Favourite science websites, amazing facts, awesome videos and more effing great SCIENCE!

[farmerbarleymow]

Great thread. I've hours of reading/watching/learning ahead of me.

Don't forget to post any random isolated things on the thread I started to drive up traffic in the science forum.

The lonely science post thread

Post up random and unconnected science stuff here. This pleased me the other day - a teacher has installed a solar system in the corridor of his school. Every corridor should have one. Video of it in the tweet below.

www.urban75.net

 

[editor]

Pretty amazing

 

[editor]

And from the same person

 

[editor]

We're half human/half microbe!

Here's How Many Cells in Your Body Aren't Actually Human

Trillions and trillions.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[editor]

Open a can with a sharpie!

 

[editor]

An interesting video about sinkholes

 

[editor]

What dark arts is this?!!!

 

[fishfinger]

Trigonometry.

 

[ruffneck23]

 

[HAL9000]

9 minute audio

How a worm helped explain human development

Sydney Brenner was searching for a model animal to help him tease out the genes involved in human behaviour and human development from egg to adult. Brenner chose a tiny nematode worm called caenorhabditis elegans (c.elegans for short), whose biological clockwork can be observed in real time under a microscope through its transparent skin. The worm has since been at the heart of all sorts of discoveries about how our bodies work and fail

Witness History - How a worm helped explain human development - BBC Sounds

The nematode worm c. elegans has enabled all sorts of discoveries about human biology

www.bbc.co.uk

One bit of triva, Columbia space shuttle broke up in the searing heat of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on 1 February killing all seven of its crew. But the worms survived

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Worms survived Columbia disaster

news.bbc.co.uk

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Don't know if it's been posted here before, but I discovered Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast recently. Best science podcast I've found. In-depth 90-minute interviews with figures from a range of subjects, and the quality of his guests is magnificent - Roger Penrose, Antonio Damasio, Leonard Susskind, and many many others. He had me with Penrose, but I've yet to listen to a dud one yet.

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast – Sean Carroll

 

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[editor]

Earth and the Moon seen from 1.4 billion kilometres away through the rings of Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft.

 

[editor]

Cleaned up Apollo photos

This Guy Remastered Photos of Earth Shot by Apollo Astronauts

Philosopher Toby Ord remastered film scans of Earth photos captured by Apollo astronauts. The results are stunning.

petapixel.com

 

[HAL9000]

Calculating pi using darts..

 

[Epona]

What dark arts is this?!!!

Isn't that really quite similar to how they worked out how far the moon was from the earth? And other things that we can see in the sky too?

 

[2hats]

Calculating pi using darts..

Monte Carlo method (essentially).

Isn't that really quite similar to how they worked out how far the moon was from the earth? And other things that we can see in the sky too?

Related. Just basic geometry/trigonometry really. Likewise - calculating interstellar distances to neighbouring stars via parallax.

 

[HAL9000]

There's a lot maths in this video, and watching a video with a lot of maths is not my idea of fun. But I thought what was interesting, Ludolph van Ceulen spent 25 years calculating pi to 35 decimal places . Then Isaac Newton came up with a new method for calculating pi, reducing the time to achieve similar performance from years to days.

 

[HAL9000]

Excellent video explaining how lifts work and why they're safe

 

[HAL9000]

Concrete suitable for rocket launch pads, Grady Hillhouse really really likes concrete

 

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[8ball]

This is great - only 4 mins in and a serious amount of molecular biology basically covered, then it gets more fascinating.

 

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very short video, scale of the milky way

 

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Worst collision in the history of space flight

In June 1997, astronauts on the Russian space station Mir faced disaster after the worst collision in the history of manned space flight.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[brogdale]

Just wow!

Deepest ever images of Milky Way show stars moving around supermassive black hole

 

[gosub]

This Footage From The First-Ever Probe to Touch The Sun Will Leave You Speechless

Many science fans were freaking out this week when NASA confirmed that its Parker Solar Probe had become the first spacecraft ever to 'touch the Sun' back in April.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[HAL9000]

Rather long pod cast about crisper cas9, around 40 minutes (with some adverts, but you can just turn the sound down for those bits )

How CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing is transforming healthcare and agriculture, a decade after its discovery

Our podcast on the science and technology making the news. This week, we speak to Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel laureate who pioneered the revolutionary tool

www.economist.com

 

[Dystopiary]

All living brown bears are part polar bear!

100,000-year-old polar bear genome reveals ancient hybridization with brown bears

An analysis of ancient DNA from a 100,000-year-old polar bear has revealed that extensive hybridization between polar bears and brown bears occurred during the last warm interglacial period in the Pleistocene, leaving a surprising amount of polar bear ancestry in the genomes of all living brown bears.

 

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