From Nick Knight’s Tribute Video To Lee Alexander McQueen

NIH to retire all research chimpanzees

Two years after retiring most of its research chimpanzees, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is ceasing its chimp programme altogether, Nature has learned.

In a 16 November e-mail to the agency’s administrators, NIH director Francis Collins announced that the 50 NIH-owned animals that remain available for research will be sent to sanctuaries. The agency will also develop a plan for phasing out NIH support for the remaining chimps that are supported by, but not owned by, the NIH.

“I think this is the natural next step of what has been a very thoughtful five-year process of trying to come to terms with the benefits and risks of trying to perform research with these very special animals,” Collins said in an interview with Nature. “We reached a point where in that five years the need for research has essentially shrunk to zero. “

The US National Institutes of Health once maintained a colony of roughly 350 research chimpanzees. Cyril Ruoso/Minden Pictures/Getty

If Earth had Saturn’s Rings

From an excellent post by Jason Davis

From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.

From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.

From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.

At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.

At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.

via x

Happy Birthday Carl (1934 - 1996). Your legacy continues to shine.

my writing style could best be described as “probably more commas than is entirely necessary”

I know we can’t build anything just by sitting in the dark together, but I am so fond of you it sounds like something a person would lie about.

Anna Meister, “Not Yr Cornfield,” published in Moonsick Magazine (via bostonpoetryslam)

Found this little guy at college today

Epimetheus Above the Rings of Saturn

via reddit

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos  (via victoriousvocabulary)

Happy Birthday e!

The letter e as the base for natural logarithms was born 25 Nov 1731 in a letter from Euler to Goldbach. e was discovered (but not named) in 1683 by Jacob Bernoulli, as the limit of (1+1/n)^n as n tends to infinity. Prior to its discovery, the nameless constant e had been lurking around the embryo of the logarithm for many years.

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”    ― Neil deGrasse Tyson