"Mars Rover Finds Stronger Potential for Life"

“the period when all conditions were right was counted in hundreds to thousands of years, a very small opening by origin-of-life standards.

That has now changed. John P. Grotzinger of Caltech, the project scientist for the mission, reported at a news conference on Monday that the rover’s yearlong trek to Mount Sharp provided strong new evidence that Gale Crater had large lakes, rivers and deltas, on and off, for millions to tens of millions of years. The geology shows that even when the surface water dried up, plenty of water would have remained underground, he said.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/science/-stronger-signs-of-life-on-mars.html

About the process of searching for life on mars

"Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism"

"Whenever holding a position makes you feel superior and is fun to talk about, that's a good sign that the position is not just practical, but signaling related."
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/

I really enjoyed reading this - these are concepts I absolutely observe in myself and my life

"Are You Important?"

"According to Jackson, "Random occurrences can start links growing and lead to a person becoming important in a network: People like to connect to more popular people, and so it can snowball. "

The chance grouping of a few kids in homeroom can lead to a clique that might end up dominating a social network.

"If you rebooted the network" — meaning if everything were to be played out again — "you might get a totally different structure," Jackson says.""
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/11/11/363255882/are-you-important

"Ten Thousand Years"

"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation’s only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste...Eventually, WIPP  will be sealed up and left alone. Years will pass and those years will become decades. Those decades will become centuries and those centuries will roll into millennia. People above ground will come and go. Cultures will rise and fall. And all the while, below the surface, that cave full of waste will get smaller and smaller, until the salt swallows up all those oil drums and entombs them. Then, all the old radioactive gloves and tools and little bits from bombs –all still radioactive– will be solidified in the earth’s crust for more than 200,000 years. Basically forever.

Storing something safely forever is a huge design problem"

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

This was a particularly amazing episode of the podcast -

Aaaaand "Don't change color Kitty" is now my favorite song

"Angelique Kidjo: 'Do I LOOK like I have Ebola?'"

""I thought Ebola would bring greater journalism, that they'd write about the need for great nurses and great doctors, or how every human being on this planet has the right to a good healthcare system," she confesses. Clearly, she's been disappointed.

"I hoped they'd show the beauty of the people. But it's much more dramatic and more entertaining to show us dying.""
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/12/world/africa/angelique-kidjo-do-i-look-ebola/index.html

Batonga is my new favorite word.

FB: "I cannot be stopped by those things, because every time you keep silent, somebody dies, and we don't have endless resources of human beings."
This woman sounds amazing.

"The 39 Most Iconic Feminist Moments of 2014"

"If there's one thing history has taught us, it's that the backlash against feminism will always be a measure of our success. That's the thing with progress — it is perceived as a threat by those too weak to embrace equality."

http://mic.com/articles/105102/the-39-most-iconic-feminist-moments-of-2014?utm_content=bufferf56b3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I really enjoyed these.

"The genes that turned wildcats into kitty cats"

"The researchers uncovered at least 13 genes that changed as cats morphed from feral to friendly. Some of these, based on previous studies of knockout mice, seem to play a role in cognition and behavior, including fear responses and the ability to learn new behaviors when given food rewards. “That jibes with what we know about the domestication of cats,” Montague says, “because they would have needed to become less fearful of new locations and individuals, and the promise of food would have kept them sticking around.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/11/genes-turned-wildcats-kitty-cats