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Pretty Funny

Last October, Harvard University physicist Isaac Silvera invited a few colleagues to stop by his lab to glimpse something that may not exist anywhere else in the universe. Word got around, and the next morning there was a line. Throughout the day, hundreds filed in to peer through a benchtop microscope at a reddish silver dot trapped between two diamond tips. Silvera finally closed shop at 6 p.m. to go home. "It took weeks for the excitement to die down," Silvera says.

Producing metallic hydrogen in the laboratory has been a dream of high-pressure researchers ever since 1935, when theorists first predicted its existence3. When squeezed with enough pressure inside an anvil, hydrogen should be able to conduct electricity, the hallmark of a metallic state. And theorists say that the material could have other exotic properties, such as being a superconductor...even at room temperature. ... Dias and Silvera say that they were able to squeeze their hydrogen gas at greater pressures than anyone else has managed. To do so, they used an anvil that can fit inside a cryostat, enabling them to...

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have grown human cells inside pig embryos, a very early step toward the goal of growing livers and other human organs in animals to transplant into people. The cells made up just a tiny part of each embryo, and the embryos were grown for only a few weeks, researchers reported Thursday. Such human-animal research has raised ethical concerns. The U.S. government suspended taxpayer funding of experiments in 2015. The new work, done in California and Spain, was paid for by private foundations. Any growing of human organs in pigs is "far away," said Juan Carlos...

Joseph Goebbels said, famously, "The only real friend one has in the end is the dog. . . . The more I get to know the human species, the more I care for my Benno." As historians Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax put it, "The Nazis abolished moral distinctions between animals and people by viewing people as animals. The result was that animals could be considered `higher' than some people." The blond Aryan beast of Nietzsche represented animality at the top available grade, at one with wild nature. Aryans and animals were allied in a struggle against the contaminators, the...

This is a holographic projection of a whale. It is a photographic process that produces images thanks to the difference between two laser beams. The image is projected into a gymnasium using a special camera. There is not a drop of water in the gymnasium, let alone a whale. The old saying was, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.” The new saying is, “Don’t believe anything,” that is unless you get wet!

Instead of collectively spending $100 billion annually under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to combat global warming, developed nations should consider investing just $9 billion in a marine cloud whitening project that could prevent global warming for the rest of the 21st century, according to Bjorn Lomborg, director of a Danish think tank. Marine cloud whitening mimics the effects of a volcanic eruption by inserting salt particles into the atmosphere to make clouds denser so they reflect more sunlight back into space. “Spending just $9 billion on 1,900 seawater-spraying boats could prevent all the global warming set to occur this...

French scientist Pascal Cotte has astounded art historians with a major discovery about Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Lady With an Ermine (1489-90), the BBC reports. Until now, it had been assumed that da Vinci’s composition had always included the white ermine, but Cotte’s three year-long investigation has revealed that the Italian artist actually painted the work not in one, but in three clearly differentiated stages. His first version was ... [snip]

“As the new Republican administration marches the English-speaking world out of Europe’s climate crusade transatlantic relations will surely plummet. At the same time, and to the mortification of Europeans, US-Russia relations will probably thaw. After all, it wasn’t Moscow that led a 30-year economic warfare campaign against America’s energy infrastructure via the ruse of Global Warming; no, that was our old “Allies” in Berlin. Insights into European deep-state machinations can be gleaned from Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning – published in 2015 by the German media conglomerate, Bertelsmann ....

Millions of years ago, a wolf-sized otter swam around ancient swampy China, scientists have discovered. The huge otter would have weighed about 110 pounds, and lived about 6.24 million years ago, according to a new report. The fossilized remains of this now-extinct ancient otter— one of the largest otters known— were discovered in a mine in China’s Yunnan Province, and part of what makes it remarkable is that the find included a nearly-complete cranium.

Two years after putting its first rover on the moon, China says it will launch a mission to bring lunar samples back to Earth late this year. As it plans that mission, China's space agency is also preparing a separate trip to the moon's far side, possibly in 2018. In late 2013, China became the third country to land a rover on the moon's surface, joining the U.S. and Russia in that elite club. Named the Jade Rabbit, China's rover ran into a slew of early technical problems, as the Two-Way reported. But it overcame many of those issues and...

New analysis and graphing tools for sea-level data at SeaLevel.infoGuest essay by David Burtonhttp://www.SeaLevel.info now has interactive regression analysis (line/curve fitting) and visualization (graphing) tools available for mean sea level (MSL) measurements from over 1200 tide gauges, plus spreadsheets which combine various subsets of that data. This article is intended as a primer, for how to use these new tools.But first, a few notes:Note #1: This is a work in progress. I already have a large “to-do list,” but suggestions & corrections are nevertheless very welcome.Note #2: These tools are my free contribution to the community. There’s no charge...

The Genetics of Politics | Liberals vs. Conservatives - the differences in the brains of conservatives versus liberals, as compared to K-selected/R-selected behavior Stefan Molyneux Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLlTW2Ie-_Y&t

For decades, scientists have theorized that the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates is driven largely by negative buoyancy created as they cool. New research, however, shows plate dynamics are driven significantly by the additional force of heat drawn from the Earth’s core. The new findings also challenge the theory that underwater mountain ranges known as mid-ocean ridges are passive boundaries between moving plates. The findings show the East Pacific Rise, the Earth’s dominant mid-ocean ridge, is dynamic as heat is transferred. David B. Rowley, professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, and fellow researchers came to the conclusions...

Dear Ms. Paltrow, I’ve been reading all about the jade eggs you are selling on GOOP for $55-66 a pop and the corresponding interview with a jade egg enthusiast. I have tried not to respond to this hot mess, after all a man who leers at naked 15 year-olds and brags about sexual assault is about to assume the highest office in the land. Quite frankly women have more compelling health interests right now, however, I have been asked by so many people about your vaginal rocks that I felt it necessary to drop you a line. I read the...

When you think about our Solar System, with its lone, luminous star dominating both the mass and light of our local corner of the Milky Way, you might think that this is what 'typical' looks like. In some ways, this is true, but a Solar System with multiple stars -- binaries, trinaries or more -- might be even more common. At interstellar distances, many of these binaries are too close together to resolve even with the most powerful of telescopes. Instead, it's only the variations in their light, where the stars more relative to one another, periodically eclipse (passing in...

Conspiracy theorists have been warning a massive planet – called Planet X or Nibiru – will wipe out life on Earth for some time. Now a paranormal researcher claims to have combined astronomy, scientific research and the Bible to calculate the date of the apocalypse. ... Meade claims the Book of Revelation, in the Bible, says when Nibiru will reveal itself. Revelation 12: 1-2 speaks of a “sign in heaven” of “a woman clothed with the Sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head”. Using computer models of the movement of the...

Global warming is going to steal away some of those postcard-perfect weather days in the future, according to a first-of-its-kind projection of nice weather. On average, Earth will have 10 fewer days of mild and mostly dry weather by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. Some places will get more days perfect for picnics or outdoor weddings, while other places will lose a lot. Rio de Janeiro, Miami and much of Africa are big losers, while Europe and Seattle will gain nicer weather. “It’s the type of weather where you can go outside and do something fun,” said...

For the third year in a row, the Earth has set a record for warmth, according to three analyses just released from three government agencies. The planet's mean surface temperature in 2016 was 0.99 degrees Celsius above the late 20th-century average, topping the previous record set in 2015 of 0.87 degrees above average, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.