ralphewig:

Space History - I found this amazing chart on the MIT Technology Review site. It shows the number of space launches for each country over time, starting with the very first launch ever, to the end of the Space Shuttle era. One thing that immediately struck me was that the often mentioned “US leadership in space flight” people were so worried about losing when the Shuttle retired isn’t as self-evident as some would like to believe.

Actually, the list of nations on that chart is pretty long, and growing every year! Just as all nations share the responsibility of stewardship for planet Earth - and the consequences when any one of them fails in that responsibility - it will take all of humanity’s resources and efforts to make us a multi-planetary society. No matter what flag is on it (although personally I’d prefer it to be none at all), any spaceship that successfully claws its way out of Earth’s gravity is an accomplishment for all of us.

(via openscience)

explodingdog:

I wish I had some chewing gum, maybe I should go out and get some chewing gum.

mdt:

I wish I had enough wall space for the whole solar system…

Beyond Earth: A Poster Series // by: Stephen Di Donato

(via physicsphysics)

I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one’s preferences are any better than anyone else’s. There is no such thing as good taste.

Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I’m going to try to explain why.

One problem with saying there’s no such thing as good taste is that it also means there’s no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn’t. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.

It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith in relativism. When you’re trying to make things, taste becomes a practical matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would it make the painting better if I changed that part? If there’s no such thing as better, it doesn’t matter what you do. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you paint at all. You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. If there’s no such thing as good, that would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same level of performance with less effort, surely that’s more impressive, not less.

Yet that doesn’t seem quite right, does it?

Continue at
 http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html

“The very first image of the whole Earth was made in 1966. It was fax quality, sent back by the Lunar Orbit 1. Most remarkable was the ingenious contraption that took a picture, developed the film, scanned it and transmitted it back, all in analog, with mechanical moving parts, in zero gravity and a total vacuum.” - Kevin Kelly

freshphotons:

“To mark the International Year of Chemistry and the hundredth anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Marie Curie, this issue features a series of Commentary articles examining broader issues in chemistry beyond the science itself. As part of this collection, Michelle Francl considers how the representation of women in science has changed since Curie’s day. The image on the cover comprises a mosaic of female scientists — many thanks go to them and also to Michelle who suggested the concept and collected most of the pictures.”

ohyeahfacts:

uraniaproject:

(via Infographic: How the New Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Stacks Up)

cookiesandknitting:

Researchers in Japan have made fertile mammalian sperm in a culture dish, a feat long thought to be impossible. The technique, reported today in Nature¹, could help to reveal the molecular steps involved in sperm formation and might even lead to treatments for male infertility.

…

(via diamidinophenylindole-deactivat)

matthen:

When you plot the position of Mars in the sky, you’ll notice that in general it moves from West to East. But when we are closest to Mars, it seems to go backwards for a bit before continuing. This is called retrograde motion, and this challenged early models of the Solar system which had Earth at the centre. The animation shows why Mars appears to go backwards for a bit. [more] [code]