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Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."

Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

-JFK

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This dramatic example of Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds was taken near the Galapagos Islands last week. The shark-fin-like clouds are the result of two air layers moving past one another. The velocity difference at their interface creates an unstable shear layer that quickly breaks down. The resemblance of the clouds to breaking ocean waves is no coincidence – the wind moving over the ocean’s surface generates waves via the same Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. In the case of the clouds above, the lower layer of air was moist enough to condense, which is why the pattern is visible. Clouds like these don’t tend to last for long because the disturbances that drive the instability grow exponentially quickly, leading to turbulence. (Image credit: C. Miller; via Washington Post; submitted by @jmlinhart)

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Help us do some science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of FYFD readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve FYFD and contributing to novel academic research on the readers of science blogs. It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here.

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Human spaceflight to scale.

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Whimsical Animated GIFs of Illustrations From the Smithsonian Library

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There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools, singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white, Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale, "There Will Come Soft Rains"

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17 Equations That Changed The World

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Harold Ramis really had no intention of starring in the film, only writing it. But he decided to star in this film as Dr. Egon Spengler after he felt he was the best person suited for the role.

Ghostbusters (1984)

R.I.P. Harold Ramis

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Quick, fashion a climbing harness out of cat-6 cable and follow me down.

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The first two components of the International Space Station were joined 15 years ago today.

“That’s what the ISS means to me: a permanent human presence in space. The orbital perspective open to all of us, through the eyes, the words, the hearts of fellow men and women… it’s all of us turning step-by-step into a space-faring civilization.” — Samantha Cristoforetti, ESA Astronaut [x]

image 1: The International Space Station orbiting Earth. Credit: NASA image 2: NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Expedition 24 flight engineer, looks through a window in the Cupola of the International Space Station. A blue and white part of Earth and the blackness of space are visible through the windows. The image was a self-portrait using natural light. Image credit: NASA/Tracy Caldwell Dyson. image 3: 50 Years Ago: Yuri’s Planet

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"Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it."

XKCD

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This Must Be the Place (8-bit Nintendo Version)

Original track by Talking Heads

Remix by apmeehan

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Jean-Pierre Jeunet Week Amelie, 2001 Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel

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Huge Viruses Are Shaking Up The Tree of Life

Pandoraviruses are challenging some long-held biological beliefs. These newly-discovered beasts are larger, in size and in genetic complexity, than any other virus that we know of (details on the graphic are below). They are not as doom-worthy as their name implies, but they may have opened a box full of new biological forms that will challenge what we think of when we say “alive” or “virus”. For the scientific low-down on pandoraviruses, check out this great article by Carl Zimmer.

Giant viruses of all kinds seem to be more common than we’ve ever imagined. It makes sense, in a way. Just like there is not a clear transition point between any two species, the complexity of life should also exist on a continuum from the small (bacterial viruses) to the complex (us). So maybe these little guys aren’t so surprising after all?

I drew up a little graphic (above) to show just how large and complex pandoraviruses are compared to other life forms. 

Pandoraviruses are huge. A human egg cell is about 100 millionths of a meter across. An E. coli is about 50 times smaller. But pandoraviruses (which dwarf flu viruses) are nearly as big as the bacterium! 

The area of the circles show how many genes each type of cell contains. The human genome has about 20,000 genes, while E. coli has about 4,500. Compared to a measly 13 genes in the flu virus, pandoraviruses have about 2,500!, almost none of which seem to be related to known genes.

The size of the genome, in bases, is where it gets weird. The human egg’s genome, at 3 billion bases, dwarfs them all. E. coli and pandoraviruses have around 4 and 2 million, respectively. And there’s a tiny little single pixel in there representing the 13,588 letters of the influenza genome.

I can’t wait to see what other kinds of life/not life we find inside this Pandora’s box.

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All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Tarski's Truth Theorem - all have the flavor of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that "To seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on any map, will never halt, cannot be described."

"Godel, Escher, Bach" - Douglas Hofstadter