the fact that those letters don’t form a secret message is one of my biggest disappointments in sga

It’s your lucky day! They do form a secret message. The message itself is a little out of order, but from top to bottom (and rearranged a little) they say: 

WE HOLD THESE AS THE TRUTH
A HEARTY WELCOME TO THOSE OF OTHER WORLDS
VISITING OUR HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME (W)ELCOME AGAIN
TO THOSE RETURNING YOU HAVE BEEN GONE TOO LONG AND YOUR
ABSENCE HAS WEIGHED HEAVILY ON OUR SOULS WE ARE
WHOLE AGAIN THAT YOU ARE AMONG US AND WE CELEBRATE YOU BEING HERE AGAIN
AS WE LEAVE FOR DISTANT WORLDS WE PLEDGE TO RESPECT THE LANDS OF
OUR NEIGHBOURS AND TO ACT WITH INTEGRITY AS AMBASSADORS IN PEACE TIME
OF OUR PEOPLE TRAVELERS WITH OPEN HEARTS WILL ALWAYS BE WELCOME REFUGEES (x)

There’s also a nice picture of the translation that someone else did.

Thom Ang is an artist who’s done a whole lot of extraordinary work for the X-files. 

This is only a small sample. It’s a bit hard to find all of it, but he was responsible for a fair number of the X-files trading cards back in the day - I have three of them (all Eugene Tooms of course, though two are from a VHS tape promotion) and they are truly gorgeous.

WELCOME (BACK) TO THE FUTURE

Knock loud, I’m home

I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?

More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.

The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.

Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.

Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this– first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.

The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place. 

This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.

This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown.


(Source)

THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL. MAN I LOVE SCIENCE. SO MUCH.

This is awesome.

Booom

Fingal’s Cave, Scotland

Located on the uninhabited island of Staffa, Fingal’s Cave has a unique, cathedral-like structure and hexagonal columns, according to the National Trust for Scotland. (Source)

Marvel Announces Star Wars Lando Series

Coast Guard Aircraft Spots 100-Year-Old Shipwrecks

A helicopter from the U.S. Coast Guard’s Traverse City, Mich. station was on a routine patrol mission over northern Lake Michigan Friday, when crew members noticed a chilling sight.

Beneath the crystal clear waters of the lake — now free of ice, but still just above freezing — they could see the wreckage of numerous lost ships on the lake bottom. They took a series of photos and posted them to the station’s Facebook page, and invited local historical buffs to help them identify the wrecks.

Marvel Villains.

Created by: Patrick Brown.

Can I just say that I love that the artist made Stan Lee the bartender!

EXCUSE ME WHY IS BUCKY IN THIS PICTURE

He infiltrated the place, bluffing something about being a sort of antagonist, and pointing out that he had undeniably villainous-looking hair. He’s actually there to take out someone far more dangerous than himself. Note that he’s poised ready to throw a knife. Most of the attention in the room is on the arm-wrestling match (though some people have other things to think about, like 70s Tyrion who’s about to get arrowed, and Mystique is probably wondering why the artist drew her arching her back and sticking her tits out while looking vaguely in the direction of nothing). He’ll throw his knife, it’ll whisper through the air and thud home, the target will crumple silently to the ground, and Bucky will have melted away into the shadows before anyone notices, because by that point Loki will be making a big whiny fuss about how he got a cramp and it’s not fair and he demands a do-over.
Pick your target; I favour the Red Skull.