Hey there all! I am an Adventure Guide for the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience in Cañon City, CO, be sure to come check us out sometime! This blog is going to be primarily about dinosaurs, rocks, space, ancient history, and other things. I'll try to keep it relevant to educational things, but it will probably be silly or irrelevant from time to time.
who was the fool who was tasked with naming the galaxy and the only adjective they could think of was ‘mmmmmmmmmmmmilky…’
scientist: (gazing up at space) scientist: ……….. it sure is a milky boy
NO
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND
ASTRONOMERS ARE THE SHITTIEST EVER AT NAMING THINGS I KID YOU NOT.
When it came time to name the two theoretical particle types that might be dark matter THEY INTENTIONALLY CHOSE THE NAMES SO THAT THE ACRONYMS WOULD SPELL “WIMPS” AND “MACHOS” I SHIT YOU NOT
THEY ARE FUCKING TERRIBLE AT NAMING ANYTHING
I just listened to a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson himself LAST NIGHT and he went on about this more than once.
“I’m walking down the street and I’m like ‘ooh pretty rock…’ and some Geologist is like ‘actually, that’s anorthosite feldspar’ and I’m like ‘Nevermind, I don’t want it anymore.’ Any biologists in the audience? [some clapping] Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The most important molecule in the human body, what did you name it? It has NINE SYLLABLES and it’s so long that even YOU GUYS abbreviate it as ‘DNA’!
But astrophysicists and astronomers? No, man, we call it like we see it. Star made of neutrons? NEUTRON STAR. Small white star? WHITE DWARF. You know that big red spot on Jupiter? Know what we called it? JUPITER’S RED SPOT.”
okay i’m glad you mentioned the biologist nonsense bc their naming methods are the bane of my existence
I see your astrophysicists-are-shit-at-names and raise you Marine-Biologists-Are-Fucking-Maniacs.
See this beautiful creature?
It’s a carnivorous deep-sea sponge that lives off of Easter Island and never sees the light of day, as it’s about 9000 feet down. Those delicate-looking orbs are covered in millions of tiny hooked spines, which latch onto anything unfortunate enough to bump into it, and hold it in place as it is digested alive by the sponge’s skin. Amazing, beautiful and profoundly creepy. They could have given it so many cool names. Could have drawn on mythology (I think Scylla would have been an appropriate reference), the region it was found in, the textured skin, PHAGOCYTOSIS, anything!
Made these from real sheep horns found up in Dartmoor.
Fits any sized head as the wire base is adjustable. Wire is wrapped in twine. Very sturdy for being handmade. The horns have “8” burned into them as well as two holes from when they were alive.
£40 Shipping within the UK included.
Will ship outside of the UK but shipping costs will vary depending on where.
Quetzalcoatlus northrupi, drawn by yours truly. Pretty sure I made the tail too long, but the references I’ve seen tend to vary greatly. The wings are smaller than I expected, but I’m pretty sure I got those right!
one of the oldest and arguably the most important museum in Brazil is burning to the ground as we speak. home to the portuguese royal family from 1808 to 1821, the Museu Nacional stored fossils, meteorites, pre-historic human skeletons and a variety of artefacts related to natural history. it holds two centuries of latin & brazilian history and now it’s all gone.
some of the things that are now lost forever: the largest collection of egyptian artefacts in latin america; the skeleton of the largest flying reptile ever found in Brazil; the oldest human fossil ever found in the country, named “Luzia” (over 11.000 y.o) and other 20 million extremely important relics and researches just burned to the ground. never to be seen again.
thanks to our government, of course, who didn’t want to pay the museum the necessary funds to make the essencial maintenances since 2014 (which by the way, costed less than a supreme federal court judge’s sallary: R$520 in a year).
another sad instance where the state’s indifference towards culture and history becomes painfully obvious. this is a massive blow to our cultural legacy.
all that in our independe week. happy independe for us, brazilians, who just lost our history and culture in a fire caused by ignorance and indifference.
in case you’re wondering, this is what the museum used to look like:
this is what it looks like now:
thousands of years of culture lost. happy independence week.
“Authorities say the fire lasted for six hours, causing irreparable damage. To put it bluntly: it’s all gone. A meteorite, that can sustain incredibly high temperatures, was found intact. But other than that, there are apparently no other pieces left. It would not be an understatement to call the Museu Nacional the Brazilian equivalent of the Louvre or the British Museum.”
here is some of the international news saying on this, because most articles and videos are all in portuguese, u can check some of the news in english: (here *new york times*) (here *bbc news*) (here *le monde* for french speaking readers) (here *shorouk news* for people who speak arabian) (here *azteca news* for spanish) (here *corriere della sera* for italian).
it was a natural science and historic museum, there were all sorts of important researches and relics. all burned. this was our culture. our history. the first human fossil found in brazil (mentioned above, Luzia) was so important for science, since it proved that way before indigenous tribes existed in Brazil, there were black people.
this is the place where our first constitution was made and the declaration of independence was signed. our independe day is this friday. heartbroken.
“We all knew the building was vulnerable.”
The hydrants nearby were dry; the building was old. It was the perfect storm of destruction, and a loss of this magnitude is devastating for the scientific community, for Brazil, and for the world.
Museums have the potential to do a lot of public good. One of the precious fossils this museum held was Luzia, mentioned above.
How much more could we have learned from her about the peopling of the Americas? What could her bones have told us about migration, about who the first people in Brazil were? And now she’s gone. She died again in that fire.
She’s not the only one, either. The museum held so much indigenous history, including many audio recordings of indigenous languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken. Those languages are truly dead now- there’s no way to get those back. The natural history collections housed onsite? Gone. Some of those insect collections held unnamed species that are extinct and now we’ll never know about them.
And this isn’t just about the stuff, it’s about the people, too. The natural history and anthropology and fossil collections- how many scientists learned from them? How many kids fell in love with the natural world because of the displays? How many people were able to connect to the past because of those holdings?
Rio spent billions of dollars on the olympics, billions of dollars on stadiums that are now abandoned, less than two years later. The museum’s budget dropped to $84,000 last year. That was the whole budget for a museum that has served the world for two hundred years, a museum that was immensely valuable to the people of Brazil.
They’re never going to be able to rebuild, not to the scale they used to have. You don’t just build giant new natural history museums today- you can’t. The money doesn’t get allocated, the collections are impossible to reproduce. Two hundred years of cultural heritage and education are gone.
On the post about V404 Cyngi, you said that it emitted bright flashes of light from material it could not swallow. Can you explain how that works? How can a black hole not be able to swallow something?
Excellent question! I’m gonna take this opportunity to talk about the awesomeness of this binary.
V404 Cygniis a variablemicroquasar, a low-mass X-ray binary that
consists of a stellar-mass black hole and a companion star. The
companion star is slightly smaller than our sun and it orbits a black
hole 10 times its mass. The star’s orbital period is just 6.5 days,
which indicates that it’s a close binary. The close orbit and the black
hole’s powerful gravity produce tidal forces that pull a stream of gas
(accretion stream) from its companion. The gas slowly forms a rotating
disk around the black hole, known as an accretion disk. Gravity and the
interaction of particles in the disk will cause material to compress
and spiral in towards the black hole, and release energy in different
X-ray spectral states (low/hard state). However, there is a much larger
X-ray outburst that can cause the binary to shine hundreds of times
brighter than normal.
Side note: the entire disk emits light in the infrared, the UV light
comes from the disk’s inner regions. Gas closer to the black
hole is hotter and emits more energetic radiation, X-rays or even gamma
rays.
Most of the time, the turbulent flow inside the spinning disk is
steady, although, it’s clumpy enough that the binary system can appear
to flicker a little, and emit short bursts of low-energy X-rays, which
is one reason why it’s designated as a variable and a soft X-ray
transient. The stability of the flow within the disk depends on the rate
of matter flowing into it from the stellar companion to that falling
into the black hole. But, there’s a glitch in V404 Cygni’s case; the
disk fails to maintain that steady internal flow as the gas continues to
build up around the black hole, like water behind a dam. The disk
becomes progressively hotter as it reaches a critical density and when
the temperature reaches the ionization level, the dam breaks, and V404
Cygni becomes an X-ray nova.
It is important to keep in mind
that the accretion disk is a complex hydrodynamic place, it is subject
to instabilities, in this case; the viscous/thermal disk instability
model can broadly explain the sudden X-ray outbursts. This
thermal-viscous instability triggers cooling and heating fronts that
propagate throughout the disk, alternating between low viscosity state –
a cooler, less ionized state where gas simply collects in the outer
regions of the disk, and a high viscosity state – a hotter, more ionized
state that sends a tidal waves toward the black hole (illustrated below).
In the cool state the disk accumulates mass from the companion star,
this can take several decades, and in the hot state the disk loses mass,
at an increased rate, the heating waves propagate through the disk bringing
it to a bright hot state at which the X-ray luminosity reaches its
maximum. Hence the name X-ray nova. An X-ray nova is a short-lived X-ray
flare that appears suddenly, and then fades out over a period of weeks or months. Now the interesting part. The powerful outbursts generate beams of plasma (hot
gas) ejected at great speeds (relativistic jets) along the polar axis of the disk. So, if
nothing can escape a black hole, not even light, then why do some black
holes have these bipolar jets?
The origin of these jets
remains elusive, the exact process is not well understood, however,
strong magnetic fields are suspected to play a role; spinning black
holes that are devouring interstellar gas also expel some of it in twin
collimated jets, because magnetic forces can be as strong as gravity near
black holes. The black hole itself is not directly involved in the jet
launching, the powerful jets of plasma emerge from the inner parts of accretion disk and
travel along the open lines of the poloidal magnetic field, which extend to large distances above the disk surface.
Here’s a visual aid to give you an idea of what’s happening. This is a
computer simulation of the formation of jets from a rotating accreting
black
hole. The accretion disk is the yellow,
doughnut shaped object, the outer disk and the wind is in green/orange,
the plasma beams are blue/red and the magnetic field lines are bright green.
Cat skull that I cleaned and prepped. This poor thing was roadkill and I needed to reconstruct the front half of the skull and as a result the skull and jaw do not line up well.
X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the donor (usually a relatively normal star), to the other component, called the accretor, which is very compact: a neutron star or black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays. (Hydrogen fusion releases only about 0.7 percent of rest mass.) The lifetime and the mass-transfer rate in an X-ray binary depends on the evolutionary status of the donor star, the mass ratio between the stellar components, and their orbital separation.
An estimated 1041 positrons escape per second from a typical low-mass X-raybinary.
i think one of my fave shark facts is this thing that some species of sharks do where they sorta peek their heads out of the water to see whats above the surface…..its called spyhopping and great white sharks do it all the time
