SciShow takes a look at the scientific reasons behind why things look cute. Everything featured in the video obviously applies to your favorite blog editor. Ahem. This google doc contains all the articles and citations that inform the video, if you’re looking for further reading. [via laughingsquid]
The prisoner’s dilemma has been studied for decades because it is essentially a thought experiment about how to achieve the best outcome for yourself when you have to rely on the variable of someone else and you can’t necessarily predict what they will choose to do. It’s about collaboration and blind trust dominated by betrayal and [...]
If you’ve been to one city you’ve been to them all, right? Of course not. Urban life is a cacophony of sights, sounds, architecture and smells all grafted onto one another over the course of time. Paris is nothing like Los Angeles, which is nothing like Melbourne, which is nothing St. Petersburg. Cities are urban [...]
Neil Armstrong, who was the first human to set foot on the moon, died on Saturday. He was 82. Think about that for a moment and let it sink in. The man walked on the moon! I’m travelling in San Francisco for work, which is why I was a little late to this news. My apologies.
The Mars descent imager (MARDI) has delivered its first, full collection of images to NASA, which was then able to piece together a video of Curiosity landing on the Red Planet. Missing frames of the descent were interpolated using thumbnail data and the quality was improved through noise reduction, color balancing, and sharpening.
Continuing their runs of awesome, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the NASA Extreme Environment Misson Operations team discuss the possibilities of stopping an asteroid from colliding with our planet for VICE’s newest video vertical, Spaced Out. [via theaggregate]
Shark Week wraps up this weekend, and melodysheep, who’s been killing it for PBS this summer, sends the Discovery Channel’s 25th year of sharks off on a high note. And if that wasn’t enough to satiate your shark appetites, there’s always Andy Casagrande’s video wherein he attached a GoPro camera to shark bait and recorded [...]
AsapSCIENCE, the gang that made the scientifically acceptable videos about napping at work and superheroes — which I totally slept on and never posted (I KNOW!) — explain why music is probably your drug of choice. Just digging into these guys’ videos makes me realize I’ve been totally ignoring one of YouTube’s best channels.
Excitement. Awe. An inspiring moment. Based on anecdotal evidence on Facebook and Twitter, it seems like plenty of people stayed up to watch the event and cheer on Mars Curiosity Rover surviving its seven minutes of terror early this morning. It’s a monumental endeavor — one that makes any science nerd proud that people are excited about science! When was [...]
This explains a lot: “Over 500 million years ago a spineless creature on the ocean floor experienced two successive doublings in the amount of its DNA, a “mistake” that eventually triggered the evolution of humans and many other animals, says a new study. The good news is that these ancient DNA doublings boosted cellular communication [...]
