Listen To The Sound Of Wikipedia

This reminded me of the isonitrile freezer at my previous internship.

For those who don't know, isonitriles (aka isocyanides) are a class of compounds that contain this motif:

They are known to smell very bad and many synthesis pathways to those compounds were discovered because of their stench. (I personally think they smell like a mixture of rotten cabbage and burned rubber but more ''artificial'')

So in that lab, we had a freezer dedicated to them, and even with sealed bottles in à -20°C freezers in a separated and ventilated cabinet, you would still be able to detect their odour if you stood next to it (not strongly, but still detectable).

We had to move that freezer to a new lab, it stayed unplugged for 15 to 20 minutes, and in the 5 minutes we need to power it back in the new lab, the entire room had filled with that isonitrile stench (mind you that freezer had not been open during the entire operation). Thankfully we did that on a Friday afternoon and by Monday the smell had disappeared.

Just for reference this is from the MSDS of benzyl isonitrile :

found on a fridge in my lab, haha

oh yeah speaking of grass.

i can't think of any epiphytic grasses and I can't understand why they wouldn't exist. it seems like the perfect niche for a grass.

Picture of the bubble nebula and surrounding objects : Top left (the vague group of stars): M52 an open cluster

Center right: NGC 7538 an emission nebula (also known as the northern lagoon nebula)

Bottom center: NGC 7635/the bubble nebula and the surrounding hydrogen cloud

The ''bubble'' part of this nebula is created by the stellar wind (flow of gas, plasma and particle) emitted by the central star at nearly 650 million km/h hitting and compressing the surrounding interstellar gas. The central star (BD +602522) is currently estimated to be about 45 times heavier than our sun and about 4 million years old. Being so massive and thus very hot (it's a type O star) its lifespan is very limited for a star and it should go supernova in about 10 to 20 million years.

BD +602522 is slightly off center from the bubble, this is due to the interstellar gas being a bit more dense on one side and thus slowing the stellar wind more efficiently.

Single exposure to make the central star more visible.

Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 12x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.

Starless version of the same image:

Older image where the bubble is more distinct from the background hydrogen clouds :

Finale got around to processing the photos of M33 I had taken at the end of august. M33 is a spiral galaxy about half the size of our own galaxy and located about 2.7 million light years from earth. This galaxy has a rather high rate of star formation resulting in numerous ionised hydrogen regions (the red irregular blotches inside the galaxy), some of those being notable enough to have been included in the NGC catalogue or the IC catalogue.

NGC 588 NGC 604 (Example of some of the notable nebula in M33)

On of the first recorded observation of this galaxy was possibly done by Giovanni B. Hodierna before 1654, it was independently rediscovered by Charles Messier in 1764 who added it to his catalog (hence the name Messie 33).

information on the photo - total exposure time : 1h48 min using RGB and Ha filters - camera : ASI294 mm - telescope : Newtonian 150/600 with 0.95x coma corrector - photo edited with pixinsight

For those using PixInsight for treatment/edition, I recently discovered the scrips created by Seti Astro (https://www.setiastro.com/pjsr-scripts), Blemish-Blaster was quite useful to remove the halos from my Ha filter and What's In My Image helped with the identification of nebulas. If you had not heard those scrips, you should check them out.

Here's another black and white picture taken in H-alpha, this time of the Pacman nebula (NGC 281). I don't have a lot to say about this one, it's a hydrogen gas cloud similar to the gas cloud around Sadr that I previously photographed. An interesting thing about it thought, is its position, it's about 6 500 light years from us and about 1000 light years above the galactic plane, making it a prominent target to study star formation. The cluster of stars at the center of the nebulas is a good example of those newly borne stars as it is only about 3.5 million years old.

At least viruses are a distinct physical thing, prion on the other hand are just fucked up geometry.

It's just angry geometry that angers the other protein around it. It doesn't even have DNA or RNA!!!

i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf

Ok, so I needed a bit of help from a friend who know more about this than me (unfortunately my knowledge of computer science is very limited). He suggested to try base64 since this string ended with a ''='' signe (he said it indicates padding if all the bits don't aligne perfectly at the end in this encoding schemes) and had both lower and upper case letters.

the translation from base64 gave : FGS: Thi& is Fleeting Green Sunsets. Can anyone read me?

I must wonder: have you ever encountered a failed broadcast, corrupted or otherwise?

TSAC: Corrupted broadcasts are commonplace. They often occur as a result of interruptions during radio transmissions, caused either by environmental factors or damage to associated communications arrays.

If a communications tower fails to transmit a message for one reason or another, the data is dumped into a local storage medium (usually a pearl) for the sake of preservation. The data then needs to be retrieved manually by an Overseer in order to be recovered.

Data recovery subroutines can be used to reconstruct partial transmissions, but broadcasts caused by faulty or decaying equipment often become corrupted. I usually ignore these signals. However, occasionally an abnormal broadcast will catch my attention.

An Overseer of mine patrolling the nearby long-range communications spires retrieved one such broadcast rather recently...

[ OUTGOING REQUEST ] COMMUNICATIONS MANIFEST [[ERROR]] UNABLE TO SEND - Malformed Message Header SOURCE NODE TRACE: (NULL)_ROOT, (NULL)_COMM06, 464753_SPIRE02 || DESTINATION: (NULL)unknown group MESSAGE CONTENTS: --- FATAL EXCEPTION: UNABLE TO RENDER MESSAGE CONTENTS INVALID SYMBOL AT LINE 01, SEQUENCE 08. LINE 03 MISSING TERMINATING EXPRESSION. == BROADCAST IS CORRUPTED. == ATTEMPTING RECOVERY. PARTIAL BROADCAST RECOVERY SUCCESSFUL. RAW CONTENTS: 01010010011010110110010001010100010011110110100101000010010101010110000101000111011010110110110101001001010001110110110001111010010010010100010101011010011100110101101001010111010101100011000001100001010101110011010101101110010010010100010101100100011110010101101001010111010101100111010101001001010001100100111000110001011000100110111001001110011011000110010001001000010011010111010101001001010001010100111001101000011000100110100101000010011010000110001001101110011011000111011001100010011011010101010101100111011000110110110101010110011010000101101001000011010000100111010001011010010101000011100000111101 [ Pending upload by dispatched Overseer. Unit will enter read-only state in 146 cycles. ]

For those not in the US wanting to search for dark skies near you, this website is quite useful.

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

This is a photo of the Andromeda galaxy I took nearly 5 years ago. The dark parts of the galaxy are gigantic clouds of dust and gas in which no stars and planets are born. This galaxy is one the closest one to our own, and yet it's 2.55 million light years from us, It's composed of about 1000 billion stars, in a few billion years it will collide with our own galaxy.

The two lighter blotches around Andromeda are two satellite Galaxys that orbit around Andromeda and are also composed of millions of stars.

Those numbers are so big they start to get inconceivable, and that's only a small fraction of what exists out-there. We are not much in the grand scheme of the universe, but when you look at the night sky and the wonders of the universe you can feel at least for a little while that you're part of it.