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This ring lets blind people read non-Braille books

One of the problems with Braille is that it’s typically printed in specialist books aside from the copies created for sighted people, meaning that those with sight difficulties can’t borrow their friends’ books and need to seek out the bookstores and libraries that cater for them. In the past, we’ve seen projects such as Thailand’sMr. Light and Mr. Dark — which uses special typography to enable the blind and non-blind to read the same book. Now the FingerReader initiative from MIT provides visually impaired readers with a wearable ring that can scan written text and read it out loud. READ MORE…

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Decided to make a handy graphic after seeing a lot of misinformation spread around tumblr. Current science isn’t perfect and definitions are bound to change, but I wanted to push back against the hostile attitude against it because it seems like a lot of people are being hostile for the wrong reasons.

Please let me know if there are any factual errors, thank you :)

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The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History. This video will take you on a journey to the end of time and space as we know it. "Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.” 

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Inside a Changing Autumn Leaf

One of the great wonders of life is watching the leaves change colors in the fall. When temperatures get cool, chlorophyll begins to break down revealing the underlying pigments in the plants’ sap. This depiction of the inner-workings of a maple leaf shows the process in action.

Sorce: SciAm Blog Network

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What’s six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant? An asteroid — and there are lots of them out there →

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First Case of Ebola in U.S. Diagnosed in Dallas

The United States has diagnosed its first case of the deadly Ebola virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday.

The patient is a man who became infected in Liberia and traveled to Texas, where he was hospitalized with symptoms that were confirmed to be caused by Ebola, a CDC spokesman told AFP. Learn more

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Why are human faces so unique?

What’s in a face? The amazing variety of human faces — far greater than that of most other animals — is the result of evolutionary pressure to make each of us unique and easily recognizable, according to a new study out of UC Berkeley.

Behavioral ecologist Michael J. Sheehan explains that our highly visual social interactions are almost certainly the driver of this evolutionary trend. Many animals use smell or vocalization to identify individuals, making distinctive facial features unimportant, especially for animals that roam after dark, he said. But humans are different.

In the study, Sheehan and coauthor Michael Nachman asked, “Are traits such as distance between the eyes or width of the nose variable just by chance, or has there been evolutionary selection to be more variable than they would be otherwise; more distinctive and more unique?”

As predicted, the researchers found that facial traits are much more variable than other bodily traits, such as the length of the hand, and that facial traits are independent of other facial traits, unlike most body measures. People with longer arms, for example, typically have longer legs, while people with wider noses or widely spaced eyes don’t have longer noses. Both findings suggest that facial variation has been enhanced through evolution.

“Genetic variation tends to be weeded out by natural selection in the case of traits that are essential to survival,” Nachman said. “Here it is the opposite; selection is maintaining variation. All of this is consistent with the idea that there has been selection for variation to facilitate recognition of individuals.”

Human faces are so variable because we evolved to look unique →

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The cute side of the robocalypse: Balancing robots from Japan

muRata manufacturing wants to cheer people up with its latest balancing machine. It’s part of a group of swarm robots, called the murata cheerleaders. But it’s not exactly clear what they’re cheering for.

— Update —

Just discovered this gem:

[Murata Cheerleaders]

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A person stands in front of the lava flow and massive smoke plumes of the Holuhraun Fissure, near the Bardarbunga Volcano, Iceland on Sept. 2, 2014.

IMAGE: ARCTIC-IMAGES/CORBIS

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The DIY squishy robot is here, and it’s a bit weird.

(Visuals courtesy of the Harvard Biodesign Lab.)

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The spew bioluminescence of the shrimp Parapandalus sp.

An amazing picture of a deep-sea shrimp belonging to the genus Parapandalus (Decapoda - Pandalidae) -[Syn. Plesionika]-, hurling a blue glowing cloud of organic matter.

This amazing picture was taken during a Deep Light cruise to Bahamas in 2009, to study bioluminescence and vision in deep-sea benthic animals. You can read here the research article.

These shrimps occur in virtually all tropical and subtropical waters and in some temperate seas, but most species of the genus can be found in the Indo-West Pacific.

References: [1] - [2]

Photo credit: ©Johnsen Lab | Locality: Bahamas (2009)

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Bracken Cave: Home to the world’s largest bat colony

As many as twenty million Mexican free-tailed bats spend their summer months in Bracken Cave, Texas making it home to the largest congregation of warm-blooded animals in the world. Join journalist Millie Kerr as she captures the unforgettable sight of these bats emerging at dusk to feed, and spends some time with leading bat expert and photographer, Merlin Tuttle to discuss the threats facing these often misunderstood mammals.

Uploaded by: Earth Touch.

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NatGeo 2014 Photo Contest Entries

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This month I made patterns from Youtube videos of flying animals! I marked specific points on the wing throughout one wingbeat, and drew in curves that fit all 15 points in the wingbeat loop. 

You can check out the full sized GIF here or pick up a poster for your room here.

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How Many Lakes on Earth? Researchers Finally Know

Until now, no one knew for sure how many lakes exist on Earth.

Blame geography — most of the world’s lakes are in places where humans don’t live, said David Seekell, an environmental scientist at Umea University in Sweden. “This is something one would have assumed had been done long ago, and was in a textbook somewhere,” Seekell said.

Lake size was a liability, too. Millions of lakes are too small for mapmakers to bother charting.

Instead of counting lake by lake, earlier estimates were statistical guesses, based on the number of lakes in a parcel of land or on average lake size. One widely cited study from 2006 estimated the lake total at 304 million.

A new study published Sept. 16 in the journa Geophysical Research Letters sidesteps these problems. With high-resolution satellite data and supercomputers to check every cloudless pixel, researchers now have the best count yet of lakes on Earth. The result? There are 117 million lakes in the world.

Yet the bodies of water cover more land (3.7 percent of Earth’s surface) than previous studies had predicted. This is because quite a few medium- to large-size lakes were missing from the databases used for previous studies.

About 90 million of the lakes fall in the smallest size category, measuring 0.5 to 2.5 acres (0.2 to 1 hectare), the study reports. That’s equal to a country house lot, a large farm pond or 1.9 American football fields.

"Most lakes are in the far North, and there’s actually quite a few of them," said Seekell, a co-author of the new study. "Even if they’re small and no one sees them, they are potentially important for global-scale environmental issues like the carbon budget," he told Live Science.

Continue Reading.

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Hollywood vs. reality http://space-pics.tumblr.com/