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This Week in Science: Understanding Pi and Iron Man Lends a Bionic Hand

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

What it felt like to be the last man on the Moon

Feeding piranhas

What a cackle of hyenas can do to a carcass in one night

As oceans warm, starving sea lions wash ashore

∞ How the Penguin Got Its Waddle

3D acoustic levitation is still one of the few ‘WOW” videos I’ve seen

Being Stabbed with a Mucus Dagger Is Not Even the Worst Part of Snail Sex

The first successful penis transplant

A rocket that may one day take us to Mars roars to life

∞ “The first documented case of natural selection in humans for a defense against an environmental poison

Male burying beetles who have more sex have less “self-esteem”

Ahhhh tiny chameleons are so dorbs

There are 228,445 known marine organisms

NASA Can Make 3 More Nuclear Batteries, And That’s It

Popping a water balloon underwater is exactly as cool as it sounds

∞ How Do Chameleons Change Color?

We have a new potential date for the start of the Anthropocene

Sometimes you have to feed a cow a magnet

On GMO spider Viagra: “One’s penis is not a good place to develop congestion.”

As if gecko feet weren’t amazing enough, their skin is self-cleaning too

As global warming opens up a path, whales will end up on the wrong side of the world

Ancient giant squid were still giant

Currently watching a peregrine falcon watching someone in Baltimore in real-time

On trying to get the perfect camera trap picture, and getting it

Why are van Gogh’s paintings slowly turning white?

∞ “Homeopathy is not effective for treating any health condition,” report concludes

The largest harvesting of animal biomass in human history was of whales in the last 100 years

I had no idea induction heating was so instantaneous

I’m astounded that a model plane can be so light that its propeller hardly needs to spin at all

We’ve located a star screaming through the galaxy at 2.7 million miles per hour

Are humans going extinct any time soon, or will we learn to better play the game?

Underwater nuclear explosions are like protests from Poseidon

∞ Meet LA’s newest mountain lions

Why do we pretend like all opinions are equal? Maybe the “equality bias”

Maybe my favorite solar system scale visualization: If the Moon Were Only One Pixel

Pendulum motion is so satisfying to watch with bowling balls

∞ An aquarium shark vomited up a human forearm and started a murder mystery

When a supernova explodes four times

Making an affordable, customizable 3D-printed arm for kids

Someone explain these awesome fluid dynamics to me

There are no “alternative cancer cures”

We might finally “vaccinate” ourselves against HIV without vaccines

∞ “Barehanding” live power lines looks pulse-pounding

Daylight Saving Time needs to die (at least as the US knows it)

 

Extreme Nerdery

The power of a good GIF: Making Pi instantly understandable

Gak is a decent thermal insulator, apparently

∞ Who else would it be

I’d love to walk into a science lab with sun shining through these beautiful portraits

Spider-Man moves to the country

Fluid dynamics in ASCII

∞ I love RDJ for giving a little fan a 3D-printed Iron Man limb in character

Do we have enough nuclear weapons to match Adventure Time’s “Mushroom War”?

∞ Paste into Google: 2+(-sqrt(1-x^2-(y- abs(x))^2))cos(30((2-x^2-(y-abs(x))^2))), x is from -1 to 1, y is from -1 to 1.5, z is from 1 to 2

Apple Watch Vibranium Edition would cost $600,000

Every loop in Edge of Tomorrow

An interactive comic from Science explains general relativity with superhuman ease

Want to make a laser-guided blowgun for pocket change? Well, here ya go

∞ The tube of air weighs around the Eiffel Tower more than the Eiffel Tower, and other fantastic insights

No Man’s Sky is so big that the developers coded robots to explore it for them

A full map of Link’s Awakening

 

Sciencey GIFs and Images

Your reminder that giant anteater legs are pandas

∞ My new favorite GIF: Vaping in decibel-doused car on a high-speed camera

A nuclear blast up close looks like something out of Dragon Ball Z

Honestly, welding up-close and in slow-motion may be one of my most mind-melting GIFs ever

There is so much physics in this water balloon popping I wouldn’t know where to start

∞ I’ve never seen a shockwave this clearly

“The sheep…they have come.”

Resistance is futile

A mantid is born

The delightful physics of the sand dunes in Merzouga, Morocco

Scientists sometimes make an ant Pompeii happen with molten metal

∞ Faig Ahmed’s glitch carpets will make your guests question their sanity

Mimic octopus: Beetlejuice sandworm edition

 

Pop Culture Happenings

Private flights have all the fun

∞ “We’ll return after these messages” was inserted to help younger viewers distinguish programming from advertising

The an interactive web of sexual encounters on Archer

Anti-vaxxer bets 100,000 that measles isn’t really a virus. Doctor provides proof. Court orders him to pay up

Why some people are scared of a Google truth machine

∞ The Heart-Stopping Climbs of Alex Honnold

Terry Pratchett

Reverse psychology in advertising is now my favorite

Can’t disagree with the gifys winners this year

This is a real photo, with a real mayor

Amazing! Prosthetic Allows Dog To Sting With Deadly Poison For First Time

Attorneys expected to announce a coalition to take on the fraud and lies in the supplement industry

Headline of the day: “Concrete block full of human teeth serves as a memorial to dentist’s dog”

∞ Asphyxia: A trippy dance performance captured with Kinects

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, on the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, has “never sent an email”

In Florida, officials ban term ‘climate change’

Tyson Boop

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