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The Week in Science: A Comet Landing, Russian Craters, and Rust Cohle’s Interstellar

Digging through the web this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.


I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.


Science to Read, Watch

You are a skeuomorph, and corn on the cob is fruit

The sky is blue because the atmosphere is making the white-hot sun look blue-hot

8 Reasons Discovery’s Snake-Eats-Man-Alive Show Is A Terrible Idea

More than 300 species of spiders practice myrmecomorphy

∞ The dietary supplement industry should scare you. Here’s why

Real-Life ‘Unicorn’ Found

The “polar vortex” isn’t really a weather event. It’s pretty much just winter weather

A giant crustacean and the world’s longest hunger strike

This is “The Insominator.” It keeps bees awake so we can study their dancing

We need better glass to save the 600 million birds a year that die hitting windows in the U.S.

This little bee can’t sting you, so it bites you until it dies

∞ The frilled shark has teeth like parking lot spikes

This worm produces digestive enzymes to eat wood…in its gills

∞ Scientists reach the bottom of the mysterious Siberian crater. Lots of data, no aliens

Dragonflies are not any less vicious when they live underwater

For Every 1°C of Global Warming, Lightning Strikes Will Increase By 12%

Why Some Microbiome Studies May Be Wrong

Kill your darlings: Figuring out why male mammals commit infanticide

Can we track disease rates by using Wikipedia page hits?

Los Angeles has a healthy population of cannibals and body snatchers. They are bugs

These giant, blind torpedoes of sharks stay deep, so we didn’t know that they are everywhere

“When tiger keelback snakes get pregnant, they eat as many poisonous toads as they can find.”

How do you “teach” a baby otter to swim?

New survey shows we have no idea how our populations are made up. We think teen pregnancy is 14x higher than it is

Live jelly cam at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. That is all.

Plankton bust a move to best get around without being felt

∞ Hermit Crabs Line Themselves Up From Biggest To Smallest To Swap Shells

“Philae did the f*cking tallest, longest, slowest JUMP ever done.”

∞ Comet 67P is singing to us

Goodnight sweet little lander, you did a great job.

The APEC Summit Turned World Leaders Into Star Trek Cosplayers

Get cosmic advice from a Carl Sagan chatbot made in 24 hours

The science of planetary motion lets us illuminate our veterans at 11/11, 11:11AM each year

We’ve discovered the ideal beach bodies for elephant seals

∞ A timelapse of the Sun in 4K

Mantis shrimp does home renovations

With “Lord Kelvin’s Thunderstorm” you can get electricity from falling water and no moving parts

These Rainbows Are Animals Taking Shape

How Were the Pyramids Built?

There Are Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written

With 80Gb of photos, some video, and a pinch of dubsteb, Guillaume Juin made my favorite ISS timelapse video

How you milk a snake and make antivenin, in six steps

A scientific survey on which sexual fantasies are the most/least common

Chronicling NASA’s abandoned launch sites in photos

More Etymological Maps of the Brain

 

Extreme Nerdery

I for one welcome our katana-wielding robot overlords

Someone put Super Smash Bros. on a calculator

∞Vaporizing a droplet of water with a laser is more complicated than it sounds.”

If you have a 3D printer you need to do this? Right now?

When Darth Vader quotes Bible verses, he is even scarier

∞ You can’t finish the fight without physics. How do you build a Halo ringworld?

The speculative physics behind a Smaug-killing arrow

Where is Comet 67P between a Borg Cube and the Death Star? These are the important questions

Don’t try to sweep this robot’s leg

“Interstellar isn’t the first sci-fi film to descend into new age platitudes, here’s why it should be the last

Google teamed up with Interstellar to create downloadable lesson plans based on the movie’s physics for students

∞ Rust Cohle already explained the ending of Interstellar to us

Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition

 

Sciencey GIFs and Images

The maneuvering that got Rosetta to Comet 67P

The celestial surfaces we’ve seen

We are pretty sure praying mantises can take down hummingbirds, but not this one

∞ Astoundingly detailed x-ray of a “pancake stingray,” Heliotrygon gomesi

Sunrise on Saturn

∞ A punch in slow-motion is like having your face glitch

If this really is mimicry, it is unbelievably cool evolution

Zeus the screech owl is blind, but inside his eyes are galaxies

∞ Reflexes

Physics tricks are the best tricks, and also are all the tricks

Your brain likes models and assumptions. That’s why this lady looks cut in half and floating

A real snowpiercer

∞ A murmuration of starlings is like an organism

The inner eyelid of cats — the palpebra tertia — is weird, just like your kitty

Liquid nitrogen and hot water makes a N2 mushroom cloud

Pearl, a leucistic raven

The full xckd comic of Rosetta’s success, in one GIF

The awesome fluid mechanics of a landing plane

Neil. Gets. Down.

∞ What do you think the instantaneous PSI on a katana blade is?

Biologists call these bits on a baby stingray “walky parts

An owl takes a bath

Something explodes in the Jovian atmosphere

We in the engineering business call this “close enough

∞This is how NASCAR tire changes are so fast: Take advantage of momentum

Considering the forces, this person was lucky their attempt at gun clearing didn’t backfire

A camouflaged road in Finland during WW2

Maybe this is why tennis players check their rackets after each volley h

A representation of how exhaust gases flow through an engine nozzle with Schlieren photography

Watch the shockwave as these two beasts butt heads

This is brilliant: Stabilize the sky instead of the ground and you can see the world turn

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field shows thousands and thousands of galaxies, but it is only a tiny slice of sky

The quickest way to put on a swimming cap is with fluid physics

 

Pop Culture Happenings

Robin Williams had Lewy Body Dementia, which may have contributed to his death

Interstellar highlights the Hollywood trend of scientists as heroes and heroines

Faith in humanity maintained

Coming home as an internet journalist person

Cosmonauts Used to Carry Insane Machete Guns In Space

∞ Woman expertly photoshops herself into photos of her younger self

Kind of amazing to see foley artists making an action sequence in real time

AARP runs vomit-inducing, quackery-filled breast cancer piece with Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge

Ray Harryhausen performing his brand of magic for Jason and the Argonauts

The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi

∞ Net neutrality is not “Obamacare for the Internet”

Meet the Mysterious Creator of Rumor-Debunking Site http://Snopes.com

Tyson Boop

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