I realize this is an animal crossing meme but as an astrophysicist I was really excited for a second that someone was finally seeing the light on how fricking difficult and a huge waste of time it would be to try to terraform Mars
This is really quite a big deal. A tremendous amount of modern research ends up being sold to journals which require unreasonable payments to access it and only pay the original authors a pittance. It’s nice to see an agency like NASA deliberately widebanding its findings.
Not sure if people fully realize just how big of a deal this is.
THIS is how science is advanced. Not through biased corporate research, business secrets, marketing, paywalls and patent wars. But through open, uncensored and unrestricted public access to knowledge.
Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad
lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)
Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around
Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram
in my own experience with geology most precautions with samples are to preserve the life and safety of the geologist, most of the rocks are fine.
i am continually reminded of one of my colleagues, who wanted to collect a sample of gypsum on a field excursion but was too lazy to take off his backpack and get his rock hammer. so he said “eh, it’s soft enough” just fucking punched the rock until a piece fell off like it was fucking minecraft
Linguists throughout the ages: We have spent lifetimes gathering the significations of words and phrases in various language so everyone can appreciate them as well as possible.
Language teachers: Translate this text, no dictionaries allowed.
ifesbob 