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This Week in Science: INTERSTELLAR Science and Robot Dogs

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

When bad weather hits, productivity goes up

∞ 25 years ago this week, we saw Earth as a pale blue dot. Then Carl Sagan gave my favorite speech

The Science of Kissing

This is your brain on love

Syphilis: A Love Story

The Poisonous Chemistry of Chocolate

What are your odds of finding love, or other life in the universe?

∞ Interstellar has produced a scientific paper. Alright, alright, alright.

We put the equivalent of five plastic bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline into the sea in 2010

This snail is so metal that it is literally metal

Ebola Victims Still Infectious a Week After Death

Using Jupiter to refine our exoplanet hunting techniques

Another gorgeous skytrail video

How Math Can Help You Find True Love

How Chris McCandless Died: A Scientific Update

Smoking kills far more people than we thought

A heron is caught surfing

Cuttlefish sex is a face-cuddle

∞ I’ve seen a spider-tailed horned viper before, but never hunting. Its lure is incredibly believable

SpaceX enjoys half-success with its Deep Space 9 mission, as I insist on calling it

Ding, ding! It’s seal versus giant pacific octopus

You’re not left or right-brained. You’re all-brained

For Brian Williams: A list of memory biases

∞ Intimate Portraits of Bees

A bit too fearful, but here’s a good piece on the complexities of the nocebo effect

Why Comets Are Like Deep Fried Ice Cream

A meteor explodes over New Zealand

This is a fruit fly’s beating heart

∞ An eagle-owl at 1000fps is slow-motion beauty

Heterosexual cowgirl is the position most likely to break a penis

There’s No Plague on the NYC Subway

Modern science gives us about a billion more heart beats than we should get

Why do mirrors flip horizontally (but not vertically)?

Bald eagles are among the most contaminated birds on the planet

What muscles make crocodiles croak?

Obsidian scaples have edges *3 nanometers* thick. That’s thinner than a cell membrane

Watch a mouse kidney form

∞ The stabilization tech of Boston Dynamics’ new robot blows me away

What is déjà vu anyway? What is déjà vu anyway?

What happens to life on Earth after us?

What’s the straight dope on pot?

 

Extreme Nerdery

∞ A real Cupid would be a human-vulture hybrid crossbow-wielding monster

I bet you wish you could have gotten a valentine like this

Telling the first owl I see that it takes 2,500 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop

If the Moon was a black hole nothing would really happen

∞ BioShock’s Rapture is 150 meters below the northern mid-Atlantic

You’d think that our posters for space missions would be super official. Nope.

You could eat 24 tubes of toothpaste before keeling over

∞ Beat any child in a find Waldo contest with the mathematically best path

Does Superman have super-ethics, or something worse?

Physics valentines and anti-valentines, because symmetry!

How long do you have to cut off a zombie-bitten limb? Just seconds.

Robin Hood is a brilliant economist

∞ A New Hope’s opening crawl is about 18,000 miles overhead right now

The full set of Apollo speeches

I love like geology

I finally know what the heck The One Ring does

∞ You’re the light arrow of my life

 

Sciencey GIFs and Images

The Spanish shawl nudibranch is so vivid it’s surreal

The exoplanet gold rush

∞ So I can make a camera stabilizer out of a green vine snake?

I love that this bubble pops at roughly the same speed as the BB popping it

Dodge ram

∞ Venture inside a tarantula with animated GIFs from Jacob O’Neal

The balance is strong with this one

I’m betting on the hippo

That thing when you’re hitting the slopes and you pass right by a mountain lion literally chillin’

Bad idea #98463937928: Shark petting

If thou gaze long into an abyss, a smiley face will also gaze into thee

∞ What it is like to be punched by a drunk gorilla

We should teach sex ed with snapping turtles

Chinchillout

Holy cow did a ram just take out this cow

And so, among the crab graveyard, the ray finds another victim

 

Pop Culture Happenings

The Oxford English Dictionary has more than 80 different synonyms for “grey”

∞ Playing Fallout: New Vegas on an old TV looks absolutely perfect

Emojis for the introvert

∞ TBS speeds up Seinfeld 7.5 percent to get more commercials in

I got lost in Aakash Nihalani’s EYE SCREAM SUNDAY for awhile

∞ How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

I don’t even know how to describe these sculptures. They’re just amazing

Get lost in a graphic of the history of the world from a Biblical perspective 4004 B.C.-1878

“There is no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” — The Food Babe

This guy can teach how to turn yourself into Frieza if you have the right make-up

My reaction to most of Internet culture

I think I found emojis for every Pokemon

∞ Secular parents do just fine, maybe even better, compared to religious parents

Elizabeth Warren takes on Rand Paul’s ‘profound mental disorders’

Cholesterol in your diet will soon be OK in latest guidelines

This “Bigfoot video” is spooky, sure, but it’s also totally fake

∞ In Tokyo zoo security drills, the best image gallery

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

Literary Study Finds All Modern Narratives Derived From Classic ‘Alien Vs. Predator’ Conflict

ART I tell you

And the conservatives lose another talking point: HPV Vaccination Not Linked to Riskier Sex

Tyson Boop

What is Wrong with MAD MAX’s War Boys?

What is Wrong with MAD MAX’s War Boys?

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Hundreds of Real Doctors Have Famous Fictional Doctor Names

Hundreds of Real Doctors Have Famous Fictional Doctor Names

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The Mysterious Medical Condition That Gives People Dragon Faces

The Mysterious Medical Condition That Gives People Dragon Faces

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