See this image for a brilliant visual of the sizes of large stars, all in a single animated gif:
I found it here. Don’t know much else about it.
Category: Science
Scientists Create See-Through Fish, Watch Cancer Grow
Through cross-breeding, scientists have created a zebra-fish with a transparent skin so that they can actually see the insides of the fish. Zebra fish are genetically similar to humans in a number of ways, and hence serve as good subjects for experiments like this. These are now being used to understand cancer. Excerpt:
White created the transparent fish, which he nicknamed Casper, by mating two existing zebrafish breeds, one that lacked a reflective skin pigment and the other without black pigment. The offspring had only yellow skin pigment, essentially appearing clear.
In one experiment, White and his colleagues inserted a fluorescent melanoma tumor into the abdominal cavity of the transparent fish. By observing the fish under a microscope, they found that the cancer cells started spreading within five days. White could actually see individual cells spreading.
See full article. They also have a picture of the fish for you to ogle.
If you smell food in a shop be very careful…
More scientists doing interesting experiments:
In the first experiment, Li asked participants to act as “photo editors of a magazine” and choose among either appetite stimulating pictures of food or non-appetite stimulating pictures of nature. A control group was shown no pictures at all. All were then asked to participate in a lottery that would either pay them less money sooner or more money later.
Those who had been exposed to the photos of food were almost twenty percentage points more likely to choose the lottery with the chance of a smaller, more immediate payoff than those who were exposed to the photos of nature (61 percent vs. 41.5 percent) and eleven percentage points more likely to choose the short-term gain than those who had not been exposed to any stimulus (61 percent vs. 50 percent).
Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater — even when told they were on a tight budget — than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).
See full article (via boingboing).