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The Week in Science: Death Star Maps, Colossal Squid Dissections, Every Sci-Fi Ship Ever

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

Even mantis shrimps have spring cleaning

The pro and cons of hand-driers (and a subsequent pant wiping)

Love how Maria Konnikova weaved in the science of interest with a profile of xkcd‘s Randall Munroe

What Slipped Disks Tell Us About 700 Million Years of Evolution

∞ What does the world look like when you have pulsing, colorful worm larvae in your eyes? Ask a poor snail

Study suggests that even if we could perfectly predict all behavior, most people would still believe in free will

Small but systematic bias awards more Hubble Telescope time to men than women

90% of kids who died last flu season didn’t get vaccinated

Australia’s EPA has reviewed the controversial shark cull. Their verdict? Save the sharks!

Nat Geo Wild’s Radical Approach to Science TV: Being Truthful

How do you save a tree species from climate change? How about we take it and push it somewhere else?!

You should be scared by the mathematics of Ebola

Baby clownfish make journeys much more epic than Nemo

Emotion Is Not the Enemy of Reason

The California drought, in pictures

New Football Helmets Take a Page From Nuclear-Plant Safety

Turns out we might run a bit faster on the Moon than NASA expected

What Are the Real Odds That Your Birth Control Will Fail?

New study on chimp violence reignites battle over whether battling is innate

∞ This little organism has sex to reset its encrypted genome, not to reproduce

Battling the invasive ash borer beetle via sexytimes with 4,000 volts

“When bone first evolved, there was not a cell in it.”

Kissing bugs love it when you ride the lazy river through a cave. Specifically, they love your blood

This is how much it costs to rent a panda

Always bet on the Musk

The Debate About GMO Safety Is Over, Thanks To A New Trillion-Meal Study

There have been no deaths in Australia from a confirmed spider bite since 1979

A new report calculated the cost of “fixing” our climate. It could be free

The DNA that crafts our faces is exceedingly variable, suggesting we evolved for unique visages

∞ For the love of science stop trying to make moray eels into puppies

Watching the Birth of a New Breed: the Werewolf Cat

Optically levitated, glowing diamonds, or holy wow what is going on, for short

Is a sex video SFW if they don’t have skin?

Filtering the blood of rats with nanoparticles and magnets! THE FUTURE

This robot that totally doesn’t look like a sex toy uses pneumatic legs to launch itself around town

∞ I watched a 3-hour colossal squid dissection. Now you can too! Here are some highlights

The secret to the packrat’s poison-eating power lies inside its microbiome. We know because we fed it poop

The robot roundup: Jetpacks for running, soft robots, and unleashed cheetahs

Nearly everyone has had the phantom ring/vibration hallucination. Yep, it’s a hallucination

The spread of the living oil spill that is the lionfish

 

Extreme Nerdery

Let the MythBusters remind you that your flight you’re about to get on is definitely boarding the wrong way

The latest Metal Gear Solid has the most accurate rock climbing in video game

∞ Nick Acosta turned HD screengrabs of Star Trek: TOS into amazing panoramas

The “steamy hot murdersquish” of the Japanese honey bee

How do you make a Death Star fully operational? Antimatter.

∞ Pyrosomes are the Borg of the Oceans

If your daughter wants to ride a balloon behind a Ferrari

Our baby steps towards Star Trek-style warp propulsion. Engage article

The Wall and Castle Black in Minecraft

What the fuck has NASA done to make your life awesome?

∞ I had so much fun messing with Haxiomic’s delightfully robust fluid mechanics simulator

Let’s not do the time warp again.”

Thank you, deviantART user park0g, for making my Mass Effect characters fist-bump

Kenny has died 97 times, officially

You can make a Google Earth-style map look Death Star-y with a few tweaks

∞ The nerdiest chart of sci-fi ships ever is now complete. Get lost in it

 

Sciencey GIFs and Images

Artist RJ Palmer is proof that every new dinosaur deserves the deviantART treatment

So, particle animation is getting pretty good yeah?

∞ Separation from Atlantis on the final space shuttle mission, STS 135

A recently launched Atlas V rocket creates a visible shockwave

Watching cavitation bubbles form in the bottom of a bottle is one of life’s little joys

Liquid oxygen can be manipulated magnetically, with really cool balls (literally)

∞ Some people like staring at fires, I like staring at steel wool

Hamster learns about energy transfer the hard way

Squirrel foiled again by angular momentum

How do you land a drone anyway? Catch it.

Pipes burst under basketball court, simulate space-time

∞ The engineers never intended to make a silo collapse like a boss. But…

Working on Sunday tiger

I’m waiting for the next Doctor Who regeneration

Ants get thirsty too

Not sure what is happening here, but lightning sure does make a light show when hitting a wire

This is a giant squid beak. Wish the sperm whales good luck.

This fun-sized snake isn’t adorable at all

Optics FTW!

Don’t drive with snow on your roof because aerosolization

Wait a minute…this isn’t my world….I’M AN OWL!

Heh. Floating wind turbine power cables look like giant wall-plugs

Does your forklift even moon-walk bro?

 

Pop Culture Happenings

Stuff that was fake on the internet this week

Artist in the process of making a new lighting fixture after scraping octopus skin

∞ I absolutely adore Leila Jeffreys’ portraits of birds

Danish commercial switches Quint and Jaws and I love it

I WANT THE TINY VELOCIRAPTOR ONE!

Editing together traffic to make it more hectic and it is damn nerve wracking

∞The Diatomist“: a short film about Klaus Kemp’s mission to beautifully arrange tiny organisms

A 25-year retrospective on The More You Know

My town is catastrophically anti-vaccine, and whooping cough is back

George the goldfish undergoes risky brain tumor surgery, extending his little life by 20 years

Humans are still fighting with longswords, it’s just a little safer now

Canadian vandal makes me smile

An Origami Microscope For Less Than a Dollar

Russian litter vigilante throws litterbugs’ trash back in the car window at them, or tapes it to a mirror

 

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