Apparently Random

black-and-white:

meow (by hey_dima)

artandaperture:

Jason Wang

scipsy:

Target: Drug-resistant bacteria

“Most nanotechnology has been targeted to cancer drug delivery or imaging; not many people have shown interest in using a nanotechnology approach for infectious disease” (via MIT)

theworldsgame:

bluesfan:

50 goals for Fulham. Congrats to Clint!

Best USMNT player (non goalkeeper division) ever?

Very Interesting, worth a look…

theatlantic:

The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture

One of the clearest regional differences in the U.S. can found by tracking the words people use to refer to soft drinks, which is in fact the map you saw at the top of this story. Pop or soda, or even Coke, these small linguistic differences are not as small as we might think. While “soda” commands the Northeast and West Coast (green) and “pop” is in between (black), “Coke” reigns in the south (turquoise). These small distinctions can often act as touchstones for larger cultural differences.

Read more. [Image: Samuel Arbesman]

(via npr)

thisistheverge:

NASA used ‘LOL memory’ in the Apollo missions

Here’s something worth sharing: to resist the harsh rigors of space, NASA used something called core rope memory in the Apollo and Gemini missions of the 1960s and 70s. The memory consisted of ferrite cores connected together by wire. 

jtotheizzoe:

Using last.fm Data to Map Geographic Flow of Music

By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain tastes frequently originated, and draw a hierarchy of influential cities (like the chart shown above for North America).

Surprisingly, the size of a city doesn’t associate very strongly with how influential it is. That means that despite its enormous size, NYC isn’t that much more influential than Portland or Austin. There are prevailing theories that large cities are the drivers of cultural invention, but this seems to show (for music, at least) that a connected online world is leveling that playing field.

Also, they have a graph displaying “Normalized Radiohead vs. Normalized Coldplay”, which has to go down as one of the best figures in a research paper, ever. 

(via arXiv)

(via npr)

scipsy:

Floating city: Venice from Space