96. Spring
doctor: my patient needs these meds
insurance companies:
image ID: the reaction image of thor giving someone a fake, condescending and overly cheerful squinty smile. the caption reads "do they really though?" end ID. - description from @skeleton-origami
10000% accurate
Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
The Perseids meteor shower is here! It's one of the biggest of the year, and will peak early in the morning on Thursday, August 12, 2021 and Friday, August 13, 2021. To spot them, find a dark area away from bright lights (yes, that includes your phone), and let your eyes acclimate to the night sky. But don't worry – if you can't get away from lights, join us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for a meteor shower livestream hosted by our Marshall Space Flight Center's Meteoroid Environment Office. Get all the details on our Watch the Skies blog.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.
hey btw, if u like my work, consider supporting me on patreon! we’re doing a lil choose your own adventure on there rn that can be best described as Horror Sanrio
it’s like (◕‿◕)
but also like (̴̣̗̖̮͇̠̮̱̳̘͈͆͊́̀̽͗̍̈́̒ʘ̸̧̳̬̺̜̤̻͉̹͕̻͙͎̓͌̽̚‿̴͓͎̟̩͕̰͓̍̀̋͠ʘ̵̡̨̨̢̦̪̝̱͇̰̣̼̫̹̈̈̽̈́̚)̶̢̙̖͒̆
Please fucking lie to your employer. Like they don’t need to know your mental health issues or what drugs you do. Ffs
FINALLY, A PRESSURE POINT TO FIGHT USPS SABOTAGE: LOTS of calls and emails to USPS Board of Governors. Ready, set, go. We know how to do this. Be concerned, firm, polite. Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General and Trump appointee who is now dismantling the USPS on behalf of Trump, “serves at the pleasure of” and reports to the 6-member USPS Board of Governors. These six men have the power & duty to #StopDeJoy & prevent Election Day chaos. 5 of the 6 are Trump appointees, but retired Harvard lawyer (CCJ, @NastyOldWomyn) contributing this info on Twitter is clear that a relentless barrage of calls, emails, and other callings-out will absolutely get their attention. She says: · I’ve represented Boards as a lawyer, and I know “this kind of attention is not what they’ve signed up for. It’s disruptive to their day jobs, which is where they make their money.” · “None of the members wants to suffer reputational damage from overseeing the meltdown of USPS during a pandemic. They do NOT want to be in the spotlight, so SHINE IT BRIGHT!” · “Board members HATE being contacted, HATE having their phone mailboxes fill up with messages, HATE being inundated with emails and letters. And, oh, they would HATE being picketed at work, if someone decided to start a demonstration.” · In contacting these 6 Board members, “I plan to be polite but firm about my fury about the recent deterioration of USPS’s service, giving personal & family examples regarding medication & veterans services, & expressing my distrust of & dissatisfaction with the performance of PG DeJoy. In my experience, rudeness NEVER helps. Call & email each of the 6 USPS Board of Governors. Tell them who & what you are (a retiree? Veteran?), what you & family rely on the USPS for in this pandemic, how DeJoy’s changes are disrupting that & causing stress. Express worry about Vote-by-Mail. Their emails: directoraccessmailbox@cigna.com; lee.moak@moakgroup.com; roman@rmiv.com; ron.bloom@brookfield.com; barger.jim@gmail.com; mduncan@inezdepositbank.com.
Tagging @fericita-s @broadwaybaggins @mercurygray @tortoisesshells @britishdetectives @amarguerite @incognito-princess @sassy-doctor-foster @the-spaztic-fantastic to get some traction
I lost my job last week. I came back from vacation to be thrown into a meeting into HR and my manager to be told that I'm being let go. It's so stupid. They didn't even give me a chance to wrap my day up or finish anything that was outstanding.
Though the billions of people on Earth may come from different areas, we share a common heritage: we are all made of stardust! From the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.
The building blocks for humans, and even our planet, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for stars. If we could rewind the universe back almost to the very beginning, we would just see a sea of hydrogen, helium, and a tiny bit of lithium.
The first generation of stars formed from this material. There’s so much heat and pressure in a star’s core that they can fuse atoms together, forming new elements. Our DNA is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. All those elements (except hydrogen, which has existed since shortly after the big bang) are made by stars and released into the cosmos when the stars die.
Each star comes with a limited fuel supply. When a medium-mass star runs out of fuel, it will swell up and shrug off its outer layers. Only a small, hot core called a white dwarf is left behind. The star’s cast-off debris includes elements like carbon and nitrogen. It expands out into the cosmos, possibly destined to be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. New life may be born from the ashes of stars.
Massive stars are doomed to a more violent fate. For most of their lives, stars are balanced between the outward pressure created by nuclear fusion and the inward pull of gravity. When a massive star runs out of fuel and its nuclear processes die down, it completely throws the star out of balance. The result? An explosion!
Supernova explosions create such intense conditions that even more elements can form. The oxygen we breathe and essential minerals like magnesium and potassium are flung into space by these supernovas.
Supernovas can also occur another way in binary, or double-star, systems. When a white dwarf steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance too and lead to another kind of cataclysmic supernova. Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study these stellar explosions to figure out what’s speeding up the universe’s expansion.
This kind of explosion creates calcium – the mineral we need most in our bodies – and trace minerals that we only need a little of, like zinc and manganese. It also produces iron, which is found in our blood and also makes up the bulk of our planet’s mass!
A supernova will either leave behind a black hole or a neutron star – the superdense core of an exploded star. When two neutron stars collide, it showers the cosmos in elements like silver, gold, iodine, uranium, and plutonium.
Some elements only come from stars indirectly. Cosmic rays are nuclei (the central parts of atoms) that have been boosted to high speed by the most energetic events in the universe. When they collide with atoms, the impact can break them apart, forming simpler elements. That’s how we get boron and beryllium – from breaking star-made atoms into smaller ones.
Half a dozen other elements are created by radioactive decay. Some elements are radioactive, which means their nuclei are unstable. They naturally break down to form simpler elements by emitting radiation and particles. That’s how we get elements like radium. The rest are made by humans in labs by slamming atoms of lighter elements together at super high speeds to form heavier ones. We can fuse together elements made by stars to create exotic, short-lived elements like seaborgium and einsteinium.
From some of the most cataclysmic events in the cosmos comes all of the beauty we see here on Earth. Life, and even our planet, wouldn’t have formed without them! But we still have lots of questions about these stellar factories.
In 2006, our Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth containing tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away – the first star dust to ever be collected from space and returned for study. You can help us identify and study the composition of these tiny, elusive particles through our Stardust@Home Citizen Science project.
Our upcoming Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies, all while exploring many other cosmic questions. Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
Information security professional for a major firm. Overall geek and gamer. Lover of all things Sighthounds. My immune system hates me, along with the occasional attempted suffocation done thanks to my lungs. On top of that, working through severe depression and anxiety plus a side of ADHD. I'm a broken human being.
186 posts