The Big Think

How to turn a sphere inside-out – Absurd Intellectual: “”

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122 degrees F. and 100% humidity make special suits and breathing gear mandatory, but these crystal structure would make it worth it. Beautiful!

Scientists decode the entire genetic code of skin cancer and lung cancer. Although this is just a first step in curing these (and other) cancer’s, it’s a huge first step. Equivalent to unearthing the Rosetta Stone in the detangling of Heiroglyphs.

Popular science on how old is dirt.

National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen adopted by Antarctica predator.

What Would Happen if I Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.”

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A piece of a baguette dropped by a passing bird caused a shutdown at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.

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Okay, this is really neat.

A new da Vinci portrait is discovered by finding a faint fingerprint of the master.

Superheavy Element 114 is finally deemed unstable after long research. Bummer. Scientists had hoped that, after element 113, the very unstable massive elements might start to become stable again. Guess not.

Maybe it’s not a good idea to get vaccinated for the flu after all. Sheesh.

The deadly black London Fog, and 7 other weird weather phenomenon.

Scientists photograph a single atom’s electron cloud.

Cool mysterious tubular clouds.

Bodies from the ice.