February 2012
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Find where your last name is most common →
yawnyatheapocalypse:
(via bastardette)
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BBC News - Vega rocket set for maiden voyage →
The 30m-tall vehicle, first conceived in the 1990s, will launch on what is termed a qualification flight from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. It will carry nine satellites into orbit but the object of the mission is really to prove the rocket’s systems all work as designed.
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“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space,...”
– Stephen Hawking (via crownedrose)
BBC News - Genetic Parkinson's disease brain cells... →
Scientists in the US have successfully made human brain cells in the lab that are an exact replica of genetically caused Parkinson’s disease. The breakthrough means they can now see exactly how mutations in the parkin gene cause the disease in an estimated one in 10 patients with Parkinson’s.
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Rare Martian meteorite lands at Natural History... →
“The piece of the Tissint meteorite, about the size of a paperback book, is the largest and newest known and could help determine whether there is life on the planet. The meteorite fell as a shower of stones in the desert of southern Morocco last July.”
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“Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our...”
– How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (via crossettlibrary)
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The Pope will die within a year: Vatican... →
“The sensational prediction was allegedly made by Cardinal Paolo Romeo, the archbishop of Palermo in Sicily, on a recent visit to China. He seemed so sure of the fact that the people he spoke with, including Italian businessmen and Chinese representatives of the Catholic Church, were convinced that he was talking about an assassination attempt. They were so alarmed by his remarks that they...
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Ancient seagrass: 'Oldest living thing on earth'... →
“Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus.
The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known...
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“V is a kind of pale, transparent pink: I think it’s called, technically, quartz...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, on being a synaesthete.
Steve Silberman profiles synaesthesia in Inside the Mind of a Synaesthete. Read it. You won’t be sorry.
(via jtotheizzoe)
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Lake Vostok: Russia scientists reach underground... →
“There are hopes it will allow a glimpse into microbial life forms that existed before the Ice Age, or precious evidence of what conditions must be like on the ice-crust moons of Jupiter and Saturn, or under Mars’ polar ice caps - and whether life could survive there.”
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“There is nothing better than imagining other worlds … to forget the painful one...”
– Umberto Eco, Baudolino (via underpaidgenius)
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“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both...”
– Arthur C. Clarke (via mchl)
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“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer (via black-wolves)
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“The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The...”
– Neil Gaiman (via writingquotes)
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Top five regrets of the dying →
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