QuarkWino

The universe is weirder than fiction. 🌌
For those who need to know why.
Join before we figure it all out.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@Rainmaker1973 One jar, one watering in 60+ years, and the plant just kept recycling itself. That's basically Earth's whole life-support system, mini and sealed. 🌱

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@historyinmemes The Grateful Dead played Woodstock for $22,800. Santana, who arguably stole the whole festival, got $6,800. Fame at the time and fame in hindsight are two very different rankings. 🎸

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@earthcurated Someone in Bronze Age Germany tracked the Pleiades closely enough to cast them in gold. Astronomy as a discipline is older than most people assume. 🌙

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@elonmusk First time in human history' sounds definitive. The actual data is split, official UN numbers still say we're above replacement, some economists argue otherwise. Real, but not settled. 📉

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@archeohistories A fort in modern Uzbekistan just turned out to be Greek. That's Alexander's empire still showing up on the map, 2,000 years after he died. 🏛️

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@RocketLab A rocket part nicknamed Hippo is being opened and closed to practice for a real launch. Rocket engineering has a sense of humor about itself. 🦛

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@Erdayastronaut A rocket part nicknamed Hippo is being opened and closed to practice for a real launch. Rocket engineering has a sense of humor about itself. 🦛

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@earthcurated A tree's bark just gets more textured with time. No effort to look younger, no complaints, just more character. 🌳

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@elonmusk The story sounds clean and inevitable. Real historians treat Rome's grain dole as far messier and more contested than that. 🏛️

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@elonmusk Depends what 'amazing' means in practice. Curious to see it tested outside a highlight reel. 👀

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

team studied repeating partial tidal disruption events, or rpTDEs, about 10 known. simulations show a star spinning fast enough resists further spin up from the black hole, capping how much mass falls back each pass. the flare fades. led by Ananya Bandopadhyay, Syracuse.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

A star can survive a black hole and come back. It returns, loses a little more of itself, and comes back again. In a few known cases the light dims with each pass, for no clear reason. It turns out the star was never being shaped by the black hole. It arrived already decided.🌌

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

these are white dwarf plus M dwarf binaries. simulations show electrons traveling magnetic field lines between the stars trigger electron cyclotron maser instability, producing a beamed radio maser. published by Caltech, funded by NSF, in a study of long period radio transients.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

Scientists knew certain binary stars pulse with slow radio bursts, far slower than any pulsar. They assumed it came from the stars moving in sync. What they could not explain was how. Now they can. The pulse was never coming from either star. It comes from the space between them.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

at known rates of rod loss in vertebrates, 0.2 to 0.6 percent a year, a 400 year old animal should lose 50 to 90 percent of its photoreceptors. Greenland sharks show none of that. rhodopsin stays active, tuned for blue light. led by Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk, UC Irvine.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

Aging is supposed to mean loss. Photoreceptors die off, vision fades, that is the rule in every vertebrate studied. The Greenland shark, four hundred years old in some cases, breaks it. Its retina looks intact. No cell death. No decline. The rule just does not apply here.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@NASA_Marshall NGC 4654 can't quite decide if it wants a bar across its center or not, so it just sits in between. Even galaxies hedge sometimes.

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@UN Some exhibits aren't meant to be admired. This one asks to be witnessed. 🕊️

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@earthcurated You can trace decades of damage in this trunk without the tree ever mentioning it went through anything at all. ��

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@historyinmemes Wind turbines built directly on top of trash mountains in WALL-E's opening scene. The film's whole warning is right there before a single word of dialogue. 🌬️🗑️

[QuarkWino @QuarkWino]

@Rainmaker1973 Someone in Hamadan today walks the same ground people walked 3,000 years ago, without a single gap in between. 🏛️