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It’s like something out of the Jumanji cartoon.

A gyro stabilizer cube. 

Elemental Profile: Krypton

Krypton is the thirty sixth element on the periodic table, giving it thirty six protons and electrons. It occurs in trace amounts in the Earth’s atmosphere, at a concentration of about 1 ppm.

On the periodic table, it falls into the group of noble gases, the right most column, or group. The noble gases are all odorless, colorless gases that are extremely nonreactive or chemically inert. This is because the outer valence electron shells of these gases are already filled and krypton doesn’t need to bond with other atoms to get a full set of electrons.

Krypton is white and crystalline when solidified (the melting/solidification temperature is 115.78 K or −157.37 °C) and has over thirty known isotopes, six of which are considered stable.

Source.

This amazing motion capture film ventures inside what is said to be the largest steel processing plant in the world, Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, in the city of Magnitogorsk, in Chelyabinsk Province, Russia.

The incredible imagery and contemplative soundtrack give an ordinarily very grimy and no doubt uncomfortable setting a highly transcendent quality.

How the fuck does Bill Nye expect this to happen? What do you want to do, force women to enroll in science courses, regardless of whether or not they want to do it? Just for the sake of having “enough” women? Why the fuck do these fractions matter so much? It’s not like people are holding guns to our head and threatening to kill us if we become interested in science.

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of us DON’T FUCKING WANT to be scientists. Is that a crime?

Hi there, princess-munchkin. Female engineering student here. 

Bill Nye is not saying that you HAVE to be a scientist, and you are right that no one is holding a gun to my head because I am interested in science, but let me tell you some of the struggles of being a woman in the STEM fields. 

1) Because I am a woman, I am not expected these fields. I first fully realized this when I was in high school, on my robotics team. See, although my robotics team was about 50% female, most of the women were part of the “business administration” side of things: finance, marketting, PR, membership, etc. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. But I was there to be an engineer, and specifically, to be the robot programmer. This was met with a lot of hesitation at first from some of the other students (all of whom happened to be male. This is not necessarily a bad thing.) You see, all of the robot programmers before me were guys. Computer programming is just a thing that guys do, or so they thought. Even after I had proved myself to the mentors on the team, many of the students still underestimated my abilities. There were rumors going around that I wouldn’t have been able to program the robot at all if the lead software mentor wasn’t there to help me. This was just flat-out false, but it wasn’t until I won an award for the team that the other students actually saw my merit. 

2) There is not a lot of encouragement for women to go into these fields. I first noticed this when I was in elementary school. I was always interested in math, science, you name it, but many of my teachers and family members pushed that to the side for a long time. When I asked for legos for christmas, I would get ballet slippers. In fact, for a long time, I was training to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance. I loved math more, but no one seemed to notice that about me. It wasn’t until I had a long conversation with one particular teacher in high school that I decided to look into engineering. I had never even considered it as an option before, because no one decided to encourage me to pursue my interest in science. If it hadn’t been for that teacher, I would probably not be at the school I am at right now. 

3) For a long time, Engineering/Science/Math WAS a “boys only” club. Let me tell you when some of the top technical schools and societies started letting women in:

Do you see the implications of this? Engineering has been a part of our society since around the late 1800s (in the case of RPI, since the 1820s), but women weren’t even allowed in for the most part until the 1950s, regardless of their merit. 

4) Because of the fact that it was a “boys only” club for such a long time, there are not a lot of women engineers and scientists to look up to. When you’re reading your physics, chemistry, and math text books, the majority of those theories were came up with by men. It is true that much of our history was written by White Men, but this does not mean that the fact that there are few women scientists to look up does not matter. 

So, as you can hopefully see, princess-munckin, or anyone else that shares the opinions of princess-munchkin, Bill Nye was not arguing that women that are not interested in STEM should go into those fields anyway. But he IS arguing against all of the systematic barriers set up against women who ARE interested in engineering and science. There are several women out there who are just as good as the boys at math and science, but will never pursue their interests because it just doesn’t seem like an option. That was me for a long time. I am super grateful for the fact that I fought against that, and that I ended up where I am. 

if you don’t like science, fine. Don’t be a scientist. But if one day you have a daughter and she shows interest in being a scientist, PLEASE encourage her. Because Bill Nye is right, there needs to be more women scientists in the world. 

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it monday

Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries  (via

sonnywortzik)

#THIS IS ACTUALLY A THING?#KIDS BELIEVE IN CONSUMPTION AS THE HIGHEST FORM OF CONTROL#THAT’S WHY THEY ARE OBSESSED WITH APEX PREDATORS

(via recursivities)

Mostly Mute Monday: Sunsets From Space

While we’re used to dramatic, slow sunsets where it takes between two and three minutes simply for the Sun’s disk to drop below the horizon, it takes mere seconds for the Sun to go from a barely-visible red glow to a brilliant, blinding white. In the space of a few breaths, the entire thing is over, a sight that only around 500 people have ever experienced firsthand.

Sputnik One rides Old Number Seven into orbit, October 4, 1957

via reddit

Sharks are Coming by carlosgrillo Sharks and Diver. Tiger Beach, Bahamas.

February 9, 2015

Today In History

‘Dr. Bernard A. Harris, Jr. became the first Black astronaut to take a spacewalk on this date February 9, 1995. Harris was the Payload Commander on STS-63 (February 2-11, 1995)—the first flight of a joint Russian and American space program.’

(photo: Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr.)

- CARTER Magazine

Inspirational Woman of Science: Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

She is a research fellow in UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies and an Honorary Research Associate in UCL Department of Physics and Astronomy. She has designed a number of space instruments and now presents Sky At Night.

She is also at number one in Debrett’s list of most influential people in Britain within science and medicine. 

Despite suffering from dyslexia and being a woman of colour in a field dominated by white men, Maggie is (one of if not) the best in her field right now.

Find Out More:

[Photograph Credit: Richard Saker for the Observer]

SNOOTING AROUND AT THE SPEED OF SOUND

Svalbard Ptarmigan by Tony Northrup Photography.

It’s a mix of hell and outer space.

how are u going to tell me mermaids dont exist then 

this scares the shit outa me

i still wanna explore it

Hedgehog Particles Could Mean Safer Water-Repellant Paints, Better Drug Delivery

An unexpected find in a University of Michigan chemical engineering lab could lead to safer, cheaper water-repellant paints and coatings that don’t use hazardous volatile solvents.

Typical coatings and paints that are formulated to shed water use oily pigments that are hydrophobic, meaning they don’t readily mix with safe solvents composed mainly of water. To help these color particles stay suspended and distributed so they can be applied in even coats on surfaces, they are often dissolved in chemicals like hexane and toluene, hydrocarbons refined as part of gasoline production. Such compounds impact the respiratory and central nervous systems of humans and animals. They are also air and water pollutants.

A team led by biomedical and chemical engineering professor Nicholas Kotov says they have discovered a new process to make the surface-coating particles that could cut out the dangerous solvents. They have been able to modify oily, hydrophobic microspheres of polystyrene by growing microscopic spikes on their surfaces. The spikes, which can be grown on many types of material, let the so-called “hedgehog” particles stably disperse in water-based solutions. When applied to fabrics and paper in a water-based solution, they created superhydrophobic coatings. 

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White stout

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