise distance is more powerful than a faster swing from a worse distance i also studied stick height vs the “perfect distance”,,, by the end of it my brothers both wanted to die but the next year in bantams my baby brother lead his league in scoring, and like half of them were clappers sooooooo

unironicallyardentnerd:

hostilepopcorn:

northernersfeel:

devodyana:

kingsxoqueens:

The opposite of albinism called melanism, a recessive trait where the skin and fur are all black.

nature & real talk

Holy shit that’s majestic.

Yes, the powers of Photoshop are indeed majestic

So far the closest thing we have to melanistic lions are the black-mained Asiatic lions
(Panthera leo persica), and it’s not known whether lions are even able to be melanistic!

The only melanistic big cats we know of are jaguars…

…and leopards.

We do, however, know of abundism in other big cats! What’s abundism you may ask? Well, it’s basically when places that normally have a lot of melanin end up producing an abundance of it. So an abundistic tiger looks like this:

And an abundistic cheetah looks like this:

And just for good measure, here’s an abundistic leopard:

This has been a PSA!

Oooh okay, I want to jump in here, purely because I saw this and it brought back my childhood fascination with king cheetahs so I had to infodump.

As far as I can tell, that is actually a king cheetah, not an abundistic cheetah. From a brief bit of research, the king cheetah coat pattern isn’t strictly caused by abundism, but is actually caused by a recessive mutation in a gene responsible for coat patterning.

It was found that a mutation in the Taqpep gene is what causes the king cheetah coat pattern where “the black spots coalesce into larger areas, and multiple longitudinal black stripes appear on the dorsum“. Just to illustrate this a little better, here’s a regular cheetah on the left, with a king cheetah on the right

The scientists who discovered that this mutation was responsible for king cheetah patterning actually first discovered the mutation in domestic cats. It is the same gene that causes the blotched tabby mutation (as opposed to the striped/mackerel tabby coat pattern).

It gets slightly more complicated after that. The scientists also found that, while the Taqpep gene is responsible for patterning the areas of yellow vs black coat colour, it isn’t directly responsible for producing a darker coat (the taqpep gene is found in low levels in both light and dark areas of the cheetah/cats skin). This raises the question, if Taqpep isn’t directly changing coat colour, then what is?

After some investigation in fetal cats (and some confirmation tests done in lab mice), it was found that Edn3 was the gene responsible. Edn3 produces a hormone that up-regulates the differentiation and grown of melanocytes (the cells that produce melanin). So, putting things all together: it seems that Taqpep expression sets up an invisible zones of patterning, and these zones determine the level of expression of Edn3. By extension, this increases the number of melanocytes present in the skin, and thus the yellow vs black coat colour. Mutations in the Taqpep gene lead to wider, more erratic zones of colouration, which leads to the blotched coat pattern responsible for king cheetahs.

Okay, so, I know this wasn’t really at all related to the original post, or even the comment above, it was mostly just my sudden need to infodump my knowledge on king cheetahs. I do apologise if I’ve over-stepped, and if people would rather I removed my comment and just made a separate post, I can do that. Also, I apologise for any factual errors I’ve made in this post; it’s mostly what I’ve learnt from quickly skimming through the paper and trying to summarise what I could (the paper itself is very informative and goes into a lot more detail than I have if you’re interested in this kind of thing). If you spot any glaring mistakes, let me know and I’ll happily edit this where necessary.

Reference:

Kaelin, C., Xu, X., Hong, L., David, V., McGowan, K., Schmidt-Kuntzel, A., Roelke, M., Pino, J., Pontius, J., Cooper, G., Manuel, H., Swanson, W., Marker, L., Harper, C., van Dyk, A., Yue, B., Mullikin, J., Warren, W., Eizirik, E., Kos, L., O’Brien, S., Barsh, G. and Menotti-Raymond, M. (2012). Specifying and Sustaining Pigmentation Patterns in Domestic and Wild Cats. Science, 337(6101), pp.1536-1541

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1220893

dendritic-trees:

thequantumqueer:

justhurtingalot:

Isn’t it weird how you can actually feel the pain in your chest and stomach when something really hurts your feelings

wanna hear some crazy shit? that happens because you have a miniature brain in your stomach that controls digestion and fucks it up when you’re upset

calling on my neuroscientist friend @dendritic-trees to back me up on this and presumably un-oversimplify it

You do in fact have a mini-brain, not only in your stomach, but stretching through your whole GI tract. It is your friend, the enteric nervous system. The basics are pretty good on its wikipedia page if you want a few more details, but basically it is part of the autonomic nervous system (the same system that controls automatic things like the fight or flight response) and controls the movement of the guts. And it will work even if it is completely disconnected from your brain.

But the two systems interact so that stuff going on in your brain can disrupt your digestion, but equally so that issues in the gut can create feedback that alters your mood. Science heavy explanation here. More lay-person friendly summary here (from Johns Hopkins, don’t read the comments). Also if you get “all disease can be fixed by changing your diet” out of this (I read the comments) you are guilty of gross over-interpretation and have to go to data analysis jail).