Do You Ever Think About Humans, Even Humans Who Don’t Like Glitter, Like Glitter. We Are Drawn To Shiny

The Earth As Seen From

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

The Conversation

Explainer: what is citizen science?

Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to researc

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

imagine going to your manufacturer and being like, alright. hear me out. we’re doing a super ultra double plane and its gonna be so fucking powerful

Me after spending hours in the lab only to get a .05% yield

biologists will be like this is a very simplified diagram of a mammalian cell

chemists will be like this is a molecule

Periodic Videos on YouTube discusses the creation of the element darmstadtium and pays a visit to where it was discovered. 

Caecilians’ teeth are so metal. Nothing you will expect from what looks like a gummy worm when it has its mouth closed.

Sometimes you need to read something twice to get it. You might need to watch a movie three times to understand it. You might have to have that album on repeat for a week until the lyrics make any sense. You're allowed to engage with it and can keep engaging with it until it means something to you. People will see a painting at a museum and laugh about not getting what the big deal is but like you can come back, you can see it at another time, and maybe that next time it'll be different for you. I'm of the belief the "media literacy crisis" would solve itself if more people just sat down and did it again. Watched, read, played, listened, etc like I don't think people are getting more ignorant necessarily I just think we're not glorifying personally replaying things nearly as much as we should be.

The autoclave is designed to kill schmucks I think

September 21, 2012: It’s just another day in L.A. as the Space Shuttle Endeavour passes overhead on its way to LAX, the last stop before retirement at the California Science Center.