Message From Pluto 7

Completely unrelated,  but I wanted to show you these robots. Yes, these are not fish, these are robots - the future is now.  Not to mention that they’re moving apparently randomly through a three-dimensional space, and not touching each other! That’s impressive.

wow look at this great picture of me

You’ve always been my favorite.

a gifset of planet facts because i rlly love space!!

//please dont remove caption!

message from pluto 6

yes it’s true i do not like people

This was the crossword puzzle in the New York Times yesterday. 

Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a Schrödinger puzzle, select squares have more than one correct letter answer: They exist in two states at once. “Black Halloween animal,” for example, could be both BAT or CAT, yielding two different but perfectly correct puzzles. Only 10 such puzzles have now been published in Times history.

It’s the theme of Tausig’s puzzle, though, that makes it special. Four entries in Thursday’s crossword can include either an “F” or an “M.” Both are correct; neither is wrong. For example, “Part of a house” can be either ROOF or ROOM. The long “revealer” answer, tying those select entries together and spanning 11 squares smack-dab in the middle of the puzzle, is GENDER FLUID.

This puzzle, with “M”s and “F”s that aren’t fixed, is a masterful blend of subject and structure. “It potentially really evokes what gender fluidity is, which is not moving back and forth between two poles, but actually not being committed to either pole, and potentially existing in many states at different times,” Tausig said.

Maki Naro @ The Nib

message from Pluto (SBE 3)

did u know when its dark u can see stars on earth isn't that rad u just go outside and wow look up there all those pretty stars that aren’t the sun wow the sun just has to go and hide them during the day but at night wowie just look at all of em up there just wow we’re so small compared to space

Octopus and squid evolution is officially weirder than we could have ever imagined

Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, scientists have discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

This is weird because that’s really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA.

The findings have been published in Cell.

Olga Visavi/Shutterstock

the sun doesn’t have to go to college bc it already has 28 million degrees