(via pete)

(via fil's shared feed)

I love his podcasts - they are usually 10-15 minutes long and focus on verifying claims and sussing out truth. See full transcript of this episode here.

We succeeded in taking [this picture from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan
(excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996)

You are missed, Dr. Sagan.

(via boingboing)

The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars.

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently we've waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting.

A YouTuber by the name of Cristina opens a can of ass-whoppin' on the recently released video:

Ray Comfort is quite an "interesting" fellow. If you have not done so you should watch his debate with ThunderF00t (it's a long debate, but pretty good). Also make sure to read the Damn Interesting article about how the present-day banana came to be (hint: Ray Comfort is embarrassingly wrong).

(via Pharyngula)

Here's "I Am a Paleontologist", which I now cannot get out of my head:

You should also check out Science is Real because, well, it is.

UPDATE: Boing-Boing's "Meet the Elements" is also damn good sciencey stuff!