#SCIENCING

[sepdet]

Venus Is Not Nekkid

aka what does Venus really look like?

Ok so you've probably seen pics of Venus like:

which is amazing 1990s radar data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft that discovered its surprisingly young, almost crater-free surface and fissures and lava flows and shield volcanoes:

Which was a vast improvement, because apart from 6 photos of the surface by Russian landers asking "why me?", all we had before were grainy Mariner & Pioneer images from the 1970s showing Venus wrapped in featureless clouds in visible light or striped in ultraviolet:

Magellan's radar peered through the clouds to reveal a surface less than 500,000 years old. Without plate tectonics to release heat, hotspots ooze continually, resurfacing the planet in a way that may resemble primitive Earth before plate tectonics.

More terrifyingly, Venus may have been habitable for billions of years until it had a massive flood lava catastrophe like the Earth at the end of the Permian, when 95% of life on our planet died. Except on Venus it was even worse, setting off a runaway greenhouse effect that boiled away the oceans.

Most solar system "family portraits" show Venus with Magellan's false-color radar data, naked, stripped of her thick blanket of clouds:

US "Views of Our Planets" stamps (Mercury also false color, Jupiter & Uranus UV I think)

But that's not how Venus looks through a backyard telescope. She's a shining white pearl, which was why the Greeks & Romans recognized her as Aphrodite/Venus.

In 2020, JPL engineer Kevin M Gill reconstructed a visible-spectrum portrait of Venus from old 1974 Mariner 10 probe data using UV and other odd wavelengths:

See this writeup on the image with a discussion of Venus' crazy clouds racing around the planet like a toxic hurricane.

A whole community of astronomers and image wizards has grown up hunting through old missions for data they can crunch and de-noise with data processing tools to create new, better images. Space agencies have taken note and now post data for them to play with.

So when 2015 Japan's dogged Akatsuki spacecraft finally made it to Venus after several mishaps, we got its first [UV images]:

Then they started posting raw data from all their instruments (UV and near-IR, because a white pearl is pretty but not as useful for science) and the image wizards went to work.

[two UV images combined by Damia Bouic]

Citizen scientist Damia Bouic has a whole blog post of gorgeous Venus images she's processed from Akatsuki data: Here's just a few. They're false color to bring out details, but I think (?) she's using the visible-spectrum colors of Venus for the color and the UV and/or IR data for saturation and brightness.

Venus' night side in infrared (detects heat). Check out that funky wave. clouds at the equator move the fastest, but I'm not sure what's causing that.

Another UV image processed by Damia Bouic

TL;DR: Venus is Beauty in visible light, the Beast on the surface, and I guess you'd call UV/IR views "I have a bad feeling about this."

[b-radley66]

Chapters: 3/6 Fandom: Borderlines Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Saavik, Kaylin Stone-Hunter, Decker Sinclair, Jamie ‘Croft’ Blackthorne, Chandrelle et Prehaska ne Songet | Chandra, Siobhan Lincolnton, Ensemble Cast - BAN, Spock Additional Tags: The Lost Era (2293 - 2364), Border Patrol, Science, Espionage, Adult Language Series: Part 8 of Borderlines: Titan’s Journeys Summary:

The continuation of a beginning.

[drlinguo]

Source

(from @errantscience )

[magus-s]

[redpandaempire]

Orange, G

Copyright redpandaempire

[nando161mando]

[nightmare-from-heaven]

Hey. Your brain needs to de-frag. Literally it needs you to sit there and space out.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

Give your brain a Daily Dose Of De-Frag.

[labdynastes]

"OK" SO IT SEEMS AS THOUGH MY GENETICALLY MODIFIED KILLER BEETLES HAVE ESCAPED. HAS ANYONE SEEN MY FUCKI🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲OH G🪲OD🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲 SHI🪲🪲T🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🧪AAAHHHHHHHHOOOHhh Hey. That One Learned thge basics of Chemistry . #Proud

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Honestly bizarre that tomatoes get all the flack for “not being a vegetable” because they're technically a fruit when:

A) There are a ton of fruits that get categorised as vegetables. Like this also applies to pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers.

B) The fucking mushrooms are standing there at the back of the crowd in this witch trial, trying to look inconspicuous because they somehow got into the vegetable club with no fucking controversy despite the fact that they're not even plants.

[darkesttimelinesblog]

Spread the word.

[mindblowingscience]

By using antibodies from a human donor with a self-induced hyper-immunity to snake venom, scientists have developed the most broadly effective antivenom to date, which is protective against the likes of the black mamba, king cobra, and tiger snakes in mouse trials. Described in the journal Cell, the antivenom combines protective antibodies and a small molecule inhibitor and opens a path toward a universal antiserum.

Continue Reading.

[sepdet]

Okay, these are ALL great. Earworm warning on the third one. 😅

Here's a link to the article on science.org.

Roukka’s No. 1 fan—his cousin's 6-year-old daughter Frida—was mad about not being in the video, he says. But Roukka has already made her a promise: “If I ever do another Ph.D., I will make sure she’s the first one to join for the next Dance Your Ph.D. music video.”

Overall Winner and Chemistry Category Winner

Sulo Roukka, University of Helsinki, “Insights into oral chemesthetic perception: A focus on food-related behavior”

Biology category winner

Priya Reddy, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, “Unravelling the plant mechanisms involved in plant-microbe interactions”

Physics and AI/quantum categories winner

Arfor Houwman, University of Innsbruck, “Collective Phenomena in Ultracold Dipolar Quantum Gases”

Social sciences category winner

Manisha Biswas, Humboldt University of Berlin, “The Powerful Outcomes of Collective Synchrony”

[b-radley66]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Borderlines Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Saavik, Kaylin Stone-Hunter, Decker Sinclair, Ensemble Cast - BAN, Jamie ‘Croft’ Blackthorne Additional Tags: The Lost Era (2293 - 2364), Border Patrol, Science, Espionage, Romulans Series: Part 7 of Borderlines: Book VI - Titan’s Genesis Summary:

An Empire’s games ensnare Croft, while Decker learns from an Empress. Saavik and her crew go to a bar, but doctors and a master-at-arms is needed before the visit is done.

[lizardsfromspace]

Scientists shouldn't have to pretend they're bringing back the dire wolf. Geneticists should be able to say "I want to make wolves larger for no reason", and we should have the resources to say "that sounds cool as hell. Here's a billion dollars"

[analytically]

Astrology doesn't seem to work.