Oakfairy

kaible:

Ｍ　Ａ　Ｓ　Ｔ　Ｅ　Ｒ　　Ｈ　Ａ　Ｓ　　Ｒ　Ｅ　Ｔ　Ｕ　Ｒ　Ｎ　Ｅ　Ｄ 

[reddit]

[video]

SciShow News explores new research in the world of food, including insights into what causes food addiction, and how a certain flavor might be good for your health.

[SciShow]

The post The Science of Sugar Addiction & The Fifth Taste (Umami) appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

After a few days with a cold, tissues start feeling like sandpaper on your nose. A little coconut oil on the nostrils will help soothe that dryness.

Read more...

[video]

pleatedjeans:

Follow @DrDogMD

I’ve got plenty of geeky t-shirts, but none I’d wear at the office on Valentine’s Day. In that spirit, are are 5 geektastic t-shirts you can get to celebrate on February 14th! Please note that all these shirts come with free worldwide shipping until Feb. 9th.

The Perfect Date

Take This Heart

Best Line Ever

Heart of Ice

A Special Hug

The neatoshop also has plenty of other Valentine’s Day tees apart from those above, so be sure to check ’em all out!

The post Five Geektastic Valentine’s Day T-Shirts appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

[Brittany]

[video]

Earlier this year, the folks at Hubble released a jaw-dropping and massive image of the Andromeda galaxy that took me by surprise. What I mean is, when I first looked at the picture I saw small(ish) versions, and they looked noisy, low quality.

Then I clicked on the bigger version, and literally gasped when I realized that what I thought was noise was actually a hundred million stars, jammed so closely together from our vantage point 2.5 million light-years away that they looked like grain in an old photograph.

YouTube user daveachuk put together a nice animation of the galaxy, starting off with a ground-based wide-field image by Cory Poole, then merging into the Hubble image. It’s wonderful.

See what I mean? From a distance, the stars blend together, looking like fuzz. It’s only when you zoom in, resolve them, that you start to see what’s really happening here: You’re looking into an entire other galaxy, a massive swarm of nearly a trillion stars located some 25 million trillion kilometers away.

That’s 25,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers, if you want to see it written out.

It’s funny, too: When I saw this image, I suddenly remembered a similar photograph from years ago. I used to work with a camera on board Hubble, called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS. I wrote a little program that would take the previous day’s public observations (ones that were immediately released, as opposed to being proprietary for some period to give scientists a chance to work on their data), clean them up a bit then display them on my monitor so I could peruse them.

Most of the pictures were almost blank; random patches of sky with a few fuzzy galaxies in them. But then one day an image popped up that was just wall-to-wall stars, thousands of them. I was momentarily stunned, then came the “what the hell am I seeing?” moment. Checking the coordinates, I realized that this was an observation of NGC 205, a dwarf companion galaxy orbiting Andromeda. I’ve seen it dozens of times through my own telescope, looking like just a faint, glowy patch near Andromeda’s core. And here it was resolved into stars!

It took a second for me to recover, and then the real moment hit me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

“A hundred years ago,” I thought, “Edwin Hubble himself would have killed for this data. They were still trying to figure out what galaxies were back then, whether they were gas clouds or billions of stars, and here I am looking into one and seeing its true nature as casually as sipping my morning coffee.”

It was a big moment for me, and I’ll always remember the clarity with which I felt the march of scientific progress, and the awe of seeing the raw Universe laid out right in front of me.

If everyone could feel that, even for a minute or two … I wonder how much better a place the world would be.

Tip o' the lens cap to Robert Gendler, who put together the Hubble mosaic of Andromeda!

By adho1982
An owners workshop manual style design inspired by Firefly.

By Alex Solis [website | tumblr | instagram | society6]

Meet Matt Murdock. Blinded as a boy but imbued with extraordinary senses, Matt fights injustice by day as a respected lawyer and by night as the masked vigilante known as Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. He’ll do anything to make his city a better place, but at what price? All episodes available April 10, only on Netflix.

[Marvel Entertainment]

The post The First Trailer for Marvel’s Daredevil is Here! [Video] appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

A fantastic, and unfortunately all too true, comic by Tony Wilson from Dorkly.

[Source: Dorkly]

The post Dorkly Comic: If Movies Had DLCs [Comic] appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

After getting engaged at Comic Con last fall, Chris Love and Kara Kyser decided that since they are both huge geeks (and fans of the Fallout game franchise, obviously,) regular engagement photos just wouldn’t do and got into some classy post-apocalyptic style garbs for their engagement photoshoot.

“We thought it would be fun to kind of tell this story where we got married, but then the fallout happened, but it’s OK because we managed to survive and are still rocking our wedding day attire.”

Kudos to Kansas City-based and world-renowned photographer Joshua Hoffine for the amazing pictures!

That’s it, I want Bethesda to make an announcement about Fallout 4 coming out this year now.

[Photography: Joshua Hoffine | Via Buzzfeed]

The post Geek Couple Enters the Fallout Universe for Engagement Photo Shoot [Picture Gallery] appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

levi-person asked: Hi, Neil. In a recent VlogBros. video Hank Green said that 50 Shades of Grey has sold more copies than the number of books Ray Bradbury sold in his lifetime. That worries me, and I’m afraid that it will become increasingly difficult to find brilliant literature in the future. Do you think the commercialization of literature (if that’s an appropriate phrasing) has put good, thoughtful and valuable literature at risk? The aforementioned statistic seems rather ominous. Thanks for reading.

If ever you’re curious, go and look at the annual bestseller lists for years gone by. You’ll find a lot of books that sold an unbelievable number of copies when they were fashionable. I’m sure The Revolt of Mamie Stover also sold more books than Ray Bradbury will ever have sold in his whole life in its year. Have you read it? Heard of it? Off the top of my head, Peyton Place in its year, or The Gospel According to Peanuts, or The Ginger Man, or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull in the years when they sold tens of millions, undoubtedly outsold the works of Ray Bradbury. But when their day is done, mostly those kind of books drift back into the void, and go, if not out of print, then back into a world where nobody quite knows why they sold that many copies any more. (Do you know who Gilbert Patten was? He sold about 500 million books in his lifetime…)

Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury sold quite a lot of books in 1956, and quite a lot of books in 2006 (Fahrenheit 451 alone has sold over 5 million copies), and he found his readers for his books and his stories in every year. And I’ll wager a hundred years from now he’ll still be read…

So, honestly, I wouldn’t fret, if I were you.

Nothing’s changed. Some books are, often inexplicably, bestsellers. That’s been the way of it for a hundred and fifty years or more.

Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.

(From http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/25461828644/hi-neil-in-a-recent-vlogbros-video-hank-green)

By Ubertee
The Meaning Of Life.... on a t-shirt

onlylolgifs:

Assassin’s Creed with kittens.

[video]

By Devin [webcomic | facebook]

jasperislington:

No?  NO?  Did you really just say no to THIS face?

The force is strong with this one…

[tumblr | facebook | instagram]

obviousplant:

I added some rules to the park by my house

[tumblr | facebook | twitter]

Sushi has taken on its own shape and form in the United States, but even before the first sushi restaurants opened up in California, America had an impact on the type of sushi eaten in Japan. During the American occupation after World War II, a food rationing program helped the rise of nigiri outside Tokyo.

Read more...

For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, I recently linked to an article that I think is very important. It was written by my friend Hank Green, about the reactions to his recent interview with President Obama.

Hank, as you may know, makes amazing YouTube videos about all manners of topics, with the overarching goal of making the world a better place. This isn’t some treacly greeting-card sentiment; Hank (and his brother John, and their team of amazing young people creating videos) honestly and openly want everyone to be better people. Their motto is “Don’t Forget to Be Awesome.” And they mean it.

Hank, along with YouTube creators Bethany Mota and Glozell Green, interviewed the president, asking him questions that were important to their audience. These included the government’s use of drones, net neutrality, Boko Haram, and racial tension. These questions were unflinching, unapologetic, and discussed without the manufactured “both sides” baloney so common in mainstream media.

The reaction to this by some of that same media was as predictable as it was maddening: disbelief and derision. This is what inspired Hank to write his article. I strongly urge you to read it.

Hank calls these older news sources “legacy media,” which is an interesting term. He describes how these current news media inherited their positions of popularity, as opposed to earning it; they’re not the same venues they once were. A lot of their inroads into our society, their ability to get their message out, is based on their past when things were very different.

And the trust they rely on now has, in many cases, been squandered if not cynically exploited and outright betrayed. The 24-hour news cycle is a huge factor in this, I think; that is a lot of time to fill, and nonsense loves to occupy that space. But corporate ownership is a huge part of the problem, especially when the owners are dogmatic ideologues with an agenda.

Apropos of that, one of my favorite parts of Hank’s article was his response to a tweet by Rupert Murdoch. The head of News Corp. (the right-wing company that owns Fox News) tweeted this:

Hank’s response was perfect. Perfect.

As Hank points out in his article, the average age of Fox viewers is not exactly young. Young folks in high school and college don’t get their news from Fox (or CNN or even MSNBC); they’re far more likely to get it from The Daily Show, from links on social media, and on YouTube.

It’s incredibly trite, but it’s true nonetheless: The future is online. A big chunk of the legacy media still haven’t quite figured this out. They just slap their printed or TV content online and call it good, but that’s not the way things work (or, at the least, it's not enough). And they’re starting from the wrong premise anyway. Younger folks don’t want to see five old rich white guys yelling at each other about women’s rights. They want a thoughtful take on it, from people who represent them better.

People like Hank, Mota, Green, and so many others have spent a lot of time being themselves online, and have built a huge capital of trust. That’s why their audience numbers in the many, many millions.

It’s not too late for legacy media. All they have to do is win our trust back. But trust is earned, not given, and earning that trust is hard work, something I don’t see too many in the old school doing much of. Resting on their legacy is how they got to this dying cul-de-sac in the first place.^*

I have no specific solutions, no road map for legacy media to save themselves. This is new territory, and it's being mapped out as it's being discovered. Maybe we just have to wait for the old media to die off ... but that’ll take a while. They still have a lot of money and a maniacal grip on a lot of politicians.

But there’s hope; the president did speak to this new group, and he did reach their younger audience.

What I can hope for is that an entire new generation will reach their adulthood having grown up under the tutelage of this new wave of media and absorb those principles. All they need to do is don’t forget to be awesome.

I’ll leave you with this: the presidential interview. It’s really quite good.

^*I’ll note that Slate started as a totally online magazine, which is one of the reasons it’s still going strong, and one of the reasons I was happy to hitch my wagon to them. They understand online culture, and don’t carry the baggage of Old Media.

[Source: Neodusk on Deviantart | Neodusk on Tumblr]

The post Meanwhile, at the Gamers Bar [Comic] appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

Dear Chris: I love you.

I. "Hey Anna, do you like pizza?" I was just sitting down to dinner one evening this past November when I looked through some new Twitter notifications on my phone. My night, I realized regretfully, was about to get very, very stupid.

Read more...

Thanks for being a fan!

The interaction of solar winds and Earth’s atmosphere produces northern lights, or auroras, that dance across the night sky and mesmerize the casual observer. However, to scientists this interaction is more than a light display. It produces many questions about the role it plays in Earth’s meteorological processes and the impact on the planet’s atmosphere. To help answer some of these questions, NASA suborbital sounding rockets carrying university-developed experiments -- the Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiment (M-TeX) and Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) -- were launched into auroras from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. The experiments explore the Earth’s atmosphere’s response to auroral, radiation belt and solar energetic particles and associated effects on nitric oxide and ozone. This composite shot of all four sounding rockets for the M-TeX and MIST experiments is made up of 30 second exposures. The rocket salvo began at 4:13 a.m. EST, Jan. 26, 2015. A fifth rocket carrying the Auroral Spatial Structures Probe remains ready on the launch pad. The launch window for this experiment runs through Jan. 27. Image Credit: NASA/Jamie Adkins > More: M-TeX and MIST Experiments Launched from Alaska