A Sunday slurry

A completed survey of the southern hemisphere's Milky Way.

A solar farm built over a large reservoir... clean drinking water, solar energy... what's not to like?

Dick wars in the GOP.  Because being a large dick matters apparently.

An environmental activist Berta Cáceres murdered in Honduras.

The return of DIY abortions.

A Tudor vegetable.

Still fucked at Fukushima.

Dinosaurs to twanging bras to bright spots on Ceres.

How dinosaurs became birds.

There shouldn't be any public schools because they teach liberal stuff.

Olive oil kills cancer cells.

Slut-shamers and anti-abortionists share the same fear of women being able to control their own bodies.  And what happened after a boy twanged her bra several times.

What are poopers?  Ok, I laughed at the misspelling but the blog post is hilarious.

Supermassive black holes that shouldn't exist but do.

Portland harnesses the power of the sewers to create electricity.

Jeb Bush.

Mysterious bright spots on Ceres.  And a weird orbit of 3753 Cruithne around the Earth.

Terrorism will not destroy America.  Our hysteria about it might.

Gadgets, Gaza, and Good Grief, Oklahoma!

Masai rebel woman fighting for women's rights.

How bad it actually is in Gaza.

Gadgets that are listening to you, a little too well.

It's snowing on the east coast.  That's that white stuff you see in the pictures.  And an explanation on why it is so cold.

Women's reproductive rights the worst it has ever been since Roe v Wade.

Robert Reich: This Very Bad Deal Will Make Wall Street Richer and Bust the Rest of America The truth about the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Oklahoma decides it doesn't like history unless it lies.

What religious fanaticism will do to women's rights if carried to the logical end.  And Men's Rights activist isn't any better.  And what 50 shades of crap does to relationships. Update:  and more.

Jeb Bush is using the same people that Georgie did for foreign policy.  Remember, Jeb was an original signer of the PNAC.  I'd like to see him explain that away.

A star hit and run with our solar system 70,000 years ago.

Our presidents.

Back in time and ahead to the future...

This isn't the dog park!

Periods of geologic time.

We need our sleep.

Goosebumps on a comet.

The Punisher (Ukrainian grandmother)

7 lies about the American Sniper.  And more.

New police radars can 'see' inside your home.  But of course they would never misuse them....

Christmas contraceptives

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Excellent overview of 2014.  Best science photos for 2014.

Weird methane readings on Mars... ALIENS!!!1

Bernie Sanders takes on the Koch brothers.

Saint Ronnie couldn't get elected dog catcher in these interesting teabaggery times...

Tampons may save your life...

If you can erase the word, the action never happened.  Right?

Institutionalized racism is hard to root out.

Chipping away at contraceptives.  And women aren't choosing to have more babies, they're just wiser with their birth control methods.  Cutting through the deliberately confusing terminology used when discussing abortion.

Weirdness and beyond

The weird things we've found to eat.  Can you imagine how hungry we had to be to figure out how to eat them?

Wells Fargo.. foreclosing people one client at a time.

Hobby Lobby... going after birth control.  The definition of rape culture.

Anybody have an invention they'd like to have produced?

Women in the gaming industry.

Should we worry if the engineered bacteria making jet fuel (which is fantastic) escapes into the wild?

Ten cooking tips for the kitchen.

Maybe there's a Super Earth out there too?

And speaking of weird things... a spider as big as your face.  That's one more country I'm not visiting....

Things not about the State of the Union

School shootings since Sandy Hook.

What did Congress just do to the IRS?

More crude spilled  in 2013 Than Previous Four Decades Combined... or oil spill?  What oil spill?

Exploding neighborhood novas

Petition to keep China from processing our chickens.  (via Steve Bates)

Free art books from the Getty Museum.  In fact, free education!

Here is a cat playing a theremin.

Pot luck

Delicious forgotten words... we need to start using them now!

The mystery of Skeleton Lake in India.

The graph that shows what the US owes to everybody.

SEE!!  I told you raccoons were clever!

Eating at home v eating out.

Thank god my family and I live in California.

Anna Holmes and Jezebel.

Nate Silver's predictions for the Republicans.  Waving the Confederate flag at the most inappropriate time.

How Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild) probably died.

Could Boehner be playing to win?

Malala asks Obama to end drone strikes.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson critiques the film Gravity.  And we've been SuperNova'ed!

Finally!  Another planet we could call home, just in time, too!  We've really wrecked up this one!

Friday frolics... and an elephant.

baby elephant in tub

‘Frack Gag’ Bans Children From Talking About Fracking, Forever

The Hallowich case shows how drilling companies can use victims’ silence to rewrite their story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that before their settlement, the Hallowichs complained that drilling caused “burning eyes, sore throats, headaches and earaches, and contaminated their water supply.” But after the family was gagged, gas exploration company Range Resources’ spokesman Matt Pitzarella insisted “they never produced evidence of any health impacts,” and that the family wanted to move because “they had an unusual amount of activity around them.” Public records will show, once again, that fracking did not cause health problems.

When fracking and oil production creates a sink hole, who loses?  BP blames oil spill victims.

The NSA comes clean... or something.

Iran's new leader speaks of moderation and respect.

Marine life moving towards the poles.

Privatization has failed in these places.

Farmers suspicious of new Monsanto crops... I wonder why?

Speaking up against racism.

NASA finds the source of the Magellanic Stream

The Conservative March Toward a Society of Sociopaths

Celebrating sexual choice.

We need to spark the imagination of children...

Who will be our next generation of Neil deGrasse Tysons.



(Notice how he didn't talk down to the 7 year old?)

One reason we need astronomers and scientists...

They will save our asses from instant death.

 

Things and stuff

At least we'll have somewhere to move to when we wreck this one:  Rise of the Super-Earths Astronomers have discovered a giant new kind of planet that could hold life -- and they could change everything

Good.  Is anyone paying attention?  Ahmadinejad says Iran ready for nuclear talks

Monsanto, bringing chemicals to your stomach via genetically altered food. Millions against Monsanto. Leaked: US to Start ‘Trade Wars’ with Nations Opposed to Monsanto, GMO Crops And Monsanto's herbicide Roundup linked to infertility.  But what's not to like?

Superbugs spied off the Antarctic coast...  Didn't Godzilla start this way?

Gutting public schools because the Koch brothers want you dumb.

And uh... duh:
Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

*edited for crappy grammar.

Gems of space

In all their Hubble glory.

I'm going to chance it

And post this fantastic hour and a half long interview between Steven Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  YouTube may do its thing and remove it, but it is wonderful and worth your time.

Life goes on...

Veterans Day.

Remnants of the Big Bang.

Under attack from Rove, Elizabeth Warren doubles down. More of her kind, please.

I hadn't thought of it, but the Personhood Amendment would have changed everybody's birthdays and horoscopes! This explains why they never get it right!

Nightsticks are useful when there are no cameras.

James Murdoch's serfs forgot to pretend to not inform the boss what they were doing that he told them to do... or something.

Pictures of the Great War, as the landscape is today.

A discovered Leonardo.

Tracking Japan's Fukishima radiation:

It's the story of how a group of hackers and internet folks are working with Japanese volunteers to harness DIY technology to record and share data about radiation hotspots.

Women come forward with their on the job sexual harassment stories.

Wells Fargo involved with our 'illegal immigration' concentration camps.

Landmines.

Man paraglides with his hawk: Edit: his YouTube has been removed. Anyway. Man paragliding around with treats in his gloved hand and hawk flies in and lands on his arm.

We need to dream

UFOs?

Bring back an ashtray...

Questions questions questions....

This would explain a lot:

Parallel universe?!

Cat fight?

Rush Limbaugh Picks On Karl Rove For Tea Party Comments

They're never going away, are they?

Creationism lives on in US public schools

A Cirrate octopus (rare and therefore extinctly edible?):



Coming around to see ourselves going?

Astronomers find oldest galaxy yet

Cruising these here internetal tubes

You never know what you will find....

Exclusive: Gulf oil dispersant contained extremely toxic carcinogen

New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified

Dalek mysteriously appeared at elementary school

How it felt to shelter from the Blitz

Solved: mystery of the meteor-shedding asteroid

Downhill With the G.O.P.

Aurora saturnalis: halos at the poles of the ringed planet

Oh NOES!!!

We're all gonna diiiiiiiieeeee.....

What if the sun's magnetic field weakened so much that it wasn't able to muster the strength to produce a single sunspot?

This scenario may sound a little odd, but according to researchers at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, the sun is exhibiting a strange decline in magnetic strength, the driving factor behind sunspot production.

It's as if our nearest star is getting tired and wants to take a breather.

[snip]

If the decreasing trend continues its downward slope, by 2016, the average sunspot magnetic field has the potential to be below this 1500 Gauss threshold, leading to the possibility that the sun will generate no sunspots.

The last time this happened in documented history was in the 17th and 18th century when the sun didn't produce any sunspots for decades. This extended period of calm, known as the Maunder Minimum, coincided with an extended period of cooling on Earth, a period called the Little Ice Age.

Are we witnessing another slow-down in solar magnetic activity? Could this be a part of a long-period cycle where the sun runs out of juice and forgets to produce sunspots every few hundred years?

Wait a second... this info doesn't match what I posted in June.... even though we know what we are facing in only 5 billion years or so anyway....

But wait! There's a MONSTER in the center of our galaxy!!1!! We're all gonna diiiiiiieeeeee....