No Seriously At What Point Do We Stop Saying Dinosaurs And Start Saying Prehistoric Birds?? Is It A Matter

Nine relief printed original art greeting cards, each with a unique set of curios/specimens.

aren’t you two from the same mountain range?

Like if 60 degrees is Far Too Hot

reblog if you want to fight me about it

Why do cuttlefish have W-shaped pupils? What purpose does that particular shape serve?

Good question! The cuttlefish’s distinctive W-shaped pupil and “eyelid” helps even out the scattered light of the reef and reveal hidden prey.

This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With a Weapon

Archaeologists have found a fascinating puzzle in the shape of a man’s remains dating back to medieval Italy. It looks like this guy went through life with a knife attached to his arm, in place of his amputated hand.

The skeleton in question was found in a Longobard necropolis in the north of Italy, dating back to around the 6th to 8th centuries CE. Hundreds of skeletons were buried there, as well as a headless horse and several greyhounds, but this particular skeleton stood out.

He was an older male, aged between 40 and 50, and his right arm had been amputated around the mid-forearm.

The researchers, led by archaeologist Ileana Micarelli of Sapienza University in Rome, determined that the hand had been removed by blunt force trauma, but exactly how or why is impossible to tell. Read more.

Most Intact Australopithecus Unveiled

After 20 years of painstaking excavation, cleaning, and reassembling, the virtually intact skeleton of the Australopithecus hominid known as Little Foot has been revealed to the world.

Bones from the 3.67-million-year-old human ancestor were first identified in the 1990s within the Sterkfontein caves northwest of Johannesburg, in South Africa. Little Foot represents the most complete Australopithecus ever discovered.

it is absolutely my kind of thing. so much work, such intricate pieces! I would’ve loved to be on the team that put this together.

Creepy or adorable? Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot: the octobot.

Instead of being controlled by electronics, the robot’s logic board is powered by chemical reactions and fluid passing along tiny channels. Scientist have struggled to create completely soft robots because rigid components like circuit boards, power sources and electronic controls are difficult to replace.  

Learn more about the octobot and soft robotics here and see the full study published in Nature here.

Videos Credit: Harvard SEAS/Image Credit Lori Sanders

hey you wouldnt happen to know a large, dashing, incredibly strong but also musically talented goliath or harbor any feelings for anyone fitting that description...

oh, I think I have an inkling of who you mean, anonymous. They seem very capable! I believe they were the first to establish communications with the Entity of Song we encountered together (I may have been a little preoccupied taking notes but it was so new and strange and frightening...) and that did take a considerable degree of musical skill and quick intellect! I feel they will be a very helpful co-worker in the HDC should they join up when all this is over!

Help Explore Your Own Solar Neighborhood

We’re always making amazing discoveries about the farthest reaches of our universe, but there’s also plenty of unexplored territory much closer to home.

Our “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” is a citizen science project that asks curious people like you — yes, you there! — to help us spot objects in the area around our own solar system like brown dwarfs. You could even help us figure out if our solar system hosts a mysterious Planet 9!

In 2009, we launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Infrared radiation is a form of light that humans can’t see, but WISE could. It scans the sky for infrared light, looking for galaxies, stars and asteroids. Later on, scientists started using it to search for near-Earth objects (NEOWISE) like comets and asteroids.

These searches have already turned up so much data that researchers have trouble hunting through all of it. They can’t do it on their own. That’s why we asked everyone to chip in. If you join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, you’ll learn how to look at noisy images of space and spot previously unidentified objects. 

You’ll figure out how to tell the difference between real objects, like planets and stars, and artifacts. Artifacts are blurry blobs of light that got scattered around in WISE’s instruments while it was looking at the sky. These “optical ghosts” sometimes look like real objects.

Why can’t we use computers to do this, you ask? Well, computers are good at lots of things, like crunching numbers. But when it comes to recognizing when something’s a ghostly artifact and when it’s a real object, humans beat software all the time. After some practice, you’ll be able to recognize which objects are real and which aren’t just by watching them move!

One of the things our citizen scientists look for are brown dwarfs, which are balls of gas too big to be planets and too small to be stars. These objects are some of our nearest neighbors, and scientists think there’s probably a bunch of them floating around nearby, we just haven’t been able to find all of them yet. 

But since Backyard Worlds launched on February 15, 2016, our volunteers have spotted 432 candidate brown dwarfs. We’ve been able to follow up 20 of these with ground-based telescopes so far, and 17 have turned out to be real!

Image Credit: Ryan Trainor, Franklin and Marshall College

How do we know for sure that we’ve spotted actual, bona fide, authentic brown dwarfs? Well, like with any discovery in science, we followed up with more observation. Our team gets time on ground-based observatories like the InfraRed Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescope in Chile (pictured above) and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and takes a closer look at our candidates. And sure enough, our participants found 17 brown dwarfs!

But we’re not done! There’s still lots of data to go through. In particular, we want your help looking for a potential addition to our solar system’s census: Planet 9. Some scientists think it’s circling somewhere out there past Pluto. No one has seen anything yet, but it could be you! Or drop by and contribute to our other citizen science projects like Disk Detective.

Congratulations to the citizen scientists who spotted these 17 brown dwarfs: Dan Caselden, Rosa Castro, Guillaume Colin, Sam Deen, Bob Fletcher, Sam Goodman, Les Hamlet, Khasan Mokaev, Jörg Schümann and Tamara Stajic.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Is it possible to be involved with the anthropology "community" despite not having a degree in anthro?

I don’t see why not. I think we encourage interdisciplinary work.