soundslikechicken:

Bolt (by wasatchreflections)

NASA: From Earth to the Solar System

The Solar System is much more than a collection of planets, moons, comets, and asteroids. It is our home in the cosmos.

The Solar System’s only star, which we call the Sun, plays a role in nearly every aspect of our cosmic neighborhood. The 8 planets, including Earth, all revolve around the Sun. No two planets are alike.

There are hundreds of moons in our Solar System, many are intriguing worlds waiting to be explored. Comets are Solar System interlopers, bringing information from the very edge of the Solar System.

Our Solar System resides in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, where our Sun is one among billions of other stars.

The search for evidence of life, past and maybe even present, is the study of astrobiology.

From Earth to the Solar System (FETTSS) provides a few snapshots of the wonders contained within this unique system, the likes of which we have yet to discover anywhere else in the Universe.

credit: NASA

source: http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/animations/solar_system.html

Beachgoers in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, were met with a fuzzy, green blanket of ocean last week, as the water there exploded with algae.

You’ve heard before about dead zones. These are patches of coastal ocean where river runoff full of fertilizer chemicals have produced massive algae blooms. As the algae die, their decomposition reduces the oxygen level of the water to the point that many fish and other aquatic life can no longer live there.

This is what a dead zone looks like, just before the death.

It’s worth noting, when I pulled this photo out of the Reuters files, I could see similar shots, taken on the same beach, in 2010, 2009, and 2008. This isn’t a fluke. It’s an endemic problem.

Image: REUTERS/China Daily China Daily Information Corp – CDIC

Humpback whale “says thanks” after being freed from nets

The Wrongulator is a gag calculator that gives incorrect answers to calculations. I’m fascinated by the idea — I wonder if they’ve just got a standard calculator controller in there, and then a secondary system that scrambles the results, or whether it’s a pseudorandom number generator, or what. You’d want it to produce plausible outcomes (5 x 5 = 30; not 5 x 5 = 324527) but who knows if the manufacturer paid attention to this.

The Wrongulator is no ordinary calculator, its actually the world’s worst calculator as it never gives the right answer, ever! If your calculator has been exchanged for this one then every single calculation you’ve entered in it has been wrong. It is perhaps the cruelest practical joke you could inflict on your office colleague and the chances are, without being told, they’ll probably never guess….well not before it’s too late anyway! Mwhahahaha!