Here’s a new one: a white dwarf has been found with an atmosphere of pure oxygen… no hydrogen or helium. Speculation is that it was part of a binary system; the companion explodes and blew the lighter gases off the white dwarf, leaving the more deeply-buried oxygen.
This story is a little… ummm…
“Scarily lifelife” clearly has a different meaning on the other side of the pond. Especially note this photo… I may not be a great expert on women, but something about that seems a little off. Is it normal for women to be supported by steel frames attached to their spines? Or to have ankles like that? My years of wild hedonism may have been mis-spent.
Raedthinn and Fingers…
First up: the recently ended “Mythbusters” is apparently coming back on The Science Channel. Yay. But then there’s this:
the Discovery-owned cable network has greenlighted a reality competition series titled Search for the Next MythBusters, … will focus on finding an “all-new generation of myth-busting science superstars with mind-blowing build skills and nerves of steel.” It will involve both social media and stunts
Ahhhhh…. ummmm….
A reality show, coupled with “social media.” Yeah. Sure. That will surely lead to some quality scienticians.
Well, at least they’re renweing “How the Universe Works” and “Through the Wormhole.”
A quarter century ago when I was in college, it was the fashion of the day to put posters on your dorm room wall. For a lot of the straight guys, that meant posters of improbably hot babes… cheerleaders and models and such. Other guys put up posters of football and basketball players; by process of elimination, these would not seem to have been other straight guys.
This is one of the posters I put up:
I picked up this “Theoretical Performance of Rocket Propellant Combinations” poster by Rocketdyne at the Dayton Air Show sometime around 1989, and now it’s in pretty rough shape. It was stuck to a dorm wall with blu-tack and tape, and torn and taped back up; it survived college to wind up stuck to the walls at various places of aerospace employment and followed me all over the continent. I’ve finally gotten around to scanning the thing, and will expend some effort in fixing it up.
Never mind semi-naked hotties, *this* was the thing to have on your wall. This and the cutaway diagram of the starship Enterprise and the posters of nuclear mushroom clouds were *way* better. Yes, I was the coolest.
Some time ago I scored two other variants of the Propellant Performance poster off of ebay. The one below dates from 1964 and is printed on what has got to be the worst paper ever created… no flexibility whatsoever. I have books centuries old that have paper far less brittle that this thing. Fortunately I got it scanned and am well on the way to restoring the image.
And the third one? Frakked if I know where it is. I assume one of my cats has hidden it for some nefarious purpose.
So, earlier today some doofus hijacked an EgyptAir flight and made the pilot take him to Cuba Cyprus, using a fake suicide bomb to do his thing. At the end all the passengers bailed off the plane safely… but one stopped to take a selfie. Most of the time selfies are just embarrassingly bad bits of halfassed photographic self-promotion… but this’d be a selfie I’d be proud to hang on my wall if it was me:
March 17, a telescope in Austria caught this:
And as seen from Ireland:
… the man knew how to decorate an office.
Early 60’s:
Later 60’s:
Does anyone know of a good, clear color version of just the painting from the first photo? That’s the lunar lander from the “Project Horizon” days, when the Saturn was an Army project.
Some photos (from ebay) of a NASA PR glossy from December, 1961, showing the then-current Saturn C-5 configuration. Note the fairly obvious signs of some retouching of the engines on the first stage… either the engines were originally larger, or they were larger in number. Note the lack of the small but distinctive stabilizing fins on the first stage.
Arglebargle!
Where we are told in no uncertain terms that products that lighten your skin are supporting white supremacy, are a form of colonialism, etc.
Oddly no mention of skin *darkening* products or treatments. You know, like tanning beds. Or spray-on tans. Or tanning creams. Or promoting natural tanning via damaging your skin with UV exposure from excessive sunlight, ramping up your cancer risk.
