Ancient Mars Had A Thick Atmosphere Filled With Carbon Dioxide That Kept It Warm. Rivers Trickled Into

An EPIC View of Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” 

Carl Sagan wrote those words in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision For The Human Future In Space. His now-famous ode to our home planet (listen to the full passage here, in animated form) is perhaps our most poignant and humble reminder of the exquisite beauty and shared fragility of this planet we call home. 

NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.

DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):

That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them. 

As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon. 

NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.

A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:

This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture. 

Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective. 

Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.

To see a daily look at what a day on Earth looks like, check out EPIC’s daily updates here.

Not measured by money but by positive influence :) respect.

It’s estimated that the world yields 110 million tons of citrus fruits annually, with oranges accounting for more than half of that production volume. Given that not every part of the fruit is put to use, that’s a lot of waste.  But researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, have made a breakthrough that will allow humans to use citrus waste to suck the highly poisonous metal mercury out of land and sea.

Orange Peel Waste Can Help Remove Mercury Pollution From Oceans | GOOD

Watch: eSight could be exactly what people with vision problems need.

A new online platform to promote women’s economic empowerment is here! UN Women and the Government of Canada recently launched an online platform, the Global Knowledge Gateway for Women’s Economic Empowerment, which aims to re-vitalize women’s economic empowerment by building connections, and providing users with tools and resources necessary to be empowered. Get the link to this exciting new initiative here: www.empowerwomen.org

KARMA POLICE: GCHQ's plan to track every Web user in the world

The KARMA POLICE program is detailed in newly released Snowden docs published on The Intercept; it began as a project to identify every listener to every Internet radio station (to find people listening to jihadi radio) and grew into an ambitious plan to identify every Web user and catalog their activities from porn habits to Skype contacts.

The program began in 2007/8 and it mined BLACK HOLE, which is GCHQ’s repository for all the data sucked up by its fiber taps (which it calls “probes”). It attempted to map IP addresses to peoples’ identities, and cross reference users’ identities on various systems and in various locations, collecting them into “a web browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet.”

Part of this was accomplished by looking at a users’ cookies – if you log into Google on your phone and your laptop, GCHQ use its surveillance views into that cookie to connect all the traffic from your laptop and phone with a single identity. The agency exploited cookies from a wide variety of popular websites that put like/share buttons, beacons, and other assets on a many other sites. The targeted cookies came from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, the BBC, Amazon, WordPress, Yahoo, and others.

KARMA POLICE drew on a frankly bewildering array of other programs, which sucked up data from a variety of sources. These programs were given exotic codenames by GCHQ: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, MEMORY HOLE, MARBLED GECKO, INFINITE MONKEYS, etc. These logged different kinds of Internet events – search queries, Google Maps searches, and BBS/message-board posts.

The UK spy agency had an extraordinary view into the world’s Internet traffic thanks to the number of oceanic fiber links that make landfall in the UK.

Like the NSA, GCHQ relied on secret interpretations of the laws on spying to paper over its activities, so that it could tell its governmental overseers that all its activities were lawful. It amassed records on people from all over the world, including Britons, and routinely allows its spying partners to search its databases. The US NSA, as well as spy agencies from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have access to its data on British citizens and people from all over the world.

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Walmart heirs' net worth exceeds that of population of a city the size of Phoenix #1yrago

It’s grown 6,700% since 1983, to $144.7B in 2013 – greater than the net worth of 1,782,020 average Americans.

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The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions. If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion. The fact that you may still believe that vaccines cause autism does not move your misconception into the realm of valid opinion. Nor does the fact that many other share this opinion give it any more validity… You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.

Yes, Your Opinion Can Be Wrong | Houston Press

This whole article.

Education does not exist to persecute you. 

(via witch-boots)

The CDC has released a first-of-its-kind report detailing the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to our health and food supply. It is not pretty.

Within the report (you can read it here, it’s very layman-accessible) lies threat assessments for a whole range of disease-causing microbes, from famous foes like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) to lesser-known dangers like Clostridium dificile and drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae (yes, that last one does exactly what you think it does).

Thousands of people are killed by such infections every year. They inflict billions of dollars of medical costs and lost wages. The drug-development pipeline for new antibiotics is almost empty. New tools like fecal transplants and phage therapy are hopeful but still experimental, and at least a decade away. So what do we do?

The CDC calls for safer use of antibiotics, both in hospitals and on farms, and increased screening and vaccination efforts. But CDC director Tom Frieden put it plainly:

"If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era."

Unless we do something to reverse this trend, and fast, it’s high time to tuck your head between your knees. We’re either on a plane that’s going down, or we’re about to get paddled. The choice of metaphors is yours.

For now, educate yourself, make sure your doctors are educated, call for action if you can vote … and if there’s any budding biologists out there, we’ve got plenty of new problems for you to solve. We’re gonna need your help.

I always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.

Bill Gates