Check Out These 10 Cool Facts About Mercury Here: http://astronomyisawesome.com/solar-systems/cool-facts-about-mercury/

Were Troy’s walls not built by Gods? Was Rome not made by two twin half-blood gods? QUESTION: What do they both have in common? ANSWER: They both fell.

the gods like to make things that collapse // L.H.Z (via lhzthepoet)

Kennedy Space Center | by North Sky Photography

Facebook | Instagram | 500px | Tumblr | Society 6

"He's not gone as long as we remember him."

Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge

Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science.

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that’s because it kinda is. But in this story, it’s not just the poor who don’t have access to scientific papers - journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand - with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

Continue Reading.

Photographs of Mars taken by the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission, which has been orbiting the planet since September 2014.  Can you imagine our descendants colonizing this world?

The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond. This extended mission is continuing to characterize the outer solar system environment and search for the heliopause boundary, the outer limits of the Sun’s magnetic field and outward flow of the solar wind.

The first structural test article of Orion’s Service Module arrived at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio yesterday (November 9). Manufactured by Airbus Defense and Space in Europe, (the same company who built the Automated Transfer Vehicle), the European Service Module will provide Orion’s electrical, propulsion and umbilical capabilities during flight. A single Orbital Maneuvering System engine leftover from the Space Shuttle program will power the spacecraft, and four 11-kilowatt solar panels will generate electrical power. The STA will be used for fit checks and other engineering tests at NASA’s Plumb Brook facility, which is a sub-facility of Glenn. An Antonov-124 aircraft, the second largest cargo plane in the world delivered the ESM STA to Cleveland International Airport November 9.

The large space rock that will zip past Earth this Halloween is most likely a dead comet that, fittingly, bears an eerie resemblance to a skull.

These first radar images from the National Science Foundation’s 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, indicate the near-Earth object is spherical in shape and approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter. The radar images were taken on Oct. 30, 2015.

Scientists observing asteroid 2015 TB145 with NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun.

For more information, click here.

Image Credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF

TYN_75572 by will_rock_king on Flickr.

How to blow your cat’s mind: brush their teeth.