my mind begins to hum...

[Simon of the Playa]

eat drink and be merry

[Simon of the Playa]

[Ugly Dougly]

A group of Korean geneticists has altered the sexual preferences of female mice by removing a single gene linked to reproductive behavior. Without the gene, the mice gravitated toward mice of the same sex.

Those mice who retained the gene, called FucM, were attracted to male mice. (FucM is short for fucose mutarotase.)

The geneticists' study, published last week in the journal BMC Genetics explains that female mice without FucM avoided male mice, declined to sniff male urine, and made passes at other females.

[Ugly Dougly]

In November, Stephen Hawking and his bulging computer brain gave humanity what we thought was an intimidating deadline for finding a new planet to call home: 1,000 years.

Ten centuries is a blip in the grand arc of the universe, but in human terms it was the apocalyptic equivalent of getting a few weeks' notice before our collective landlord (Mother Earth) kicks us to the curb.

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

Question
I am endowed with a large bust and consequently always have to wear a bra for support. If I was flying in space in a zero-gravity environment, would I no longer require my undergarment? And, if not, what shape would my breasts assume? So many female astronauts have gone into space that I feel sure there is an answer.

Answer
Your correspondent would not need a bra in zero gravity. She can experience for herself the shape her breasts would assume by swimming braless. Breast tissue has an almost neutral buoyancy in water, and the shape of the breasts would be controlled by tissue elasticity and blood pressure. If she was occupied with something diverting while in space, which one hopes she would be, she would probably be unaware of her breasts. But whenever she pushed herself off the walls of the spacecraft to move about, the breasts would wobble and brush against clothing. Because light friction can be more distracting than firm contact, she might find a bra desirable in such a situation. Of course, during blast-off and re-entry, gravity would certainly play a part . . .

Michael Bell, Hitchin, Hertfordshire

Answer
Your correspondent's breasts would not weigh anything in space but they would still have mass and momentum. It would feel similar to swimming in water without a costume.

If they are large breasts, then this could prove to be disconcerting both for you and your fellow astronauts.

The problem was considered in the 1973 science fiction novel written by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama, in which he wrote: "Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin."

[Simon of the Playa]

"In November, Stephen Hawking and his bulging computer brain gave humanity what we thought was an intimidating deadline for finding a new planet to call home: 1,000 years."



last week he updated this number to 100.


seriously.

[Simon of the Playa]

[Simon of the Playa]

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[lucky420]

"In November, Stephen Hawking and his bulging computer brain gave humanity what we thought was an intimidating deadline for finding a new planet to call home: 1,000 years."



last week he updated this number to 100.


seriously.

That is depressing as fuck

[Ugly Dougly]

[align=center]To be sure, Earth is facing some big problems, including climate change, overpopulation, epidemics, and asteroid strikes. But before we flee this planet like an action hero jumping out of an explosion, let’s think about this for a second. Sure, it’d be great to have a backup civilization somewhere in case asteroids wipe out all life on Earth. And it would be one of the most exciting things humankind has ever done. But what would it actually require?

Mars is a somewhat obvious choice because it’s nearby, but it’s not exactly Earth 2.0. In fact, it’s arguably a lot worse off than Earth. It has toxic soil, it’s freezing cold, and the air is unbreathable. Any Martian colony would likely rely on regular care packages from home, which would not work well if Earth was done-zo.

If we really want to find the perfect home away from home, we could look to other star systems: with billions of planets in the Milky Way, there’s a good chance some will have water, land, and breathable air. But so far we haven’t found Earth’s twin, and our telescopes don’t have the kind of resolution that could tell us in detail what an exoplanet is like. Also, it would take hundreds of years to get there, and if those passengers don’t die along the way, they’d likely evolve into a new species before they even got to their new planet.

We would need to send significant numbers of people to other worlds in order to ensure the survival of the human species. Small colonies are subject to genetic anomalies from inbreeding, and vulnerable to getting wiped out in accidents.

NASA’s missions to Mars will likely only carry as many as six people at a time to the red planet. SpaceX wants to develop an Interplanetary Transport System to deliver 100 Martian settlers at a time, but at the moment it is nothing more than an imaginary behemoth.

The interstellar route is even more challenging, because we don’t even have an imaginary spacecraft capable of supporting thousands of people for hundreds of years on an interstellar journey.

And in either case, there’s always the politically charged question of: who goes and who stays? Do poor and disadvantaged people get left behind on a hellish world?[/align]

http://www.popsci.com/stephen-hawking-h ... onize-mars

[Ugly Dougly]

This is where the real cost comes in. If we go by the numbers from SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy can transport stuff to space for the low, low price of about $1,000 per pound. A USS George Herbert Walker Bush (CVN-77) worth of stuff weighs about 114,000 short tons. So a pair of them are 228,000 short tons, or 456 million pounds. Multiply that by $1,000 dollars per pound and... Yeah. We're talking $456 billion just to get this into orbit, or $468.4 billion for an Enterprise-shaped space station, total. And that's not including labor.

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

"...the souls of humans are the stars and return to those stars when they die. Plato says that the demiurge made 'souls equal in number with the stars and distributed them, each soul to its several star...and he who should live well for his due span of time should journey back to the habitation of his consort star'..." (This is from Plato's Timaeus)

All elements (above helium) were synthesized in the cores of past stars that went supernova and exploded into space. This cosmic dust is later used to form other stars! The hydrogen in our bodies was made shortly after the Big Bang. There is evidence that the material that makes up the Sun and planets is "third generation"; in other words, it is material that has been inside two previous stars before our Sun formed. So therefore we all contain "Star Dust", just like Carl Sagan said.

Here is a quick description of the death of a star and how much star dust we actually have in us...

After a star has created enough iron, fusion ceases and the hot burning core begins to cool. Up until this point the hot core of the star erupting outwards and preventing gravity from collapsing the star. Now that the star has cooled, the core no longer expands and gravity quickly collapses the star. The star implodes with enough energy to immediately fuse some of the atoms into higher elements like Nickel, Krypton, Gold, Uranium,… etc. This quick and violent implosion releases an enormous amount of energy that explodes the star. This is what we call a supernova! Astrophysicists are still not exactly certain about the details of how a supernova explodes. Hopefully you can figure it out someday! The exploded remains from a supernova travel through out the universe only to someday clump together with other stardust and give birth to a new star. This is the life of our universe. Now that we have established that every element in the periodic table aside from hydrogen is essentially stardust, we have to determine how much of our body is made up of this stardust. If we know how many hydrogen atoms are in our body, then we can say that the rest is stardust. Our body is composed of roughly 7x1027 atoms. That is a lot of atoms! Try writing that number out on a piece of paper: 7 with 27 zeros behind it. We say roughly because if you pluck a hair or pick your nose there might be slightly less. Now it turns out that of those billion billion billion atoms, 4.2x1027 of them are hydrogen. Remember that hydrogen is bigbang dust and not stardust. This leaves 2.8x1027 atoms of stardust. Thus the amount of stardust atoms in our body is 40%. Since stardust atoms are the heavier elements, the percentage of star mass in our body is much more impressive. Most of the hydrogen in our body floats around in the form of water. The human body is about 60% water and hydrogen only accounts for 11% of that water mass. Even though water consists of two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, hydrogen has much less mass. We can conclude that 93% of the mass in our body is stardust. Just think, long ago someone may have wished upon a star that you are made of.

Even the Ancient Egyptians believed that their deceased kings would return to the stars, where they would enjoy their afterlife. The stars were heavily incorporated into Ancient Egyptian ideologies and everyday life.

If a soul does truly exist and our physical bodies are just "vessels" for these souls to inhabit then it might just go back to a star once we die. Maybe we don't have the technology to detect a soul yet, or maybe it's outside the realm of scientific examination. We basically go back to the source from which we came, as you know we are all connected, as we all coexist in this universe. Call it the "So(u)l Theory" for now...

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Simon of the Playa]

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art by silas hite

[Ugly Dougly]

[Simon of the Playa]

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always wear your suit to the beach.

[Simon of the Playa]

[Ugly Dougly]

Religious leader William Miller began preaching in 1831 that the end of the world as we know it would occur with the second coming of Jesus Christ in 1843. He attracted as many as 100,000 followers who believed that they would be carried off to heaven when the date arrived. When the 1843 prediction failed to materialize, Miller recalculated and determined that the world would actually end in 1844. Follower Henry Emmons wrote, “I waited all Tuesday, and dear Jesus did not come … I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain—sick with disappointment.”

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

Also referred to as "disruption" or being "drawn and quartered", dismemberment could be brought about by chaining four horses to the condemned's arms and legs, thus making them pull him apart, as was the case with the executions of François Ravaillac in 1610 and Robert-François Damiens in 1757.

[Simon of the Playa]

the world crashes into my living room.

[Simon of the Playa]

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