Via http://space-facts.com/cool-space-facts/

Found on reddit (the thread has some more good ones)

Fun fact: Egyptian gods do not have ‘animal heads’. The depictions of gods are meant to contain a duality, as is important in Egyptian Religion (life/death, red land/black land, chaos/order, human/animal). So when you see, say, Anubis with a man’s body and a Jackal head it represents both his human form and his Jackal form, meaning he might appear in either form. But never as a human with a Jackal head. That is only something you’d see on temple walls for the duality aspect.

We hope tonight* you will stay off tumblr long enough to catch the entirely new Camelopardalids meteor shower, which promises be a good one. Comet dust from 209P/LINEAR, sloughed off 200 years ago in its orbit around the sun is due to enter our atmosphere and provide us a remarkable show. That is provided you find somewhere with clear skies away from sources of light.

Sidereus Nuncius, sometimes called Starry Messenger, is a short work by Galileo Galilei in 1610–or almost 200 years before 209P/LINEAR laid the groundwork for tonight’s show. Above is the verso of Galileo’s drawings of the Pleiades star cluster, which makes an exceptional background for our shooting stars. The edition is available for view online in our Heralds of Science collection, a set of books donated to the Smithsonian Libraries by noted book collector and founder of the Burndy Library, Bern Dibner. Our Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology is named in his honor.

Make Galileo proud.

(*Just fyi: this was originally posted on May 23, 2014—the “tonight” we were referring to. Hoping this slight edit will help with any confusion and unnecessary time away from tumblr. The International Meteor Organization has a calendar of meteor showers, if you’re interested.)

What's the best book you've read lately? And what's your favorite anthro book?

Well I’ve really only read one book lately, and it’s very good: Fields of Combat by Erin P. Finley. It’s a medical anthro take on PTSD in veterans returning from combat in the Middle East. I highly recommend it. (For fun I usually read fantasy like Terry Pratchett and Jim Butcher, just so y’all know I do have fun sometimes lol.)

As for my favorite anthro book, that’s a tough one since most of my books are more technical manuals and I’ve only read excerpts of cultural theory books. One I really liked though was Righteous Dopefiend by Bourgois and Shonberg. It’s about heroin addiction in the homeless of San Francisco and brings in all kinds of great theory from writers like Bourdieu and Foucault (I’m always a slut for Foucault).

Next I’ll be flipping through Digging for the Disappeared and Disturbing Bodies, both of which examine the forensic anthropologist’s role not only in recovering, identifying, and repatriating remains from genocide and war crimes, but how we relate to and work with the survivors. I’ll be reporting back on those once I make some headway.

Structural differences between DNA and RNA. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is like a blueprint of biological guidelines that a living organism must follow to exist and remain functional. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, helps carry out this blueprint’s guidelines. Of the two, RNA is more versatile than DNA, capable of performing numerous, diverse tasks in an organism, but DNA is more stable and holds more complex information for longer periods of time.