odditiesoflife:

Long Term Exposure of Mating Gold Fireflies

Japanese photographer Yuki Karo goes to various places around Maniwa and Okayama Prefectures in Japan and uses long exposure to capture some stunning shots of mating gold fireflies.

(via discoverynews)

think-progress:

Why the third season of Game of Thrones is amazing.

Yes!

discoverynews:

Amazing photographs from a NASA/NOAA satellite of our Earth at night. Amazingly, the new sensors of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) can identify whether light sources are natural (i.e. fires) or manmade (streetlights), viewing our planet in incredible high-resolution. Check out the pics…

Beautiful.

Phil Plait: “Astronomers studying this galaxy have determined that its central black hole is a whopper: It has a mass about 17 billion times the mass of the Sun! This may be a record; it’s certainly among the most massive black holes known. The problem is, that’s far more massive than the central bulge of NGC 1277 would suggest the black hole should be. It’s well over half the total mass of the bulge! In fact, the entire mass of the galaxy is about 120 billion solar masses, which means the black hole at its heart is 14 percent of the total galaxy’s mass; compare that to the Milky Way’s black hole mass of 0.01 percent and you’ll see why astronomers were shocked.”

Question: Anyone think maybe most of that galaxy’s stars are obscured by Dyson Spheres? (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)

officialssay:

We re-blogged this from:

shortformblog:

Awesome: Obama writes absence note for fifth-grader

Missing school to see the president? Be sure you get one of these. Ryan Sullivan, an employee at a Honeywell plant in Minnesota, got the chance to introduce Barack Obama Friday, which led to his fifth-grade son, Tyler, missing school. Fortunately, Barack came though with this. Awesome. (thanks HyperVocal, which is also on Tumblr)

Please excuse Tyler. -BO