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Ghost Head Nebula (Detail)

Credit: NASA/Hubble, color/effects thedemon-hauntedworld 

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The Pleiades Open Cluster

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2001: A Space Odyssey 

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NASA astronauts on the ISS are about to eat the first space grown vegetables ever

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Space Shuttle interior - galley

Source: 5DII

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Here’s an example of photoacoustic imaging! A combination of light and sound were used to reveal the network of tiny veins in the iris (that’s the colored part of the eye) of a mouse. 

Scientists hope that this technique can someday be used to monitor brain activity in real time and high definition. Read up on how the process works here.

Image:  Lihong Wang/Optical Imaging Laboratory/Washington University, GIF by Meredith Rizzo

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this is strangely adorable

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I /really/ love Evangelion’s user interfaces. The problem I have with most modern science fiction UIs is that they’re way too polished for no reason. Stuff like mining rigs, or military vehicles- they all have this over-nice reactive UI that bounces and squiggles whenever characters touch them. Who would program any of this shit? Not only that, but there’s a lot of bullshit shapes that show no meaningful information to the user.  This is why I love the computer/set design of Evangelion (and also stuff like Alien). They look and feel beat up. Used. Real. When I look at Evangelion’s UI, I’m reminded of oscilloscopes and other things real engineers use. Sure there’s a lot of noise on the screen, but all of it feels like it could MEAN something to someone in-universe.

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Illustration from ‘Wonderland of Science’ [1930’s]

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Hello from the children of planet Earth.

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Broadacre city Frank Loyd Wright

Utopian Architecture 1352 posts

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“In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.”

Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?

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NGC2244 - the Heart of the Rosette Nebula

The Rosette Nebula (also known as Caldwell 49) is a large, circular H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The open cluster NGC 2244 (Caldwell 50) is closely associated with the nebulosity, the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula’s matter.

The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of some 5,200 light-years from Earth (although estimates of the distance vary considerably, down to 4,900 light-years.) and measure roughly 130 light years in diameter. The radiation from the young stars excite the atoms in the nebula, causing them to emit radiation themselves producing the emission nebula we see. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses.

Credit: Jim Collins/Wikipedia

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Interstellar (2014)