I’ve been getting into vultures big time. Truly under appreciated birds. May I please request some of your faves?
OH YES... Hold on I got what you need...
Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus), family Accipitridae, order Accipitriformes, found in parts of Northern and Western Africa, southern Europe and western Asia
ENDANGERED.
Top image - fixin to smash a egg...
photographs by Frank Cornelissen & San Diego Zoo
Eurasian Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus), family Accipitridae, order Accipitriformes, Spain
photograph by Yechiel Lamesh
Himalayan Griffon Vulture (Gyps himalayensis), family Accipitridae, order Accipitriformes, India
photograph by Husein Latif Photography
Lammergeier aka Bearded Vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), Accipitridae, order Accipitriformes, found in mountainous areas of Africa, Europe, and Asia
photographs by Eduard Villar Lleonart & Swagata Ghosh
King Vulture (Sarcoramphus papa), family Cathartidae, order Cathartiformes, found in Central and South America
photographs by Steve Sánchez Calle & Supreet Sahoo
Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture (Cathartes burrovianus), spotty distribution in Mexico, Central America, and South America
may be a hot take but i think the fact minors can access 18+ content by just clicking a button that says 'yes im totally over 18 trust me' is like. totally fine tbh. its a non-issue. i dont care if curious teenagers are looking at porn. they've been doing that for as long as porn has existed. id rather teens explore their sexuality through images on the internet than rush into real life experiences when they're not ready for it yknow. the UK is trying to put stricter age verification in place (which in turn is becoming an online privacy nightmare) and like. for what. who is it helping. why is this a problem.
People panic about "But what if kids pick up bad ideas from it???"
When I was a kid, Power Rangers got banned at school because we all thought it was incredibly cool and kept trying to kick each other in the head. No-one bothered explaining "Those are trained actors and it's all practiced, they don't *actually* hurt each other, and you're not good at that yet", they just banned it.
So we went to the park after school and read Kim's smuggled copy of the Power Rangers magazine and kicked each other in the head there instead.
(This is a metaphor, but it's also literally true. So much kicking in the head.)
God forbid parents actually talk to their teenagers.
A photo of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman holding a model of the Hubble Space Telescope.
You have to be a pretty big deal for NASA to name a space telescope after you, and that is certainly the case for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman — our Roman Space Telescope’s namesake. She’s sometimes called the “mother of Hubble,” but she’s really the mother of all space-based observatories and NASA science in general. As NASA’s first chief astronomer, Dr. Roman's vision and leadership supercharged space science and helped make NASA the world-class scientific institution it is today.
Nancy Grace Roman as a young child.
Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16, 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee. She was naturally curious about the world, a trait she attributed to taking nature walks with her mother as a child. By seventh grade, she had decided that she was going to be an astronomer.
She later recounted, “I certainly did not receive any encouragement. I was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists.”
A 1972 photo of Dr. Roman at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Nancy received her bachelor’s in astronomy from Swarthmore College in 1946 and her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949. She specialized in spectral classification, which involves spreading starlight out into a rainbow to see the individual colors. She would decode these rainbows to learn about the temperature and brightness of the stars, and their distances and movements.
In 1959, just six months after NASA was founded, someone at the agency asked Dr. Roman if she knew someone who might be interested in creating a space-based astronomy program. She sure did — she applied for the job herself, and she got it!
Dr. Roman works with a model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO).
Creating a whole space program from scratch was no small feat. Dr. Roman quickly set her sights on the stars, determined to make space-based telescopes a reality.
Scientists had been batting around the idea of Hubble for generations. Today, after more than three decades in orbit and thousands of discoveries, it’s hard to believe that Hubble was ever a contentious idea. But in the mid-20th century, a budget-starved NASA and a post-World War II government were hesitant to follow the ambitious ideal of a giant new telescope.
But Dr. Roman knew how transformative it would be to observe the cosmos from above Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, which blurs images from even the best ground-based telescopes. So she gathered astronomers from around the country and sat them down in a room with NASA engineers to hash out the possibilities.
Then she championed the idea to Congress, saying that “for the price of one night at the movies each year, each American would receive 15 years of exciting discoveries.” (And she actually undersold it, since we’ve now received over 36 years of discoveries from Hubble!)
In this 1965 photo, Dr. Roman (center) conducts a demonstration with Smith College students during a visit to NASA.
With leadership experience stretching back to at least the fifth or sixth grade, when she organized her friends into an astronomy club, Dr. Roman paired a personable approach with unwavering commitment to the mission, regardless of who or what stood in her way. And now we have her to thank for not just Hubble but for every other space telescope that has followed.
A portrait of Dr. Roman with the Stratoscope II balloon in the background.
In less than a month, the observatory named in Dr. Roman’s honor will journey to the heavens to transform our view of the universe. Read more about the woman behind the mission’s name here: https://science.nasa.gov/people/nancy-roman/. Follow along with Roman’s road to launch at nasa.gov/roman, and virtually tour the Roman observatory here.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
Wake up in enormous underground cyberpunk metropolis
Venture outside with your ant buddies to forage scraps from an incomprehensible civilization of alien gods (each one several times larger than the city you've spent most of your life inside) for the glory of your GodMomEmpress
Get attacked by a platoon of soldiers from a rival megacity, they're an offshoot of your species except like twice as big (basically orks) and like 10% of them are genetically modified supersoldiers with wings
Luckily, you've been engineered from birth to spit acid so you and your antfriends successfully defeat the rival ants and their winged miniboss
I may have added this before (it's been a while and I can't find it) but the ants with wings exist only to breed! Half of those are new future queens who will mate, drop their wings and stay pregnant forever.
The other half are males who will fertilize one queen, one time and then drop dead.
These one-shot disposable flying princes are the only time a normal ant colony naturally produces any males at all.
(the winged ants are called alates, but I don't know why we don't just call them princes and princesses)
vaporwave
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
gracieabrams
gamechangershow
