Hubble explores the universe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means it has observed some fascinating cosmic wonder every day of the year, including on your birthday.
What did Hubble look at on your birthday? Enter the month and date below to find out!
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/what-did-hubble-see-on-your-birthday
The lion above is not made of stone, nor of concrete. It was cast in an "artificial stone" known as Coade stone. Coade stone was quite popular in the 18th and 19th centuries for its quality and versatility. Two hundred years after it was sculpted, this lion still shows no cracks or corrosion. They don't make statues like that anymore.
Coade stone looks and feels exactly like worked stone, but it isn’t stone at all. It is a type of ceramic called stoneware. Ceramic, as you know, is just baked clay, but depending on the type of clay and how intensely they are fired, the kiln will produce different types of material. Low temperature firing results in earthenware (terracotta, pottery, bricks etc.). These are fragile. Higher temperature causes vitrification of the clay and results in a much tougher material called porcelain. An even higher temperature is needed to produce stoneware. These are dense, impermeable, noncorrosive and resistant to scratching.
At the time Eleanor Coade set up her “Coade's Artificial Stone Manufactory” in Lambeth, there were many businesses manufacturing artificial stone in England. Eleanor Coade, the daughter of a wool merchant, in all likelihood, knew next to nothing about making artificial stone. On the contrary, she sold linen. But towards the end of the 1760s, she had the fortune of meeting one Daniel Pincot, who was already into the business of making artificial stone but was having difficulty keeping up with the finances. Eleanor Coade had the money and Daniel Pincot had the formula, and together they opened a factory on the south side of Thames where Waterloo Station stands today and began producing an unusually high-grade material. Coade originally named her stone Lythodipyra, which was Greek for “twice-fired stone”, before rebranding it to the punchier “Coade stone.” Within two years, Eleanor Coade had fired Daniel Pincot and nothing more is known about him.
So what made Coade stone so special? Find out at Amusing Planet, and you'll know why they don't make 'em like they used to.
(Image credit: Jonund)
We know that, back then, women traditionally had their hair long. So how did short hair become a trend? The answer takes us back to 18th-century France, during the French Revolution.
During the later years of the French Revolution, many fashionable young men and women of the upper and middle classes began to cut their hair short. It was called the Titus haircut, or coiffure à la Titus. The name is a reference to Titus Junius Brutus, the elder son of Lucius Junius Brutus, who founded the Roman Republic in 509 BC by famously overthrowing the Roman monarchy.
It wasn’t just a simple fashion trend. It was a symbol for the revolution.
More details about this over at Amusing Planet.
(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)
When Alia Payne, an Interactive Arts major at the Maryland Institute College of Art who went to the National Museum of Natural History to study jellyfishes, brought the jellyfishes outside into the museum to teach the visitors about jellyfish biology, she was always asked by the visitors how the stings of these spineless creatures work. While she knew the scientific answer to the question, she found it difficult to convey it to her audience.
She had the scientific answer for them but found it difficult to explain the microscopic stinging cells that fire like harpoons out of jelly tentacles without a clear visual.
That’s when a lightbulb went off in Payne’s mind. She could show visitors how jellyfish sting using art. Payne immediately got to work in the sculpture shop at her school, excited to bring the microscopic stinging cells into full view.
This is one of the many reasons that goes to show that science goes hand in hand with art.
Art is a powerful tool for telling a scientific story.
Learn more about this over at Smithsonian Magazine.
(Image Credit: Karen Osborn, Smithsonian)
In these recent times when we’re to stay at home and practice social distancing with one another, we’ve never been this prone to loneliness. Thankfully, we have technology to compensate for the lack of physical and personal contact that we normally have. We may not yet have the medicine for the dreaded disease that is spreading around the world, but, at the very least, we still have the antidote to loneliness even in these challenging times — friendship.
More about this story over at Nautilus.
(Image Credit: fancycrave1/ Pixabay)
It was a sad day for the world in February, as it lost a great scientist and humanist. Unlike others who adapted a bird’s-eye perspective to look at the various fields of the sciences, he came to be a frog who enjoyed “ jumping from pool to pool, studying their details deeply in the mud.”
The bird’s-eye perspective was not for him, and he had a lifelong suspicion of grand unified theories.
On February 28, 2020, 96-year-old Freeman Dyson passed away. But while he may no longer be around the world, his ideas will still linger.
Find out more about Freeman Dyson’s life over at Quanta Magazine.
(Image Credit: ioerror/ Wikimedia Commons)
This dude does not want to pupate. I think he's enjoying being a caterpillar too much. All he wants to do is eat and he's gotten enormous. pic.twitter.com/NiVKBeu67w
— stringmouse (@stringmousey) April 14, 2020
Most caterpillars immediately undergo pupation when they know it’s time. It is a process in which they must go through in order for them to become majestic butterflies. But not this one. This one enjoys being a caterpillar too much. It wants nothing but food.
“All he wants to do is eat and he’s gotten enormous,” says Twitter user stringmouse about the caterpillar.
Clearly the golden retriever does not want to do yoga! Windham the golden retriever clearly wants to play with his owner, look at how adorably he urges his owner to play with him instead. Honestly, why exercise when you can play instead?
image screenshot via USA Today
When we feel tired, sad, or angry, we usually rely on different things to ease our negative emotions out of our system. One of the most common ways to relieve tension is through eating, and most of us have our own comfort food. If you’re looking for something new to eat, Food Insider shows twenty different comfort foods around the globe! A little bit of warning: this video can make you hungry.
A photo of a two-pack of Warheads-band candy-themed sanitizer piqued the interest of the Internet. The sanitizer is available in scents such as green apple and lemon (classic flavors of sour candy), and is alcohol-free. If the sanitizer has no alcohol is it even useful? Vice has the answer:
The hand sanitizer is listed as alcohol-free—possibly for obvious reasons—and it uses benzalkonium chloride as its active ingredient, which the CDC says "has less reliable activity against coronavirus" than either ethanol or isopropanol alcohols. A safety data sheet for the product recommends contacting a physician or the Poison Control Center if the Warheads Hand Sanitizer is accidentally ingested, so the existence of this stuff seems like...maybe not the best idea? (It also seems to put its faith in humans not being idiots, which is risky at best.)
image via Vice
Bourbon Street is a famous place in New Orleans. It is the home to some of the world’s most potent cocktails, such as the Hurricane, Hand Grenade, and Shark Attack (yes, these are all cocktails). Listen to the new episode of Life Behind Bars to know about the history and the drinking culture of the famed New Orleans street.
image via The Daily Beast
Who knew we were capable of seeing stars explode? Astronomers have determined the strongest star explosion we were able to spot. The SN2016aps is a supernova in a galaxy 4.5 billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers observed that the supernova brightened before its explosion in December 2015, as ScienceAlert detailed:
Now, astronomers have determined that SN2016aps was 500 times brighter than typical supernova explosions. It is, they say, the brightest, most energetic and maybe even the most massive supernova we've ever seen - pushing it towards the category of hypernova.
"SN2016aps is spectacular in several ways," explained astronomer Edo Berger of Harvard University. "Not only is it brighter than any other supernova we've ever seen, but it has several properties and features that make it rare in comparison to other explosions of stars in the Universe."
Although it peaked in January 2016, observations of SN2016aps were not limited to that timeframe. After the supernova was spotted in the PanSTARRS data, astronomers kept a careful eye to observe how the object dimmed over time, a process that's still occurring.
image via ScienceAlert
An army of crabs was spotted in an airport trying to escape customs!
In the description of the video, the owner recalls:
I was waiting for my suitcase at Lynden Pindling International Airport in the Bahamas when one of the iceboxes opened when falling down with the suitcases. People blocked and caught the crabs.
Video by ViralHog / Youtube
We learned earlier that calico cats owe their color to the direct effect of genes, but cats who have “points,” like the coloration of a Siamese cat, use a very different process to determine their looks. Well, it begins with genes, but the exact path fro there is rather weird. Hank Green is here to explain it.
While most of the big newspaper Peeps diorama contests have faded away, a new leader in the tradition is emerging. This is the second year for the World’s Finest Science-Themed Peeps Diorama Contest, also known as #PeepYourScience, and the judges had a hard time deciding among 70 entries. Now the winners have been announced, and the Golden Peep Award has been bestowed on the above diorama, called A Peep into the Life of a Data Scientist by Kerri Barton, Ally Hinton, Jaclyn Janis, Lee Lucas, Kim Murray, Shravanthi Seshasayee, and Deanna Williams. See a larger version here.
Our diorama captures four key data science tasks: data cleaning, data wrangling, data modeling, and data delivery. In each scene, the bunny peeps are the data scientists, and the chick peeps are data. The first scene represents the bulk of the work of data scientists, data cleaning. The second scene further depicts the data scientist’s task of taming messy data, or data wrangling. Sometimes data are missing, hence the “Wanted” chick peep sign. Once the data are ready to be analyzed, the data scientist will use statistical models to answer a question. In the data modeling scene, a chick peep takes on the runway before an audience of bunnies. Finally, when it is time to tell the world about scientific findings, a data scientist will deliver this information in the form of a journal article, represented by our bunny “stork” delivering articles (about positive end-expiratory pressure – PEEP).
Other winners and honorable mentions address the topics of sharks, space exploration, poop, elephant toothpaste, and of course, coronavirus. See them all at the Open Notebook. -via Smithsonian
