#taillike

[rvncible]

◦ ☾—*:･ﾟ◦⇢ plotted starter for @partghoul​ !!            ft. NIX

          ⇢ The  day  was  rounding  out,  sun  setting  and  people  going  home  for  the  evening,  another  regular  day.  NIX  was  in  the  process  of  cleaning  and  prepping  for  the  next  day,  the  last  of  the  customers  getting  ready  to  leave.  OZZIE  had  set  up  his  nightly  spot  at  one  of  the  tables,  headphones  in  and  police  scanner  running  just  in  case.  Everything  felt  calm..  until  the  door  opened

          ⇢ ❝  Help!  S-someone’s  hurt,  I--  a  ghoul!  ❞  The  girl  was  frantic,  skin  pale  and  eyes  teary.

          ⇢ The  leftover  patrons  startled.  ❝  Wait,  what?  You’re  kidding,  I  thought  they  took  care  of  all  of  those.  ❞

          ⇢ NIX  hadn’t  moved  from  their  spot  behind  the  counter,  but  their  eyes  rose  to  their  counterpart  across  the  shop.  OZZIE  was  listening  intently  to  the  radio,  waiting  for  the  codes  before  giving  NIX  the  nod.  They  nodded  back,  instructing  JIHYUN  to  stay  behind  and  close  up  the  shop,  and  giving  a  few  comforting  words  as  they  gathered  their  things  and  headed  out  with  OZZIE  in  toe.

          ⇢ The  scent  was  unmistakable  --  the  GORE.

          ⇢ The  two  broke  out  into  a  sprint,  NIX  leading  the  charge  as  they  ran  below  streetlights  and  through  alleys,  a  primal  instinct  guiding  them  forwards.  They  knew  it  wouldn’t  be  long  before  the  police  arrived,  and  that  wouldn’t  be  good  for  anyone.  They’d  put  in  a  lot  of  effort  to  remain  a  secret,  and  this  could  ruin  everything.

          ⇢ They  got  lost  in  their  head,  trying  to  figure  out  who  would  do  something  like  this.  A  new  binge  eater?  Some  sort  of  rogue  from  far  away?  Or  had  one  of  their  people  gone  berserk.  All  these  options  flooded  their  head,  until  they  finally  reached  the  bloody  scene.  Their  eyes  went  dark  and  their  kagune  shot  out,  a  dark  blue  taillike  appendage  coming  from  their  lower  back  and  wipping  around  in  front  of  them,  armed  with  a  fleshy  spine  down  the  side.  They  were  ready  for  war.  Until  ..  wait,  was  xe  in  trouble?

          ⇢ ❝  Hey,  what  the  hell!  ❞

[shadow27]

Hubble reveals cosmic Bat Shadow in the Serpent's Tail

Like a fly that wanders into a flashlight’s beam, a young star’s planet-forming disk is casting a giant shadow, nicknamed the “Bat Shadow.” Hubble’s near-infrared vision captured the shadow of the disk of this fledgling star, which resides nearly 1,300 light-years away in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula. In this Hubble image, the shadow spans approximately 200 times the length of our solar system. It is visible in the upper right portion of the picture. The young star and its disk likely resemble what the solar system looked like when it was only 1 or 2 million years old.

This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the Serpens Nebula, a stellar nursery about 1300 light-years away. Within the nebula, in the upper right of the image, a shadow is created by the protoplanetary disc surrounding the star HBC 672. While the disc of debris is too tiny to be seen even by Hubble, its shadow is projected upon the cloud in which it was born. In this view, the feature -- nicknamed the Bat Shadow -- spans approximately 200 times the diameter of our own Solar System.

[orbemnews]

The Moon Has a Comet-Like Tail. Every Month It Shoots a Beam Around Earth. Carl Sagan once said that Earth is but a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” He would probably be thrilled to know that, around the time of a new moon, Earth is a speck of dust suspended in a moon tail. The moon, lacking an atmosphere to shield it, is constantly under attack. When meteorites bombard its volcanic surface, sodium atoms fly high into orbit. The sun’s photons collide with the sodium atoms, effectively pushing them away from the sun and creating a taillike structure flowing downstream from the moon. “It makes the moon sort of look like a comet,” said Jeffrey Baumgardner, a senior research scientist at Boston University’s Center for Space Physics. “It has a stream of stuff coming off it.” For a few days each month, when the new moon moves between Earth and the sun, this comet-like tail dusts the side of our world that is facing the sun. Our planet’s gravity pinches that sodium stream, narrowing it into a beam, invisible to the naked eye, that wraps around Earth’s atmosphere and shoots out into space from the opposite side of the planet. This moonbeam can be seen by special cameras as a spot in twilight skies. Sometimes it appears brighter, sometimes dimmer. Ever since the tail and its beam were first seen back in the late 1990s, scientists have been wondering what controls the beam’s brightness. As reported Wednesday in a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 14 years of observations suggests meteors — particularly larger, faster ones that bombard the moon at random — may explain what controls its flicker. “Does this have a practical application? Probably not,” Mr. Baumgardner, the study’s lead author, said. This research was driven by nothing more than curiosity, he said, a desire to simply learn more about that beautiful volcanic pearl in the sky and its mystifying moonbeam. “I think it’s very cool,” said Sarah Luettgen, an undergraduate at Boston University and a co-author of the study. “It almost seems like a magical thing.” Boston University has placed several all-sky-imaging cameras — essentially fish-eye lenses that see the entire visible sky — around the world. Originally designed to spot auroras, they can see sodium in Earth’s atmosphere with a filter. They commonly observe it when meteors burn up before reaching our planet’s surface. In November 1998, during the peak of the annual Leonid meteor shower, a team working with one such camera at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, hoped to see those sodium flares. They were puzzled when, just after the peak, a spot of sodium persisted in the sky for three nights. This spot, appearing on the side of the world facing away from the sun, brightened as the new moon approached, then quickly faded. After additional work, including models that simulated where the sodium spot could be coming from, the team concluded that it must be the result of a comet-like tail of sodium stretching out at least 500,000 miles from the moon. The tail may be sprinkling the world with sodium, but it is extremely diffuse, so there’s no chance any moon dust dandruff will gather on our heads, said Luke Moore, a senior research scientist at Boston University and a co-author of the study. The November 1998 moon spot appeared particularly bright after the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. It was also seen during other new moons without concurrent meteor showers, but it was fainter. The scientists therefore suspected that these meteor shower impacts were chipping off enough sodium to fuel a particularly luminous spot. But the all-sky-imager camera situated in the El Leoncito Observatory in Argentina, which took 21,000 images of the moon from 2006 to 2019, tells a slightly different story. Annual meteor showers — like the Leonids, one of the most intense — can coincide with a brighter moon spot. But this isn’t always the case, perhaps because their impacts are not always energetic enough to jettison lunar sodium far away enough from the moon so that it can contribute to the comet-like tail and its moon spot. Impacts by sporadic meteors, those that don’t appear in regular showers, have a stronger correlation with the moon spot’s brightness. This is possibly because they can be more massive, speedier and can collide with the moon head-on, meaning they are capable of expelling more sodium into a higher orbit. If a suitably sizable asteroid slammed into the moon with enough momentum, it might be able to expunge enough sodium to produce a moonbeam anyone could see with the naked eye, said James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who wasn’t involved with the research. And if you could observe it, “it would be a fuzzy patch of light about the size of the belt stars of Orion,” Mr. Baumgardner said. But even invisible, knowing that Earth has a meteor-fueled moonbeam is satisfying enough — a reminder of the moon’s dynamism. “I think we definitely take it for granted,” Dr. O’Donoghue said. Source link Orbem News #Beam #CometLike #Earth #month #Moon #shoots #tail

[fumpkins]

The 'mole' on Mars is finally underground after a push from NASA's InSight lander

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel for the first mole to burrow into the surface of Mars, scientists hope.

Not a furry mole, of course; the term is the nickname for the instrument formally known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package on board NASA’s InSight lander mission. The lander, which touched down on Mars in November 2018, is designed to give scientists a look inside the Red Planet and gather data to help them understand its geology and internal structure. The mole is one of the lander’s three key tools to accomplish that — but for more than a year, mission personnel have struggled to deploy it.

But after serious challenges, the mole has finally reached a new milestone. “After several assists from my robotic arm, the mole appears to be underground,” the official Twitter account for the mission wrote on June 3. “It’s been a real challenge troubleshooting from millions of miles away. We still need to see if the mole can dig on its own.”

Related: NASA’s InSight Mars lander ‘hears’ Martian wind, a cosmic first

The mole consists of a drillbit-like assembly full of heat sensors that are attached to the main body of the lander by a taillike tether. The instrument is designed to hammer itself up to 16 feet (5 meters) into the Martian surface near InSight’s home in a region called Elysium Planitia. The idea is that as it burrows down, the mole’s temperature sensors will study the rock it digs through and evaluate how energy moves out from the planet’s core.

It’s a completely new type of instrument for Mars but, although the team tested it extensively in chambers of dirt on Earth, such analogs can never precisely match circumstances on the Red Planet. And so, just about as soon as the mole set out on its Martian dig, it struggled, getting stuck or backing out. Since then, InSight personnel have tried a range of tactics to get the mole digging successfully, running into obstacles every time.

The most recent technique involved using an arm on the lander to gently push the end of the mole as it dug to keep the probe from bouncing out. That’s a delicate proposition since the InSight team needed to be careful to not damage the tether connecting the mole to the lander.

After several assists from my robotic arm, the mole appears to be underground. It’s been a real challenge troubleshooting from millions of miles away. We still need to see if the mole can dig on its own. More from our @DLR_en partners: https://t.co/7YjJIF6Asx #SaveTheMole pic.twitter.com/qHtaypoxPpJune 3, 2020

But according to a new blog post from Tilman Spohn, the German space agency scientist leading the mole team, this technique finally yielded some progress. The mole is now nearly entirely buried in the Martian soil, he wrote, with the scoop at the end of the lander arm near the surface. All told, that means the mole has moved about 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) into the rock between March 11 and May 30.

(Because the mission’s instruments were supposed to be fully deployed by now and project personnel have other work to complete, the lander can only work on the mole problem once a week, slowing progress further, Spohn wrote.)

Next will come what the team calls the “free-mole” test, as the instrument progresses deeper than the lander’s arm can assist. From now on, the mole will have to make its own way; whether it can likely depends on how much traction it can find in the column of dust and rock surrounding it.

However, external forces may soon interfere with the mole campaign, according to the blog post. “Winter is approaching on Mars’ northern hemisphere and dust storm season will begin soon,” Spohn wrote. “The atmosphere is already getting dustier and the power generated by the solar panels is decreasing. This may affect our ability to performing energy consuming operations with the arm in the near future. Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed.”

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2020/06/07/the-mole-on-mars-is-finally-underground-after-a-push-from-nasas-insight-lander/

[iamthescalesofjustice]

okay i will talk about it a little. so. octokitten facts as we know them.

kitten heads on furry, octo-tentacled bodies. they do not seem to have discernible tails apart from their existing limbs, which are fairly taillike, in a way. they have a taste for motor oil, flesh of at least the humanoid kind, radioactive substances that once were plant matter, and possibly regular cat food. intelligent to some degree. will self-replicate when exposed to chlorine. being radioactive doesnt seem to affect them negatively much. apparent propensity for biting, though that may simply be bc most of them are under or unsocialized.

and: there are octocats. but on the silvana, not on the aurora.

either the octocats are a separate form of life from octokittens (possible), or octokittens as we know them exhibit some form of environmental neoteny.

many amphibians do, including axolotls. we dont know whether octokittens and/or octocats are amphibious, though. sadly their octo-ness appears to be largely due to having eight tentacular limbs rather than sharing an assortment of deeper features with octopodes (this can be rectified by simply having fun instead of thinking too hard about what passes for canon, but thats kind of what this post is for, so). if octokittens can breathe in non-air environments its probably bc they are chaotic little bastards rather than bc they have any particular known affinity for water-based lifestyles.

anyway. octokittens on the aurora appear to exist for the entirety of their lifespans without undergoing metamorphosis into octocats. this means that whatever causes such a metamorphosis isnt present in that environment, but is present on the silvana (the unique ambient radiation of the weird is my current guess).

this of course does not reduce the amount of octokittens as they are capable of self-replication in at least one circumstance we know of, possibly more. and if they do have more zoological similarities to amphibians, well. several amphibious and aquatic species that exhibit environmental neoteny manage to achieve reproductive maturity regardless. the perpetual infestation of aurora has and will continue.

but the thought that octokittens may be like eels, and the weird their sargasso sea was haunting me. and hopefully also whoever reads this.

thinks about octokittens too much

[goldengoosepivi-blog]

Golden Goose Sneakers Sale soon faded

The tailcoat, named for its pronged taillike back, reaching up to or below the knees, Golden Goose Sneakers Sale soon faded into weddings and other such occasional wear. The frock coat was a popular choice for office and work wear, in dark and somber colors.

(AdWeek is predicting a of Slurpee selfies. For some reason, the have sold especially well in southern Utah, Oregon and Michigan, ABC News reports, noting that the black handlebar has been the most popular, with sales apparently outpacing the faux lip ticklers unofficially dubbed British, Hogan and, in a nod to Nick Offerman Park and Recreation character, Swanson.

If you are an overpronator, the clerk will recommend a motioncontrol or stability shoe. These shoes have stiffer material on the inside edge of the midsole to prevent total collapse; you can often see the stiffer material.

As you may have guessed, projects http://www.salegoldengoose.com/ for the ladies abound. Much visual filtering was required, while looking for what I wanted. All that stuff I saidshoe box apartment, blood plasma, etc. That's true stuff.