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A fascinating new science experiment proves that we can grow babies outside of their mother’s womb

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Happy TRAPPIST-1 Day! 

Here’s a comic on our latest discovery! 

http://www.space.com/35806-trappist-1-facts.html

THE 👏🏾 ALIENS 👏🏾 ARE 👏🏾 COMING 👏🏾 BINCH

Antarctic sponges live on a time scale we can barely comprehend. 

This is what a star nursery looks like

Astronomers have spotted a beautiful blue ribbon in space that will one day ignite into a cluster of baby stars.

Astronomers try to track down hot spots for new stars by searching for clouds of dust in gas in the coldest parts of the Milky Way. The ESA’s Herschel space observatory is giving us rare glimpses inside these super-cold star nurseries.

The blue ribbon in this new image shows the coldest part of the cloud. It’s about minus 259 degrees Celsius and holds about 800 times the mass of the sun. Soon all that mass will crunch together and sprout new stars. Yet, one big piece of the star-birth puzzle is still a mystery.

Follow @the-future-now​

I'm pretty new here, and I don't actually know much about dinosaurs (just followed this blog because it seemed really cool and interesting) so could you explain what shrink-wrapped means?

Of course! See, modern animals have a lot of muscles, fat, fluff, etc, and end up looking very little like their actual skeleton. For example, look at how much fluff owls have:

(Source)

However, lots of palaeoartists completely ignore this! They basically stretch skin over the bones and call it a day. One especially bad example that was featured on @palaeofail is this poor pterosaur:

It barely has room for its digestive system. It’s definitely missing the air sac system that allows it to breathe. It’s got virtually no muscles on the arms - how does it fly?? - on the head (no wonder its mouth is open. It has no jaw muscles to close it!), on the torso (it needs to flap), or on the legs (walking) It doesn’t have any fat at all, so it’s definitely starving (maybe because it can’t fly or close its moth?). The skin is much too thin; you can see all of the bones and its wing membranes should be much, much thicker. And it’s missing the hair-like pycnofibres that should be covering its body!

Many palaeoartists have started to strike back at this by drawing modern animals like we might draw them if we found their bones:

(Source)

[House cat]

(Source)

The actual position of a particle in an ocean wave. (Source)

ELI5:How come people can't be cryogenically frozen safely as the ice crystals destroy the cell membranes, but sex cells such as sperm are kept frozen for long periods of time yet remain functional?

I work in a lab where we freeze down cells all of the time. We freeze our cells in a medium that contains 5% DMSO, which among other things can be used as a cryoprotectant. However, DMSO is also toxic to cells at the concentrations necessary for cryoprotection. Consequently, when you freeze cells in DMSO, you add the DMSO medium at ice-cold temperatures and don’t allow the cells to warm up. When you later thaw the cells, you have to dilute out the DMSO as quickly as possible without causing osmotic shock, which can pop the cells. Such restrictions on freezing and thawing would basically be impossible to control at the level of a complete organism.

However, to contradict a lot of previous posts, individual cells can be recovered from freezing with high viability. When performed properly (and this varies quite a bit by cell type), you can expect >90% of cells to be alive following thaw.

The chemicals that allow cells to survive freezing are toxic to the body. Keeping the cells cold minimized the damage that this chemical does to the cells. With single cell solutions, adding the chemical at ice-cold temperatures and immediately diluting it out when you thaw the cells can keep 90% of the cells alive. There’s no way to do this with an intact body.

It’s also worth noting that this is probably not the only reason that this technique doesn’t scale to organisms.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Here’s how nightmarish humans would look if our bodies were designed to survive car crashes

Article by Chris Weller, Tech Insider & Business Insider

If you’re ever in a car with Graham, then don’t bother telling him to buckle his seat belt. His body is already designed to withstand high-speed impacts.

Designed by a trauma surgeon, an artist, and a crash investigator, Graham is a hypothetical scenario come to life. Supported by Australia’s Transport Accident Commission, the project is meant to highlight how vulnerable humans are to injury.

Graham, however, is not.

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