Via Christie’s tweet: check out this scientific/linguistic absurdity–a muscle-contraction protein known as titin (”not to be confused with Tintin,” sez Wikipedia. Duly noted!), whose technical name is 189,819 letters long.
A picture says a thousand words, so here it is…
…but if you want to behold it in all its googol-syllabic glory, click here. (I tried to repost it after the jump, but Wordpress choked on it.) I’d love to hear a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how long it’d take to actually pronounce…anyone feel like doing the math?
I’d forgotten just how deliciously weird old episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy could be.
Bill Nye Superfan SpiralOut11235 has put hundreds of clips from the show on YouTube - getting the chance to appreciate them as an adult is like watching old Bert and Ernie routines and noticing just how much you missed.
This week: Bees on Blow are like people on blow, which explains why humans get addicted to pesticides. Science proves: Axe Body Spray really works! But not for the reasons you think it does. Spirit and Opportunity: Hot Damn, but these are two tough little mars-exploring robots — we take a look back while choking back a bolus of sweet, sweet pride.
And Hey! Today we’re featured on the “new releases” section of iTunes! Dear Apple: we luuuurv you.
Fans: we lurv you too. Help us out by being the first to review the podcast on iTunes!
This week: In the matchup between Dark Energy and gravity, Dark Energy is winning. Medical names for ailments, no matter how mundane, make them more frightening. All those science fiction movies you watched as a kid (ahem) are right: Space makes everything ten times scarier and more lethal.
Like the tendency toward ‘runaway parental investment’ that the urbanization of the human population of spaceship Earth has occasioned, Episode 5 of GUW has no negative feedback loops limiting the degree of awesome that it is determined to bring into this manic and dying world.
This week: It’s the ultimate stocking stuffer: $250,000 gets you the right to name one of nine newly-discovered species. New head-mounted camera perfectly tracks every jittery, confusing flick of your eyes. Gun makers can get guns approved as medical devices? Well, at least they can try.
Just a preview of the episode of Grand Unified Weekly that goes live at SlateV at midnight tonight:
The right to name this newly-discovered species of bat after yourself is being auctioned off by Purdue University.
“Unlike naming a building or something like that, this is much more permanent. This will last as long as we have our society,” John Bickham, who co-discovered the nine species, told the AP.
Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., who, coincidentally, I have met, is whistling — a trick she picked up from a zookeeper.
This is completely anecdotal, but in a way I don’t find this surprising at all: Bonnie is the one animal with whom I had that singular moment when the barrier between human and non-human evaporates completely. [click to continue…]
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"WHATS THAT AWESOME THEME SONG ON EVERY EPISODE OF GUW?"
