God created life through evolution 😉💙💚🏞️🦕🦖🌎🌍🌏. I want dialogue between science and religion 😉💙💚🏛️⛪️🏞️✝️. I think that earth is 4,6 billion (4600 000 000) years old and life 3 billion (3000 000 000) years old. There was 5 mass extinction by nature and now 6. Extinction by human. Human and simpansie has universal ancestor, which lived 7 million (7000 000) years ago. Human Genesis is from Africa 😉💙💚👨🏾🦱👩🏾🐵🙈🙉🙊🐒🌍.
This Caturday, meet the black-footed cat (Felis nigripes). It’s the smallest wild cat in Africa, only growing about 8 in (20 cm) tall and weighing around 4.4 lbs (2 kg). Don’t let its size fool you: This pint-sized predator is an extremely successful hunter, with a recorded kill rate of 10 to 14 prey animals per night—taking down critters such as rodents and birds about every 50 minutes! How does this stack up to bigger felines? The black-footed cat’s hunting success rate is 60 percent, far higher than that of a group of lions on the hunt—they peak at about 30 percent. And why does this tiny cat eat so much? This species’ fast metabolism requires it to refuel constantly.
Photo: Patrick Ch. Apfeld, CC-BY-3.0, Wikimedia Commons
After being assembled, our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has passed final tests, and is being prepared to move to our Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where teams will work to prepare it for a launch in early September 2026.
With a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, Roman can potentially measure light from a billion galaxies in its lifetime. It will also be able to block starlight to directly see exoplanets and planet-forming disks, complete a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy, and settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.
The observatory is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who made cosmic vistas readily accessible to all by paving the way for telescopes based in space.
Want to learn more about Roman? Check out our #Roman Space Telescope tag and visit our mission page.
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This artist’s impression pinpoints many cosmic voids –– relatively empty bubbles of space.
The universe is home to trillions of galaxies, each chock full of smaller cosmic objects like stars and planets. Since galaxies gravitate together in a web-like pattern, there are also immense open spaces called cosmic voids in between. In those growing, gloomy places, dark energy dominates.
Galaxies in this animation are structured a bit like a Hoberman sphere (a lattice-like toy ball that expands and collapses), growing farther apart as the universe expands.
Zoomed out maps of the universe show that galaxies often cluster together in bright city-like regions. Each cosmic metropolis is connected to others by interstate highways – vast filaments of dark matter, gas, and dust, along which additional galaxies can be found. This large-scale structure is called the cosmic web.
Way out in the boondocks – far from the galaxies and filaments – are the cosmic voids. They’ve been growing larger for billions of years, emptying out as gravity pulls matter elsewhere.
This animation visualizes the early universe, when the cosmic was full of a hot plasma soup.
Cosmic voids were born when the universe looked extremely different than it does today. Instead of being speckled with stars and galaxies, the cosmos was filled with a sea of plasma (charged particles) that formed a dense, almost uniform fluid.
There were slightly denser kernels of matter, like a single ounce of cinnamon sprinkled into about 13,000 cups of cookie dough! Since the clumps had more mass, their gravity attracted additional material. Those areas grew and grew, drawing more matter together to form stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters as the universe expanded over billions of years. Meanwhile, the spaces in between became ever emptier.
A simulation of large-scale structure forming under the influence of gravity.
Cosmic voids aren’t completely empty, though. They do have sparse galaxies, though they seem to have delayed development. Since there’s less matter, there’s weaker gravity pulling things together so stars and galaxies form more slowly. And those galaxies are isolated so they’re less likely to interact with others, which fuels growth in denser places like galaxy clusters.
But voids are mostly filled with things we can’t see. They contain a thin mist of dark matter along with a relatively larger amount of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) like ghostly neutrinos than we find elsewhere in the universe. Since there’s not very much stuff in voids to create gravity, a different force reigns supreme: dark energy, the mysterious cosmic pressure that seems to be speeding up the universe’s expansion. Since cosmic voids are influenced primarily by dark energy, they offer clues about its behavior.
Astronomers haven’t thoroughly studied cosmic voids yet, but our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be wide-eyed enough to reveal those desert patches of space like we’ve never seen them before. Studying them will show how the universe is put together and how dark energy is pushing galaxies apart.
If you could fly through the cosmic web at hyperspeed, you might see a view like this simulated one!
So far, scientists have found around 1,000 cosmic voids. Roman’s 3D surveys should find tens of thousands more, both large and small, scattered throughout earlier cosmic eras than previous large sky surveys could see. That means we’ll be able to watch how the most vacant places get even emptier over billions of years. And astronomers can trace any changes in dark energy’s might by seeing how it stretches voids, where dark energy dominates, across cosmic time.
Follow along with Roman’s journey to launch at nasa.gov/roman.
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Adrian working on Ryland’s dome enclosure habitat makes me think… that has to have been a VERY high-value and in-demand job for the last several decades. Adrian spending their time ever since astrophage started affecting Erid’s climate working on habitat enclosures for species sensitive to climate change. Building oceanic enclosures to preserve marine species nearly wiped out by breeding astrophage in the oceans (algae bloom to end all algae blooms)(Erid deserves their own “paving the Sahara” moment).
And when the Blip-A has been gone twice as long as it should have been with no indication of what happened to them, when the astrophage has been attacking Erid’s sun for 50 years and they are starting to feel the pressure of its effects, when the Tau Ceti plan looks like a failure and the whole crew aboard has been assumed dead and they need to figure out something else… Eridian governments approach Adrian’s dome habitat team with the serious question of how much of the Eridian population could feasibly be moved into climate controlled geothermally-powered xenonite dome cities. (The answer is inevitably “not enough.” But the debates over sending a second crew to Tau Ceti in case what happened to the Blip-A was a weird fluke are not finding any consensus and the planet is snowballing towards total climate collapse and the world is ending and Adrian is bitterly glad that they and Rocky never had children because what kind of future is even left—)
So when Rocky rolls up some 20 years after having been declared dead going HI I HAVE THE SOLUTION TO THE ASTROPHAGE PROBLEM AND ALSO A MALNOURISHED ALIEN WHO NEEDS A SEALED ENVIRONMENT LIVING ENCLOSURE RIGHT NOW, I think it would have been a HUGE relief to pivot to building That. And they have a lot of experience at this point!
I don't want to be friends with russians. Not even regular ones. I don't want to seek for good russians. I want them to simply fuck off my home and allow me and my ukrainian friends to live, fathers and mothers who are servicemen in Ukrainian Armed Forces to raise their children back in their homes, for our government to improve and to become better without need to plead everyone for weapons. Is it too much? Or too political?
I wanted to buy switch without "I will have something to do while power outages" thoughts. I wanted to work calmly and comfortable without stress from air raid alarms and explosions, without need to explain kids that "this explosion happens because our Air Forces are protecting us from threats".
And I want russians to stay away from me, my blog, my art, my family, my hometown, my entire fucking country. Including Luhansk and Donetsk regions and Crimea peninsula and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
We’re on the hunt for worlds that can sustain life! But how can we identify them from trillions of miles away?
We start the search within the habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone around other stars – the not too hot, not too cold region where liquid surface water could exist on orbiting planets.
This artist’s impression shows a star with several planets within its habitable zone.
It sounds simple enough, but it’s surprisingly complicated. For one thing, the size and location of a habitable zone varies from star to star, mainly depending on how big and hot it is. It’s like standing near a bonfire; the smaller the flames, the closer you have to be to feel the heat.
This visualization of our solar system shows the rough location of the Sun’s habitable zone. Earth is nestled comfortably in the middle, and Venus and Mars fall within it as well. But since other factors also influence habitability, Mars and Venus are significantly less habitable than Earth.
Our Sun is a pretty average star with a mid-size habitable zone that extends from around Venus’s distance from the Sun to a bit past Mars.
Larger stars (which are more scarce) have wider habitable zones located farther from the star. But the stellar heavyweights burn through their nuclear fuel very quickly, so they die much younger –– maybe too soon for advanced life to have a chance to form on orbiting planets, even if they’re in the habitable zone.
This infographic compares the characteristics of three classes of stars in our galaxy: Sunlike stars are classified as G-type stars; stars less massive and cooler than our Sun are K dwarfs; and the very faintest and coolest stars are the reddish M dwarfs. The habitable zones, potentially capable of hosting life-bearing planets, are wider for hotter stars, which have shorter longevity. Planets in the habitable zones of the smallest stars are subject to the most radiation, which could make it difficult or impossible for life to thrive.
Smaller stars are far more common, with the littlest three types (shown above) adding up to around 90% of all the stars in our galaxy! They have habitable zones that are not only tiny but also very close in.
That’s a problem because the smallest stars often have the biggest tempers, lashing out with X-ray and ultraviolet radiation that could sterilize nearby worlds. And those planets tend to be tidally locked, like the Moon is to Earth, which means the same side always faces the star. Can you imagine living on a planet with eternal daylight on one side and an endless night on the other? That would make for some extremely weird weather!
This illustration shows one way that planet TOI-715 b –– a tidally locked super-Earth in the habitable zone around its star –– might appear to a nearby observer.
Out of more than 6,000 exoplanets discovered so far, around 150 are known to orbit within the habitable zone. Is Earth 2.0 among them?
This collage visualizes some of the more than 6,000 exoplanets confirmed to date.
Maybe! But it takes several more ingredients to truly make a world habitable for life as we know it. (Life as we don’t know it may exist, but we hunt for the familiar because we know it worked at least once –– on Earth –– and it gives us a solid starting point for our search).
Based on what we’ve observed in our own solar system, large, gaseous worlds like Jupiter seem far less likely to offer habitable conditions. Smaller rocky planets seem to offer gentler environments that would be more conducive to life.
This artist’s impression visualizes a variety of terrestrial planets.
And even for Earth-like worlds in the habitable zone of an average star, life would be tough without an atmosphere. An atmosphere acts as a security blanket that provides breathable air, regulates temperature, shields against harmful solar radiation, and helps any surface water remain stable for long periods of time. That’s one reason that Mars, with its barely there atmosphere, is much less friendly to life even though it’s in the Sun’s habitable zone.
This artist’s concept shows what the surface of a planet called TRAPPIST-1f may look like. It’s one of seven Earth-size planets in the system.
NASA missions kicked off the hunt for habitable worlds and will soon take them to the next level. Our now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope helped confirm the first known star system with seven Earth-sized exoplanets, Trappist-1, and studied rocky worlds. Then our Kepler space telescope, which is also now retired, showed that planets are even more common than stars in our galaxy, and proved that Earth-size worlds are abundant among them.
The Hubble Space Telescope kicked off the direct study of exoplanet atmospheres, which our James Webb Space Telescope now does in even more detail. And our TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is busily scouring the skies for nearby Earth-size planets, identifying the best targets for follow-up atmospheric studies.
In the coming decades, two more major missions will enter the scene: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory. Roman will survey the stars to find planets like those in our solar system, which other telescopes typically struggle to find, and showcase technology to directly photograph Jupiter-like exoplanets. That will provide a crucial stepping stone for the Habitable Worlds Observatory to photograph Earth-like planets for the first time ever. It will also look for signs of life called biosignatures by measuring atmospheric gases like oxygen and ozone that could signal the presence of living things.
By narrowing the search for habitable worlds, we keep moving ever closer to finding Earth 2.0! Follow along with NASA’s exoplanet discoveries here: https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/.
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The evolutionary implications of the KOTLC Universe plague me daily. Every single species is kept alive by the elves, does that mean that there's Homo Hidelbergensis' just chilling around with the Flores Men? Did the hominid species continue evolving? Do Australopithicus have complex family societies and language? Where do they keep them? Do they have them in their own areas, do they still live in bands and tribes and small family units? Or did they also create their own civilizations? Or are they kept in enclosures like other animals, at what point does it separate animals from intelligent species? How did the Elves come about in the first place? They managed to get ahold of dinosaurs and shit so was there an earlier evolution? Catastrophic event then a rebuild? There's so many possibilities!
While occasional or permanent bipedalism evolved several times among vertebrates -- Eudibamus all the way back in the Permian, early dinosaurs and then birds, the basilisk lizard, the early mammal Leptictidium, several groups of leaping rodents, pangolins, kangaroos -- almost all groups walk with a horizontal spine, usually with a heavy tail acting as counterweight. (Not in birds, but they brought their knees high against the chest to shift forward their center of mass, so they use as counterweight their butt and thighs.)
As far as I know, only two groups of animals walk with their spine upright, the whole body balanced above their feet: we and penguins.
By Sailko - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89662026
Living about 2.6-2.5 million years ago, Australopithecus garhi (garhi meaning 'surprise' in the Afar language) lived in the Afar Region of Ethiopia during the early part of the Pleistocene. They were adapted to both living among the trees and walking bipedally like other Australopithecus species, though they have longer legs, possibly indicating a 'delayed adolescent growth spurt' more like modern humans than modern non-human apes, which don't experience such growth spurts. Though this could also mean they either matured more slowly than non-human apes or that their legs grew more rapidly than the rest of their body. Research is still on-going.
When they were described in 1999, there weren't many hominin remains from between about 3-2 million years ago, with the only identified species being A africanus and Paranthropus aethiopicus. The researchers concluded that A garhi was an offshoot rather than a direct ancestor because of the lack of shared traits between the Homo genus and A garhi.
What makes A garhi interesting is that they might have been the first hominin to use tools. Bones found near them show cut and percussion marks with a bovid mandible showing 'three successive, unambiguous cut marks presumably made while removing the tongue; a bovid tibia with cut marks, chop marks, and impact scars from a hammerstone, possibly inflicted to harvest the bone marrow; and a Hipparion (a horse) femur with cut marks consistent with dismemberment and filleting'. Though the stone tools haven't been found, its thought that this is because the region where the bones were found was a 'grassy lake margin with so few raw materials for making stone tools, it is possible these hominins were created and carrying tools some ways with them to butchering sites, intending to use them many times before discarding', though they also might have just collected naturally sharp rocks and used those. A nearby site, Gona, where there are a lot of raw materials, there are tools that date to about 2.6-2.5 million years ago, when A garhi would have been the only hominin in the area, making them likely the first tool makers in the area. While more recent finds have shown possible cut marks earlier, the cut marks associated with A garhi are the oldest unambiguous cut marks that we know of. The oldest tool making site we've discovered at Lomekwi dates back to 3.3 million years ago, predating A garhi by 700,000 years. There is still a lot of research and debate ongoing about this site, and which hominin made them.
hey, would you be able to link the article you mentioned in the tags of that post about human evolution that talks about how depictions of human evolution in popular culture are racist? I would love to read it as well. thanks!
It’s this one!
Howard researchers say the persistence of erroneous representations in scientific literature, popular culture distort the authentic view of
Technically I only make them read this brief press release about it and encourage them to follow the link to the full article if they’re interested, but the article is kind of eye-opening and it did change the way I look at depictions of human evolution.
God create via evolution @ollitapiop - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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