I really enjoyed my polyp years (college).

Robot eyeballs? Bacteria that shits gold? Printing stem cells?

****in A Science.. ****in A....

http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/5...9846259915.jpg

More info:

Gold nugget forming bacteria: http://bit.ly/14C1QIK
Bionic eye: http://bit.ly/WTitKo
Sea urchins: http://bit.ly/WbLZNl
Mammal ancestor: http://bbc.in/YZKkie
Stem cells: http://bit.ly/Y3s94C
Earth like planets: http://hvrd.me/12iA29h

Did I read this wrong? Two people with blue eyes CAN have a kid with brown eyes.

LMAO

The gold nugget bacteria is really funny and well timed for me because just yesterday, as I was cleaning out the litter box, I was thinking how great it would be if they were crapping out gold and I was sifting out thousands of dollars of precious metal instead of the occassional fur laced turd.

I even started to wonder how I would cash it in. Would people question how I got it? Where would I take it to sell? Can I send it to a refinery and have it formed into bricks with the logo of a reputable company?

Sadly though, it turns out those were problems I did not have to worry about.

Yes, blue eyed parents can have a brown eyed offspring. Rather unlikely, but possible. It's technically possible for two white people to have a black child.

Little Billy didn't beat those odds though...

lolwut?

Not true at all. Eye color is polygenic, so it's not all that uncommon. I don't think the inheritance pattern follows a simple Mendelian pattern, but it cannot be likened to two white people having a black child. Sorry man, but this is intro genetics stuff.

EDIT: It is not Mendelian. 15 genes have been implicated in the inheritance of eye color.

BTW, Fish, I'm not trying to **** on your thread, and if I am, I will back off.

Sorry man, this is actually classic intro Science Humor stuff. Often accompanied by a humorous picture like you see here. They weren't actually publishing that work. I might be able to find the source if you'd like to take it up with them. But I'm not sure it would do much good.

Oh, gotcha. Just making sure that second post was a joke.

I appreciate the accuracy. But know that I present some stuff in this thread with quite a bit of humor intended. You ruined the ****ing joke Doogie Howser. Adoption was outed in science class. That's hilarious. You have to be able to laugh at that...

Ohh yeah... by the way... There's a freakin 160' city-destroying asteroid whizzing toward the Earth right now. It will approach the atmosphere this weekend. But don't panic, Science is on top of it. It's calculated that there's no way it will hit us. Missing by a mere 17,000 miles.

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Everything You Need to Know About This Friday’s Close Shave by Asteroid 2012 DA15
By Phil Plait | Posted Monday, Feb. 11, 2013, at 8:00 AM ET

On Friday, Feb. 15, the Earth is going to get a very close shave by an asteroid*. Called 2012 DA14, this 50 meter (160 foot) rock will pass just over 27,000 kilometers (17,000 miles) from the Earth’s surface. This is closer than our geosynchronous satellites, so this really is a close pass!

But, to be very clear: This asteroid poses no threat to us right now, nor in the foreseeable future. Friday’s miss is just that: a miss. And, in fact, this is a good thing, since any time an asteroid gets close (but misses), we learn a lot, including how to find them, how to track them, and even how to talk about them to the public.

So let me tell you all about this little rock, and why it’s so cool.

2012 DA14 was discovered in February 2012 by astronomers at the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra; it passed the Earth on Feb. 16th of that year, missing us by a comfortable 2.6 million km (1.6 million miles). The asteroid has a very Earth-like orbit, talking 366 days to orbit the Sun. Its orbit is slightly more elliptical than ours and tilted by about 11° to ours as well. All that’s about to change though: After the encounter this year, the Earth’s gravity will change the orbit of DA14 quite a bit, reducing the period to about 317 days.

Asteroids fall into various classes depending on their orbits; Apollo asteroids, for example, have a semi-major axis (the radius of their orbit measured across the long part of the ellipse) greater than Earth’s, and Atens have semi-major axes smaller than Earth’s. Right now, DA14 is an Apollo, but after the 15th its orbit will change shape so much it will become an Aten.

The exact shape of its orbit after this weekend’s event isn’t known, but we do know it well enough to rule out any potential impact for quite some time; the next encounter won’t be until 2046, and even then it won’t get closer than about 1.6 million km (1 million miles).

How Close a Miss Is This?

DA14 will slip past at a distance of 27,000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface. The Earth itself is about 13,000 km across, so the asteroid will be twice our own diameter away.

So, Can I See It?

Even though it’s passing pretty close, DA14 is so small that it never gets bright enough to see with the unaided eye. I’ve seen predictions that it will get to about magnitude 7, which is less than half as bright as the faintest thing you can see. However, that’s well within range of binoculars or a small telescope.

So It Won’t Hit. But What If It Did?

Ah, you’re one of those people who enjoys scaring the crap out of yourself. OK, let’s think about what would happen if DA14’s path actually did intersect ours.

We have some decent comparisons. There is a crater in Arizona called, oddly enough, Meteor Crater, that’s about 1.2 kilometers (0.75 miles) across. It was created 50,000 years ago or so by an asteroid roughly the size of DA14, which upon impact probably detonated with an explosion equivalent to a 20 megaton nuclear weapon going off.

That asteroid was metallic, so it could make it through the Earth’s atmosphere and hit the ground. We now know many asteroids are much less sturdy, and probably would explode high in the atmosphere, disintegrating under the excruciating pressures of screaming through the air at Mach 20. That happened in Siberia in 1908 in the famous Tunguska event. Again, a DA14-sized rock came in, but this time blew up high over the Earth’s surface.

Not that this was any blessing. Trees were knocked down and set aflame for hundreds of square kilometers, and anyone within probably 10 kilometers wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale.

So we really don’t want rocks like this hitting us. They won’t cause a global extinction, but it doesn’t take something ten kilometers across (like the one that did in the dinosaurs) to have a catastrophic effect. Anything the size of DA14 would be able to take out a city. And it doesn’t even have to hit over populated land; just having one come in over the United States could trigger a global economic collapse. Remember, it only took a handful of people flying a couple of planes into buildings to do that. An asteroid impact, especially one that comes in without warning, could be a lot worse.

This threat is no joke. It’s quite real, and we need to take it seriously. We need more observatories watching the sky, and a plan in place in case we do see one with our number on it. Some new observatories will soon be coming online that will help. Also, both NASA and the privately-funded B612 Foundation have plans to launch space missions that can better look for near-Earth asteroids. B612 even has ideas on how to stop a potential impactor from ruining our day, too. I gave a TEDx talk on this very topic.

By the way, the asteroid Apophis made a lot of headlines when it was thought to have a non-zero chance of whacking us. That has now been downgraded to zero, so we’re safe from that one, too.

OK, Fine. But Can It Hit a Satellite?

Since DA14 is passing closer than some satellites, it makes sense to ask if it will hit any. The answer is that it almost certainly won't. There's a tiny chance, but the rock is small, and satellites smaller. Space, however, is big. That's why we call it space. There are billions of cubic kilometers of emptiness out there, only very slightly occupied by solid bits of matter.

Put it this way: Hits to satellites by tiny grains of cosmic debris are incredibly rare, and there is a lot of that stuff floating around out there. The odds of one lone chunk of rock hitting a satellite are far, far smaller. I'd bet a lot of money nothing will get hit by DA14—and of course, satellite manufacturers actually are betting that money. NASA has consulted with satellite comapnies and given them updated coordinates of DA14 as a precautionary measure, but I don't think anyone seriously thinks there's any real danger to our birds out there.

What, Me Worry?

For most people, this pass of 2012 DA14 is a non-event; if you hadn’t hard about it you would never have known it would happen. It will pass us in the night, silent and dim.

But this is in fact a big deal. For one thing, it allows us to check our models of asteroid behavior; how accurate were predictions last year based on observations of the time, how well can we improve them, how quickly and accurately are new observations included? These can all be checked.

Plus, this sucker will be moving across the sky fast. At closest approach it will appear to move in the sky quickly enough to cross the face of the Moon in about 40 seconds. Getting most telescopes to track that fast is not all that easy. It’ll be a nice test of engineering.

Also, we’ll have a lot of observations of it, and those will have to be processed and compiled into a set of orbital parameters used to make predictions in the future. I imagine that will keep some astronomers busy for a while.

And let’s face it, people will have heard of this, one way or another. It’s not hard to find breathless headlines (one I saw said the asteroid will pass “perilously close” to Earth, a phrase that has no meaning except to scare people; a miss is a miss) and ridiculous conspiracy theories that the asteroid will actually hit or affect us in some way. We’ve seen those before—and they’ve always been wrong—and we’ll see them again.

So for me, this asteroid is interesting scientifically, but it’s also yet another exercise in informing the public, who are curious about scientific matters in general and in asteroids specifically. I’m actually pretty happy with what I’m seeing out here right now; lots of facts and not as much nonsense and scare-mongering as usual. Maybe we’re doing better.

And plus, let’s face it: This near miss of an asteroid is simply cool. It’s a big Universe out there, and the Earth is a teeny tiny target. We don’t get an opportunity like this very often, and I think it’s wonderful it’s getting the attention it is. Everything happening with DA14 is a net positive, including the public awareness. I hope that as these passes continue to happen people become even more excited by them, and it leads to us being able to fund more work on understanding asteroids, from observing them to actually visiting them some day.

Yeah, med school has made me entirely too serious and I generally take things too literally.

My bad.

^^That **** is amazing. Wow.

Cool shit that happened last year.

27 SCIENCE FICTIONS THAT BECAME SCIENCE FACTS IN 2012

http://myscienceacademy.org/2013/01/...facts-in-2012/

All of those were pretty damn cool

Want some peace and quiet? Think twice about that quiet part.....

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/777...1609709188.jpg

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World’s Quietest Place Lets You Hear Your Internal Organs

The mad and hectic pace of life, sometimes makes us all crave some peace and quiet. But then, as they say, too much of a good thing can actually be bad for you. That applies to silence, as it turns out people can’t stand to be in the world’s quietest place for too long. The longest a person has lasted in there is 45 minutes.

The place I’m talking about is a room at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis. The room, also known as the ‘anechoic chamber’, is 99.99% sound absorbent. The double-insulated walls are made of steel and foot-thick concrete. Along the walls are also 3.3-foot thick fiberglass acoustic wedges that contribute to the ultra-quietness. The room holds the current Guinness World Record for being the quietest place on Earth. While it does seem like a dream come true, especially for those who live with kids or have stressful jobs, it’s actually not all that great. The room gets so silent that you can actually hear your internal organs at work. And after a while, the hallucinations begin.

The founder and president of Orfield Labs, Steven Orfield says that people are challenged to sit in the chamber with all the lights out. There was this one reporter who managed to stay in there for 45 minutes. Mr. Orfield himself can do it for 30 minutes, in spite of his mechanical heart valve that becomes very loud inside the room. “When it’s quiet, ears will adapt,” he says. “The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating; sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”

The experience is so disorienting that it could drive a person mad. In fact, it is imperative that people sit down. Standing up and walking around is simply impossible. Because we orient ourselves through the sounds we hear when we walk, there are no cues to go by inside the chamber. “You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and maneuver. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair,” Mr. Orfield says.

As bizarre as it seems, the anechoic chamber has plenty of uses. Several manufacturers test their products for noise, and see how they could be made quieter. For instance, the room was used to make Harley Davidson motorbikes much quieter, while retaining their trademark sound. Nasa uses it to put their astronauts through various tests. They are made to float in there in a water-filled container, to see how long it takes before hallucinations begin and whether they could work through it. Because believe it or not, outer space is just one big anechoic chamber – the silence out there is just too loud.

For single nerds out there... here's a scientific formula for calculating compatible mates...

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This shot is making it's way through Google+ today. It's to show how small the moon actually is.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-R...60863122-8.jpg

Which reminded me of this photo that show just how large Africa is.

http://michaelcriner.com/wp-content/..._of_africa.png

[QUOTE=Fish;9402854]
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/777...1609709188.jpg

I spent time doing some acoustical work for a product we were developing. I can say for certain that being in rooms with the ability to efficiently absorb sound are annoying. It's hard to explain, and it may be different for everyone, but it was as if there was pressure on the eardrum. I suspect this sensation was due to the fact that the eardrum wasn't vibrating at all. Weird stuff.

[QUOTE=Stewie;9412997]Could be, but it's more likely due to the inherent force on the tympanic membrane that usually counteracts atmospheric pressure.

There was no pressure change. I was trying to explain the sensation and it's difficult because so few people experience this type of room. Even a normal conversation in the room is odd because we are so used to sounds bouncing off of objects (that our brain ignores) that when they aren't there you go... hmmm...

Pat yourself on the back much? You literally said nothing significant in the above post...

[QUOTE=Stewie;9412997]Actually, I believe you not only hear your heartbeat, but the blood flowing through your veins.

It was in response to the post above. Sorry.

Damn, really?

I thought they would surely have some sort of atmospheric pressure change due, in part, to simulating a vacuum-like environment. I obviously don't know, but that was an assumption I made.

Either way, that's cool stuff man.

Arteries. The pressure vessels transmit sound, your veins are merely conduits.

:thumb:

Being funny. Sorry.

[QUOTE=Stewie;9412997]I really can't imagine what it would be like. I have hearing aids, and currently have about 78% hearing loss in both ears. Due to a youth of guns, mechanics, drums, and rock and roll. So sound and how it relates to the world around me has always been a little strange and intriguing to me. I can tell you that pressure has a lot to do with hearing. My hearing aids attest to that in pressurized environments. Whether a room is sealed, pressurized, etc. has a lot to do with how you hear. And there is a huge amount of what you hear that is processed by your brain without you knowing. You don't simply hear everything the same way. For instance, your brain has a way of muting your own screams and loud yells, so you don't hurt your own hearing. And in noisy conversation environments, your brain has a way of locking in to who you're communicating with and muffling background noise. Hearing aids completely fail to overcome those minor brain processes, which are blatantly obvious in some situations. I'm convinced that your brain shapes and adjusts what you hear much more than people realize, and plays a big role in how you perceive and navigate your environment.

According to the Drake equation of lurve, there should be 100 something women out there for me..

I call bullshit.

Are you using the right approach?

http://wardsci.com/product.asp?pn=IG...0b30cs8RfkvNNR

:D

The Hubble pictures are awesome, absolutely awesome. They can be bought as posters, you'll have to search, I can't put the link on here.

The Deep Field from the Hubble are the best, IMO. All those little stars you see with your naked eye are actually galaxies, the Hubble Deep Field shows you that. Awesome.

This is something that I've always wondered about, due to the fact that we each interpret color on an individual basis. Your interpretation of red, could be another person's green....

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Good stuff Fish. This is a quality post.

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-conte.../mindblown.gif

There is some pretty interesting stuff out there on colors.

[full on boring farmer mode]
I saw Kevin Price from KSU and his research on telematics. They took a camera and took the infrared filter off and tied it onto a model airplane with a GPS and coursed it's flight over fields. They then put some filters on it to show variations in biomass. They then used some software to link all the pictures together and offset perspective and end up with a mosaic of the field with a resolution down to 1 sq inch.

Anyway Price went through the infrared filters and how they work with different pictures. It's amazing what you can see when you filter out noise of different colors. They had a picture of a soybean in which half was healthy and half had some disease. They didn't look that bad to the naked eye, but when you look at it in infrared, it was drastic. The disease took out so much of the biomass it looked really bad.

I'll try to see if I can find the presentation, but it was fascinating to see what just changing the spectrum does.

[/full on boring farmer mode]

I have ALWAYS wondered the color question as well. I thought it was just me, though. Rep.

Talking about the Overview Effect. How astronauts often find that looking at the Earth from space is a life changing experience.

It's kinda long, 20min. But a pretty good video..

Link added to turn off autoplay.

http://vimeo.com/55073825

Auto play was still on for me, but thanks to the spoiler it took me forever to find out wtf was playing. ;)

Planet SAVED! :D

http://boingboing.net/2013/02/21/graphene-supercapacitors-could.html

A battery can hold a lot of energy, but it takes a long time to charge it. A capacitor can be charged very quickly, but doesn't hold a comparable amount of energy.

A graphene supercharger is the best of both: it takes just seconds to charge, yet stores a lot of energy. Imagine being able to charge your spent laptop or phone battery in 30 seconds, and your electric car in a few minutes. Also, unlike batteries, Graphene supercapacitors are non-toxic.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of Graphene in 2010. Wikipedia defines Graphene as a "substance composed of pure carbon, with atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern similar to graphite, but in a one-atom thick sheet. It is very light, with a 1-square-meter sheet weighing only 0.77 milligrams."

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/51873011" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/51873011">The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/focusf">Focus Forward Films</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

I never thought of a capacitor as a battery substitute. Interesting. I'm not really in tune to the work that's being done in the area, but I've thought for some time now that battery technology is something that needs to make a large leap forward. You know: smaller, lighter, more capacity, etc.

That kind of makes sense, but kind of doesn't.

If I laid out 10 crayons unlabeled and asked 100 people (not including blind or color blind people) to pick out a red one, all 100 would pick out the same one. Doesn't that mean they all have the same interpretation of red?

No, say when you are in school and the teacher is teaching your class colors and she shows you red, well everyone in the class determines that the color they are looking at is what they see as red. Now when you lay those 10 crayons out everyone is going to see what their version of red was and pick the crayon. Not because they have the same interpretation of red, but because they see the color that they learned was red in school.

I added spoiler tags to the above gifs to avoid slowing the thread down. Here is an explanation of them:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smar...seenebulaein3d



Stunning photographs of the cosmos, like the wondrous images captured by the Hubble Space telescope, convey the beauty that arises from the simple interactions of dust and light and gas on absolutely massive scales. Missing from photos of the universe, however, is a sense of depth: These stunning nebula are not a paint splatter on a celestial canvas, but truly massive constructions hanging in the void.


Working from his own photographs of far-off nebulae, astrophotographer J-P Metsävainio came up with a way to artificially add in the third dimension. From there, he’s produced gorgeous animations of voluminous nebulae. (The files are quite big, so you might have to give it a second.)


The images, says Phil Plait, on his blog Bad Astronomy, are “not actually showing you the 3D structure of the nebula. It’s an approximation, a guess based on various assumptions on how nebulae are shaped. J-P broke the image up into layers, made a surface model of it, then remapped it all into different frames seen from different angles. He then put those together to make the animated GIF you see here.”

First, Metsavainio collects information about how far away an object is, and carefully studies the stars and structures in and around it. Then, he creates a volumetric model of his subject — usually a nebula, although he’s rendered at least one globular star cluster. Finally, he animates the 3-D rendering, providing viewers with a tantalizing taste of what it might be like to fly a starship through these enormous astronomical ornaments.

“How accurate the final model is, depends how much I have known and guessed right,” Metsavainio said. Many of his renderings carry the statement: “NOTE: This is a personal vision about shapes and volumes, based on some scientific data and an artistic impression.”

This repeat of a video on autoplay sucks shit.

listo I love the astro anarchy guy. He rocks, I love how he does the 3D stuff.

He's my pictures of the Lagoon and Heart Nebula along with the Pacman Nebula. Especially in the Pacman Nebula in the center, some cool views.

Links added so it doesn't kill thread

Warning large pics

http://re-prop.com/apod/Heart_Nebula.jpg

http://re-prop.com/apod/pacman.jpg

http://re-prop.com/apod/m8-lagoon.jpg

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Go to hubblesite.org/printshop or astrosociety.org to get prints from the Hubble.

I guess I'm too Noob to put URL links on this board.

I just edited my previous post to remove the quote with the autoplay. I hope that helps.

Cosmic Fuggedaboudit: Dark Matter May Not Exist At All


http://science.time.com/2013/02/26/c...all/?hpt=hp_c2

When the idea of dark matter first pushed its way into astronomers’ consciousness a few decades ago, the primary reaction was: “Seriously? There’s a mysterious, invisible substance out there, with a mass six or more times greater than that of the visible stars and galaxies, only we have no way of detecting it, but really, it’s there? OK then.” Or something like that, albeit in more formal scientific language.

These days, dark matter is a firmly established principle of cosmology; most of the questions now focus on how the stuff is distributed through the universe, and which of many possible subatomic particles it’s made of.

Most of the questions, but not all. Ever since the early 80’s, a competing theory has been struggling for acceptance. Known as MOND, for Modified Newtonian Dynamics, it posits that dark matter’s main effect — allowing galaxies to spin faster than they should — isn’t caused by extra stuff, but instead by a change in how gravity works under certain conditions

Click on link if you really give a sh*t

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We've all been there....

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/3382/356pbf.jpg


What Happens To Your Brain When You Get Black-Out Drunk?
Jon Jackson

You wake up in an unfamiliar room, missing a button or two, with a few stains on your shirt that you're hoping are food-related. The last thing you remember from the night before was downing that fourth shot of Cuervo. Okay, so you blacked out. But what exactly does that mean?

What did alcohol do to my brain?
Anyone with a strong familiarity with booze has either had a blackout themselves, or knows someone who has. But not all blackouts are created equal; there are two types, "en bloc" and "fragmentary." As their names imply, fragmentary blackouts cause the drinker to not recall moments for small periods of time, whereas en bloc refers to larger periods.

People who experience fragmentary blackouts, sometimes referred to as "brownouts," can typically recall forgotten events once they're reminded of them. En bloc blackouts aren't so lucky. But both types are believed to be caused by the same thing, namely a neurophysiological, chemical disruption in the brain's hippocampus, a region integral to memory formation.

Alcohol interferes with the receptors in the hippocampus that transmit glutamate, a compound that carries signals between neurons. During this interference, alcohol prevents some receptors from working, while activating others. This process causes the neurons to create steroids that then prevent neurons from communicating with each other properly, thus disrupting long-term potentiation (LTP), a process believed necessary for learning and memory.

In simpler terms, the effect is similar to anterograde amnesia in that the brain temporarily loses the ability to create new memories. Blackout sufferers still may be able to partake in spirited discussions or send late-night emails to former employers. What they won't be able to do is create memories of any of it. And of course, there's a dark side to all this. Blackouts tend to indicate a high level of intoxication, during which time drinkers don't exhibit their best judgment, raising the risk of dangerous behavior such as having unprotected sex or driving a car.

Can blackouts be avoided?
As is the case with many drinking-related woes, having a full stomach helps. Not eating will cause your blood alcohol level to elevate more quickly. Drinking less and slower also obviously helps. Studies show a blackout's main culprit to be a fast, dramatic spike in blood alcohol content; they usually kick in at blood alcohol levels of at least 0.15 percent. That's roughly twice the legal limit for driving. And the trouble really begins when this level is reached quickly.

Women may have a harder time avoiding blackouts since their blood alcohol content increases more quickly than men's. Not only do they tend to have less water in their bodies to disperse the alcohol, but they also have less gastric dehyrogenase, an enzyme that breaks down alcohol.

There also appears to be a tendency for people to revert back to blackout states once they start experiencing them, so you probably should lay off the sauce for a while after blacking out. But basically the way to avoid a blackout is either to not drink quite so much, or to at least drink it slower.

Does blacking out mean I'm an alcoholic?
Addiction expert E. M. Jellinek, who started the first significant research on blackouts in the 1940s, believed blacking out was a sure sign of dependency. More recent studies tend to indicate this isn't always the case, as social binge drinkers—hey there, frat guys—are just as likely to experience blackouts as people who drink heavily on a daily basis. Basically, it all comes down to that sudden spike in blood alcohol content, though evidence suggests some people may have a genetic predisposition to blacking out.

Either way, frequent blackouts should not be taken lightly. Aside from engaging in questionable behavior that you'd likely regret if you could remember, any time you alter your basic brain function in such a significant way leaves you open to long-term damage. basic functions in the brain are significantly altered could represent long-term damage.

Science perks....

http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/1...7414590813.jpg

NDGT asking Neil Armstrong what it was like on the moon~


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****in love this man.

My kids are wanting to get a telescope to play around with and I'm looking for something cheap to start out with that's not overly powerful, just enough to check out the moon. Do you have any suggestions on what I should be looking for that would be good for kids 7 and 9 years old?

Sent you a PM also if that doesn't sound like something you want to try let me know and I'll find something that would be decent on craigslist or Ebay for you.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1303...cience_960.jpg

Explanation: Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That's because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA and reduce their body water content to a few percent. Some of these miniature water-bears almost became extraterrestrials recently when they were launched toward to the Martian moon Phobos on board the Russian mission Fobos-Grunt, but stayed terrestrial when a rocket failed and the capsule remained in Earth orbit. Tardigrades are more common than humans across most of the Earth. Pictured above in a color-enhanced electron micrograph, a millimeter-long tardigrade crawls on moss.

Duuuuuude.. You gotta watch this.....

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Perspective....

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/7...2381075320.jpg

Tartigrade>Honey Badger

Badass, to be sure. But is it badder than a shaved bear?

Hmm. That's a tough question. I have a great fondness for bears. At this point I can only state tartigrade ≠ bear.

That's just ridiculous.

EDIT: The planet/stars perspective pics, that is.

I have the stars hanging on my wall. Mind bending.

Goes well with your race car bedframe, huh?

I put a bit of a faith in a coordination effect.

ie, we generally agree that purple is close to blue and yellow is close to orange, and all the gradients between.

Dude Has 75 Percent of His Skull Replaced By 3D-Printed Replica
Sam Gibbs - Gizmodo UK

http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/625...2157302110.png

A man has had the first ever 3D-printed skull-replacement fitted, swapping out a whole 75 per cent of the bone in his head for a man-made replacement.

The unnamed man, from the US, first had his skull scanned to create a digital replica, before the large replacement plate was printed out. It has specially designed textures and holes in the polyetherketoneketone structure to encourage the growth of cells and bone, and the technique could prove invaluable in replacement of other bone-damaged bits.

Oxford Performance Materials, the company behind the implant, thinks that there's no reason these 3D-printed bone replacements couldn't be used to repair other damaged areas, like limbs. Is this the start of the body-part replacement trend? Will we soon be upgrading our skeletons, Wolverine style? Who knows, but at least you know if you break your nut you'll now be able to just print out a replacement.

This thing looks like a bad sewing job from middle school home economics.

This is important. Spread the word guys....

http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/4...8038968413.jpg

It's in every bit of humidity and rain and dust you take in...