culpepper

[culpepper]

Emotional And Expressive Photographs Showcased By The NYC Dance Project

Fashion and beauty photographer Ken Browar and dancer and photographer Deborah Ory are the founders of the NYC Dance Project have explored the world of dancers intimately through their lenses, documented in a book called the Art of Movement. 

Keep reading

[culpepper]

Hardly slept for about a week now. Since I was forced to realise my daughter was living in a toxic environment with people who didn't understand her and had no intention of even trying. I started to arrange alternative accommodation for her but before I could communicate this to the toxic people she was kicked out .. told to leave with what she could carry. She had a panic attack & I had to talk her down over the phone. I had to spend two days finding her accommodation. 2/

It has cost me a lot of time, effort and extreme stress.. and lets not even mention the amount of money its cost me. I have spent the past week crying whenever I stopped doing and started thinking. The worry about my daughter has been immense 

My daughter has particular needs that make it even worse that she has been treated in this way. Particularly by family members. To be abandoned, misunderstood, spoken to in a vile and deliberately hurtful manner. Kicked out for nothing is just hateful and will NEVER be forgiven. I have held back and not asked or forced family  / friends to 'take sides'  as that is not my way. I am not a teenager or tiddler. I am a psychiatric nurse and child therapist. I have always supported and never harmed.

I stayed with our father when our mother died suddenly. I nursed our father through his illness and death. I lost my job each time because of the fallout from these things. I have been the supporter and carer in the family

I had multiple miscarriages and lost a baby boy at 32 weeks.. with none of my family supporting me. I have spent my whole life caring for others and have now come to the point when I am no longer going to do this.. through betrayal & hateful vile treatment of my daughter I am now withdrawing all caring and support. 

I withdraw from the role that was forced onto me by my family. I will no longer care and will only do what I am paid for apart from my son and daughter and husband and those they care about.

I no longer trust anyone. People who I thought of as caring and 'nice' turned in an instant to vile non-caring histrionic narcissistic non-persons. I am done. Don’t expect me to care at all 

And this to any of their friends or other family members who show the posts or tweets to them. You have only ever seen the nice me.. you have never seen the angry me.. the lioness protecting her cubs 

Come at me. Not at a person with special needs. 

Threaten her again and I will come back with everything I have. Including Scottish tenancy laws.. you might want to look it up.

[culpepper]

Umeå, Sweden | nhodjin

[culpepper]

The truth of the story lies in the details🍂 | billsmith2315

[culpepper]

[culpepper]

“Hi Tom Hardy! My name’s Jimmy and I’m six and a half. I love goldfish because I think that they’re golden. Do you like goldfish more than humans?”

Kids Ask Tom Hardy Difficult Questions

[culpepper]

Amybeth shared a bunch of season two behind the scenes pictures on her Instagram @amybethmcnulty! This makes me miss the series, I can’t wait for the new season…

[culpepper]

European Jews on Ellis Island protest against their deportation to Germany, 1936

via reddit

[culpepper]

November 30 2018 - Yellow jackets in Brussels, protesting broadly-speaking over the fact that politicians always fuck over the working class in favor of the rich, take out their anger on two police vans. [video]/[article]

[culpepper]

Learn Holidays Signs | Learn American Sign Language | Nyle DiMarco [x]

[culpepper]

Launching Rockets from the Top of the World 🚀

Over the next 14 months, our scientists will join a group of international researchers to explore a special region — Earth’s northern polar cusp, one of just two places on our planet where particles from the Sun have direct access to our atmosphere.

Earth is surrounded by a giant magnetic bubble known as a magnetosphere, which protects our planet from the hot, electrically charged stream of particles from the Sun known as the solar wind. The northern and southern polar cusps are two holes in this protection — here, Earth’s magnetic field lines funnel the solar wind downwards, concentrating its energy before injecting it into Earth’s atmosphere, where it mixes and collides with particles of Earthly origin.

The cusp is the only place where dayside auroras are found — a special version of northern and southern lights, visible when the Sun is out and formed by a different process than the more familiar nighttime aurora. That’s what makes this region so interesting for scientists to study: The more we learn about auroras, the more we understand about the fundamental processes that drive near-Earth space — including those processes that disrupt our technology and endanger our astronauts.

Photo credit: Violaene Kaeser

The teams working on the Grand Challenge Initiative — Cusp will fly sounding rockets from two Norwegian rocket ranges that fall under the cusp for a short time each day. Sounding rockets are sub-orbital rockets that shoot up into space for a few minutes before falling back to Earth, giving them access to Earth’s atmosphere between 30 and 800 miles above the surface. Cheaper and faster to develop than large satellite missions, sounding rockets often carry the latest scientific instruments on their first-ever flights, allowing for unmatched speed in the turnaround from design to implementation.

Each sounding rocket mission will study a different aspect of Earth’s upper atmosphere and its connection to the Sun and particles in space. Here’s a look at the nine missions coming up.

1. VISIONS-2 (Visualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral Atom Sensing-2) — December 2018

The cusp isn’t just the inroad into our atmosphere — it’s a two-way street. Counteracting the influx of particles from the Sun is a process called atmospheric escape, in which Earthly particles acquire enough energy to escape into space. Of all the particles that escape Earth’s atmosphere, there’s one that presents a particular mystery: oxygen.

At 16 times the mass of hydrogen, oxygen should be too heavy to escape Earth’s gravity. But scientists have found singly ionized oxygen in near-Earth space, which suggests that it came from Earth. The two VISIONS-2 rockets, led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will create maps of the oxygen outflow in the cusp, tracking where these heavy ions are and how they’re moving to provide a hint at how they escape.

2. TRICE-2 (Twin Rockets to Investigate Cusp Electrodynamics 2) — December 2018

If the cusp is like a funnel, then magnetic reconnection is what turns on the faucet. When the solar wind collides with Earth’s magnetic field, magnetic reconnection breaks open the previously closed magnetic field lines, allowing some solar wind particles to stream into Earth’s atmosphere through the cusp.

But researchers have noticed that the stream of particles coming in isn’t smooth: instead, it has abrupt breaks in it. Is magnetic reconnection turning on and off? Or is the solar wind shooting in from different locations? TRICE-2, led by the University of Iowa in Iowa City, will fly two separate rockets through a single magnetic field line in the cusp, to help distinguish these possibilities. If reconnection sputters on and off over time, then the two rockets should get quite different measurements, like noting how it feels to run your finger back and forth under a faucet that is being turned on and off. If instead reconnection happens consistently in multiple locations — like having ten different faucets, all running constantly — then the two rockets should have similar measurements whenever they pass through the same locations.

Magnetic reconnection is a process by which magnetic field lines explosively realign  

3. CAPER-2 (Cusp Alfvén and Plasma Electrodynamics Rocket) — January 2019

The CAPER-2 rocket, led by Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, will examine how fast-moving electrons — particles that can trigger aurora — get up to such high speeds. The team will zero in on the role that Alfvén waves, a special kind of low-frequency wave that oscillates along magnetic field lines, play in accelerating auroral electrons.

An illustration of rippling Alfvén waves

4. G-CHASER (Grand Challenge Student Rocket) — January 2019

G-CHASER is made up entirely of student researchers from universities in the United States, Norway and Japan, many of whom are flying their experiments for the first time. The mission, led by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a collaboration between seven different student-led missions, providing a unique opportunity for students to design, test and ultimately fly their experiment from start to finish. The students involved in the mission — mostly undergraduates but including some graduate teams — are responsible for all aspects of the mission, from developing the initial idea, to securing the funding, to making sure it passes all the tests before flight.

5 & 6. AZURE (Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment) and CHI (Cusp Heating Investigation) — April & November/December 2019

When the aurora shine, they don’t just emit light — they also release thermal and kinetic energy into the atmosphere. Some of this energy escapes back into space, but some of it stays with us. Which way this balance tips depends, in part, on the winds in the cusp. AZURE, led by Clemson University in South Carolina, will measure the vertical winds that swish energy and particles around within the auroral oval, the larger ring around the pole where the aurora are most common.

Later that year, the same team will launch the CHI mission, using a methodology similar to AZURE to measure the flow of charged and neutral gases inside the cusp. The goal is to better understand how particles, flowing in horizontal and vertical directions, interact with each other to produce heating and acceleration.

7. C-REX-2 (Cusp-Region Experiment) — November 2019

The cusp is a place where strange physics happens, producing some anomalies in the physical structure of the atmosphere that can make our technology go haywire. For satellites that pass through the cusp, density increases act like potholes, shaking up their orbits. Scientists don’t currently understand what causes these density increases, but they have some clues. C-REX-2, led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, aims to figure out which variables — wind, temperature or ion velocity — are responsible.

8. ICI-5 (Investigation of Cusp Irregularities-5) — December 2019

Recent research has uncovered mysterious hot patches of turbulent plasma inside the auroral region that rain energetic particles towards Earth. GPS signals become garbled as they pass through these turbulent plasma patches, affecting so many of today’s technologies that depend on them. ICI-5, led by the University of Oslo, will launch into the cusp to take measurements from inside these hot patches. To measure their structure as several scales, the rocket will eject 12 daughter payloads in concentric squares which will achieve a variety of different separations.

9. JAXA’s SS-520-3 mission — January 2020

Exploring the phenomenon of atmospheric escape, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s SS-520-3 mission will fly 500 miles high over the cusp to take measurements of the electrostatic waves that heat ions up and get them moving fast enough to escape Earth.

For updates on the Grand Challenge Initiative and other sounding rocket flights, visit nasa.gov/soundingrockets or follow along with NASA Wallops and NASA heliophysics on Twitter and Facebook.

@NASA_Wallops | NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility | @NASASun | NASA Sun Science

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

[culpepper]

pshahajsjs my cat, everyone

[culpepper]

doctor who meme » seven episodes: [2/7] vincent and the doctor “You know, it seems to me there’s so much more to the world than the average eye’s allowed to see. I believe, if you look hard, there are more wonders in this universe than you could ever have dreamed of.”

[culpepper]

inspired by @foulguy’s post

[culpepper]

A couple of roe deers on a November morning.

[culpepper]

These 9 Companies Could Help Us Send the Next Robotic Landers to the Moon

We sent the first humans to land on the Moon in 1969. Since then, only of 12 men have stepped foot on the lunar surface – but we left robotic explorers behind to continue gathering science data. And now, we’re preparing to return. Establishing a sustained presence on and near the Moon will help us learn to live off of our home planet and prepare for travel to Mars.

To help establish ourselves on and near the Moon, we are working with a few select American companies. We will buy space on commercial robotic landers, along with other customers, to deliver our payloads to the lunar surface. We’re even developing lunar instruments and tools that will fly on missions as early as 2019!

Through partnerships with American companies, we are leading a flexible and sustainable approach to deep space missions. These early commercial delivery missions will also help inform new space systems we build to send humans to the Moon in the next decade. Involving American companies and stimulating the space market with these new opportunities to send science instruments and new technologies to deep space will be similar to how we use companies like Northrop Grumman and SpaceX to send cargo to the International Space Station now. These selected companies will provide a rocket and cargo space on their robotic landers for us (and others!) to send science and technology to our nearest neighbor.

So who are these companies that will get to ferry science instruments and new technologies to the Moon?

Here’s a digital “catalogue” of the organizations and their spacecraft that will be available for lunar services over the next decade:

Astrobotic Technology, Inc.

Pittsburg, PA

Deep Space Systems

Littleton, CO

Firefly Aerospace, Inc.

Cedar Park, TX

Intuitive Machines, LLC

Houston, TX

Lockheed Martin Space

Littleton, CO

Masten Space Systems, Inc.

Mojave, CA

Moon Express, Inc.

Cape Canaveral, FL

Orbit Beyond, Inc.

Edison, NJ

Draper, Inc.

Cambridge, MA

We are thrilled to be working with these companies to enable us to investigate the Moon in new ways. In order to expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth, we need to return to the Moon before we go to Mars.

The Moon helps us to learn how to live and work on another planetary body while being only three days away from home – instead of several months. The Moon also holds enormous potential for testing new technologies, like prospecting for water ice and turning it into drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel. Plus, there’s so much science to be done!

The Moon can help us understand the early history of the solar system, how planets migrated to their current formation and much more. Understanding how the Earth-Moon system formed is difficult because those ancient rocks no longer exist here on Earth. They have been recycled by plate tectonics, but the Moon still has rocks that date back to the time of its formation! It’s like traveling to a cosmic time machine!

Join us on this exciting journey as we expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth.

Learn more about the Moon and all the surprises it may hold: https://moon.nasa.gov

Find out more about today’s announcement HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

[culpepper]

VENOM (2018) – dir. Ruben Fleischer