The Lettuce Sea Slug Is An Unusual And Entertaining Addition To The Reef Aquarium. It Has Highly Folded

You probably don’t look this adorable when you swim… The deep-sea flapjack octopus, Opisthoteuthis “adorabilis,” is a cirrate octopus—meaning that a pair of hairlike filaments surround each sucker on its eight webbed arms. Incirrate octopuses—like the giant Pacific octopus—do not have these cirri, and are more commonly found in shallower waters.

A flapjack octopus can use its arms as a parachute to pulse about and catch the current, while two earlike fins help it maneuver over the deep sea floor. Find out more about our research on this adorable and mysterious critter!

Astrophysicists detect ultra-fast winds near supermassive black hole

New research led by astrophysicists at York University has revealed the fastest winds ever seen at ultraviolet wavelengths near a supermassive black hole.      

“We’re talking wind speeds of 20 per cent the speed of light, which is more than 200 million kilometres an hour. That’s equivalent to a category 77 hurricane,” says Jesse Rogerson, who led the research as part of his PhD thesis in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York U. “And we have reason to believe that there are quasar winds that are even faster.”

Astronomers have known about the existence of quasar winds since the late 1960s. At least one in four quasars have them. Quasars are the discs of hot gas that form around supermassive black holes at the centre of massive galaxies - they are bigger than Earth’s orbit around the sun and hotter than the surface of the sun, generating enough light to be seen across the observable universe.

“Black holes can have a mass that is billions of times larger than the sun, mostly because they are messy eaters in a way, capturing any material that ventures too close,” says York University Associate Professor Patrick Hall, who is Rogerson’s supervisor. “But as matter spirals toward a black hole, some of it is blown away by the heat and light of the quasar. These are the winds that we are detecting.”

Rogerson and his team used data from a large survey of the sky known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to identify new outflows from quasars. After spotting about 300 examples, they selected about 100 for further exploration, collecting data with the Gemini Observatory’s twin telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, in which Canada has a major share.

“We not only confirmed this fastest-ever ultraviolet wind, but also discovered a new wind in the same quasar moving more slowly, at only 140 million kilometres an hour,” says Hall. “We plan to keep watching this quasar to see what happens next.”

Much of this research is aimed at better understanding outflows from quasars and why they happen.

“Quasar winds play an important role in galaxy formation,” says Rogerson. “When galaxies form, these winds fling material outwards and deter the creation of stars. If such winds didn’t exist or were less powerful, we would see far more stars in big galaxies than we actually do.”

The team’s findings were published today in the print edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

School Survival Guide 📒

Hey guys, I know a lot of you are starting school/college this year, so I’ve put together my top seven go-to’s for the upcoming academic year! 

Forgot to read it?

Bibliography 101 (MLA, APA, etc.)

Quick & easy online cash/gift cards

Taking effective notes

Online student planner

Every kind of essay

FOCUS

The primes are often thought of as behaving like a random sequence, but there are patterns in their digits. The first frame shows how many of the first 100 primes end in 1, 3, 7 and 9. They all occur roughly the same number of times, so the four squares are almost exactly the same shade of red. The next frame shows how frequently a prime ending in 1 is followed by a prime ending in 3 - and so on. A structured pattern emerges, with the final frame showing the distribution of final digits in strings of 8 consecutive primes (for the first 2 million primes).  [recent news] [visualization from] [code]

One Yowah nut, bisected

One of many opal mining sites in the red continent is called Yowah, and is famous for its opal nuts, veins of precious glowing opal within nodules of siliceous ironstone that often form amazing patterns. They vary from 0.5 to 20 cm across, and occur in an iron rich sandstone, near the border with an adjoining mudstone.

Keep reading

Sexetc.org is a website where you can input your state ( In the U.S) and it will show you all the laws regarding consent laws (if any), abortion laws, lgbt community rights, sex education laws, etc. I highly recommend this site. It also recommends you to places that can help you pay for birth control, abortions, condoms, Etc.

Experience is the teacher of all things.

Julius Caesar (via perfectdiction-ary)

The vortex at Saturn’s north pole, observed by the Cassini space probe on December 30, 2013.

(The Planetary Society)