couldn't find it so i cheated
Spoiler
hint: you need to zoom in (on a Mac, ctrl + scroll wheel), but it's still hard because the image quality isn't great
amazing science/nature images
Sometimes nature can be cruel.
But sometimes it can be quite striking
Spoiler
Like the poster I had never seen even in video a flying peacock
This GIF from a NOAA satellite shows both moving smoke plumes from the New Mexico fires as well as raging dust storms in Colorado, a convergence of climate-change-related global crises.
I was terrified by those "dust storms" before I noticed the gif is sped up. But still, that's big.
And I hope all the dark parts are not burned stuff
Dairy, without the cows
https://www.businessinsider.com/lab-gro ... ?r=US&IR=T
Sounds like alchemy... or like we're gonna make mutants...
Or it will be great
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There's a thing, for me, I'm allergic to dairy. It's ild, not life threatening, but still very annoying, but still...
This lab dairy makes whey. There's more than one kind of protein in milk. Milk allergies can be to one or more of those proteins. Whey is like the main one. This lab dairy doesn't have lactose or cholesterol... I guess some people are luckier than others.
They say they 3D print the protein using the DNA sequence... what!? uhm... my question is, where do the uhm... "building blocks" (nucleotides?) Would vegans eat this? I'm not vegan, just curious.
A survivalist somewhere in the Amazon basin discovers that his fish trap had caught an electric eel. He is recording his adventures as part of a National Geographic program. His self-made trap isn't very large, so fortunately the eel was not a large one but still was able to make him yelp several times while he removed it.
That's no comet. Below the Pleiades star cluster is actually a planet: Mercury. Long exposures of our Solar System's innermost planet may reveal something unexpected: a tail. Mercury's thin atmosphere contains small amounts of sodium that glow when excited by light from the Sun. Sunlight also liberates these atoms from Mercury's surface and pushes them away. The yellow glow from sodium, in particular, is relatively bright. Pictured, Mercury and its sodium tail are visible in a deep image taken last week from La Palma, Spain through a filter that primarily transmits yellow light emitted by sodium. First predicted in the 1980s, Mercury's tail was first discovered in 2001. Many tail details were revealed in multiple observations by NASA's robotic MESSENGER spacecraft that orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. Tails, of course, are usually associated with comets.
image credit:
A section of the Large Magellanic Cloud imaged by the Spizer and Webb telescopes.
NASA held a press conference Monday morning to discuss the precise alignment of the Webb Space Telescope and the spacecraft’s upcoming scientific operations. The space agency also released images from the telescope that put Webb’s progress on dazzling display.
“I’m delighted to report that the telescope alignment has been completed with performance even better than we had anticipated,” said Michael McElwain, a Webb observatory project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA press conference. “This is an extraordinary milestone for humanity.”
https://gizmodo.com/webb-telescope-shar ... 1848899825
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Webb's image does look better, but those crystal like lens artifacts shouldn't be there. IMO anyway.
Video tweets comparing previous infrared space telescopes to Webb:
One of these posters pointed out that:
To be fair, WISE with its 40 cm diameter telescope was only half the size of Spitzer’s [85cm primary] but both of them are tiny compared to JWST [6.5 meter primary]
6.5 meters is 650 cm! (EDIT: GAH! I added one too many zeros).
They exist due to the design of Webb:
The three supports for the secondary mirror cause the larger SIX artifacts. They always repeat on the opposite side of a given support. While NASA might have gone with 6 supports because the ultimate images from Webb would not have been affected, they went with only 3 to help minimize the launch mass.
I am uncertain as to the explanation for the 2 shorter artifacts (the vertical ones in my first image above). Since they do not appear in all of those comparison video tweets--which are using different instruments aboard Webb--I suspect that they are due to something within Webb's MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument).
Some plants were grown in some SMALL collections of lunar dust from the Apollo missions:
For this project scientists were allotted only 12 grams of lunar dust. They had added to that dry, nutrient-lacking dust water which contained nutrients, and they were surprised that most of their plants sprouted.
On the other hand, you can see from the pic above that the plants they used are showing signs of distress by having red spots on their leaves. They suspect that one of the reasons is the high amount of glass shards in the dust created by larger meteor impacts. There were fewer red spots on those plants in the dust from the lunar highlands of Apollo 17 compared to the plants in the dust from Tranquility Base of Apollo 11.
A possibility of developing methods of detecting accurate earthquake readings via gravity waves.
The author cites how in the massive 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan the first estimates of 8.1 may have reduced the initial response. The more accurate reading of 9.0 took hours to be determined. Part of the reason for that initial inaccuracy was that the seismometers in Japan were overwhelmed by that huge quake.
This method will not require hyper-accurate laser interferometers such as those detecting black hole/neutron star mergers but the principal is pretty much the same but only using existing seismographs. It will involve teasing out the data from those readings being emitted by the large shifts in the Earth at light speed. After refining this technique, scientists then tried it upon the recorded data from the 2011 Tohoku quake and found they got an accurate reading of that quake's magnitude within 30 seconds.
It is now limited to only giant quakes like Tohoku, but they hope that further refinements will allow them to get quick and accurate readings from lesser quakes.
DEyncourt wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 9:56 pm90-minute video presentation by paleontologist Robert DePalma on the fossil finds from Tanis, North Dakota. I have not watched most of it.
I have watched it. Very much worth your time if you have any interest in paleontology.
The Bad Astronomer on the image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
Here is a comparison of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (Sgr A*) to that of M87 and one of man's achievements:
This is a considerably reprocessed image of the first recorded sunquake in 1996. Also included at the link is an unprocessed version:
which was to demonstrate just how hard it was to spot that first one in 1996.
This past Wednesday on PBS in the US they showed a pair of programs on Nova about the Tanis site in North Dakota:
Dinosaur Apocalypse: the New Evidence
Dinosaur Apocalypse: the Last Day
Both are hosted by Sir David Attenborough. You should watch them in this order because I got the sense from the first that it was more tentative in making that final judgment of how Tanis was linked to the Chicxulub impact, while the title alone for the second program shows the increased confidence.
If I could do it over again, I would have watched these Nova programs before watching the DePalma talk that I had mentioned earlier in part because the Nova episodes answered some general questions I had that were not answered by DePalma.
No, this is NOT a doorway for Martians. Although the internet erupted on Thursday after a photograph from NASA's Curiosity rover appeared to show an "alien door," experts are pretty sure it's just a natural feature of the Martian landscape.
"This is a very curious image," British geologist Neil Hodgson, who has studied the geology of Mars, told Live Science. "But in short – it looks like natural erosion to me."
That's what they want us to believe 
"Biologists rescue a rare 400-pound stingray" found in a Cambodian tributary of the Mekong River:
That such giants--about 12 feet (3.6 meters) from nose to tail--can be found at all reflects the relatively unknown diversity within the river AND the remarkable recovery by the Mekong River after its decimation by the American War around its drainage.
The Bad Astronomer about those plants grown in lunar "soil":
Tray showing on left control plants in Earth soil and on right test plants in lunar dust with the top one having been removed for genetic testing.
He added that there is an unverified story from Zack Weinersmith about a supposed NASA plant growth test done in 1970(?) using lunar regolith.
Personally I doubt this. While the current growth test had lunar dust from Apollos 11, 12 (November 19-20, 1969) and 17 (December 11-14, 1972), they could only find 12 grams for this now (well, unless they wasted a lot of it in 1970). Most of the samples were lunar rocks with little dust.
Possibly still living lifeforms found in salt crystals dating back to 830 M years old:
Others have argued that this life may have found its way into these crystals long after those crystals were formed.