Spockvarietyhour: Posts tagged SCIENCE!

#SCIENCE!

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I know a title like The Sixth Extinction doesn’t suggest much humor (and there isn’t much. honestly I’m terrified), but by far the funniest thing in this book are accounts of what scientists used to think about extinction.

Apparently, and I guess it makes sense, nobody really thought about extinction back in the day. Fossils were regarded as curiosities, or by some cultures as spiritual stones, and nobody considered there may have been some animals alive before that aren’t alive now.

And then when extinction was a Concept TM, it was widely regarded that it happens gradually and continuously. So when some younger scientists started looking at massive die-offs in the fossil records and they were like “hey uh……so like 66 millions years ago…..um…everything died. something must have Happened”

ALL OF THE “ESTABLISHED” scientists in society were like “you fucking.,, , , , , , IDIOT!!! You FOOL!!!!!!! That’s CODSWALLOP!!!!!”

and basically anyone who brought up mass extinctions were made to be huge laughing stocks and I’m just reading about the scientists who laughed so hard at the concept of the mass extinctions like “oh buddy……… … …I know you were regarded as a genius in your time and I know all of my knowledge is entirely 100% circumstantial based on when I was born so technically in this topic I’m not actually smarter than you but. Did you have to be such an ass……… . . ”

Science!Science Quotation Marks

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mondrianyone

So the sun’s orbit is the infinity symbol. How cool is that?!

Borrowed from INature FB group. Thank you!

space science!

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ri-science

LEVITATING PUMPKINS!

“And the cursed pumpkin rose up from the earth, carried to the sky by the spirits of All Hallows’ Eve.” Or in other words, Andy put a superconductor in a pumpkin and levitated it on a magnetic track.

Watch the full video here!

did-you-kno

I know, Halloween is done. But Ri Science did some pretty amazing things with pumpkins that I thought you needed to see. If the levitation wasn’t enough, here’s some more:

Exploring Pumpkins and Thermite

In the top pumpkin, the reaction between iron oxide (rust) and aluminium powder, set off by a strip of magnesium to provide enough heat, produces iron and aluminium oxide.

The reaction is incredibly exothermic, occurring at about 2000 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the iron melts and is spewed out in a rain of fire, and flows out as a river of molten metal into the poor head below. This is more than enough to set off the gun cotton in the second pumpkin, which bursts into a healthy fireball.