Chapters: 3/? Fandom: The 100 (TV) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Clarke Griffin/Lexa, Clarke Griffin & Lexa Characters: Clarke Griffin, Raven Reyes, Lexa (The 100), Anya (The 100), Octavia Blake, Bellamy Blake, Lincoln (The 100), Indra (The 100), John Murphy (The 100), Emori (The 100), Harper (The 100) Additional Tags: This is going to be a sloooow burn, ye be warned!, with a dash of angst thrown in there for good measure, okay maybe a little bit more than a dash.., again ye be warned :), Clarke’s POV Summary:
The one where Clarke is a marine biologist and Lexa owns a boat charter business in a beach town.
Or my excuse to nerd out over marine bio and boats with our fave leading ladies!
Clarke Griffin is a marine biologist looking to get in some research time before returning to university – a last minute charter for a diving expedition will bring her into close quarters with the boat’s salty but attractive owner.
These swimming pools with black tiles are my aesthetic.
Make the black tiles out of that black material that absorbs all light and swim over the void.
Fun fact about Vantablack- Because it absorbs all light, it heats up very fast. If exposed to direct sunlight, it takes in all the UV and heat and contains them, and can reach heats well over 212°F, the boiling point of water. So if you did coat the pool in that material, the water would boil as soon as the sun touched it, killing everyone swimming in it.
But that’s not all. The flash boiling of an entire pool of chlorinated water would release the chlorine as gas, which would kill everyone within a 200ft radius of the pool. And it doesn’t end there.
The release of chlorine gas combined with the heat of the black tiles would be more than sufficient to fuse the boiled hydrogen ions with the chlorine, creating an explosive reaction with the nitrogen in the air. So shortly after everyone in the pool boils and everyone around the pool dies of chlorine gas poisoning, the region would explode with the force of a small atomic bomb (8kt for a pool like those pictured above), leveling about 50 city blocks.
You’d think that would be bad enough, but get this-
Such chemical explosions expel gamma rays. Gamma rays ionize hematite, which is the mineral from which the black material mentioned is made. This creates Scopohyoscpnol, a compound known as “The Zombie Drug” because it essentially erases the brain and induces cannibalistic tendencies in its victim. It can be transmitted through saliva, infecting all who are bitten within hours.
So basically, if you did have Vantablack tiles in your pool, you would boil your friends, poison your neighbors, nuke your city, and condemn the globe to a zombie plague. But to be fair, it would look pretty cool.
Toy manufacturer Lego Group has
announced it will be creating a set of Legos based around the women of
NASA, Community Specialist Hasan Jensen wrote in a blog post for the company on Tuesday.
The idea for the project was originally pitched by Maia Weinstock, who submitted it to Lego through the company’s Lego Ideas program.
The set will include five women who contributed to NASA’s
mission, including computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, mathematician
Katherine Johnson, astronaut Sally Ride, astronomer Nancy Grace Roman
and astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to enter
space in 1992. Read more (2/28/17 5:53 PM)
imagine if we allocated just one year of our military budget to
improving our nations infrastructure
our education system
NASA
We’d have Starfleet soon if it went to NASA
How the hell do you even spend $711 billion on military funding alone.
Fuck everything, this is the most important
In 1998, the UN estimated that we would need $40 billion annually to sustain the entire WORLD population. Not just the US, not North America, the entire planet. This translates to roughly $58 billion today. This would cover housing, food, health care, and a lot more. And we’re spending over 12 times that on military alone in this country. (Source. A breakdown can be found near the end under “Foreign Aid”)
Today a massive discovery was announced: 39 light years away in the TRAPPIST-1 star system seven terrestrial planets all orbit extremely close to each other.
…and three are well within their star’s “habitable zone”.
TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf star. Because its temperature is so much lower than a typical star like the sun (it’s roughly 2550 K while the sun’s 5772 K) planets are able to orbit much closer than they could in our Solar System and sustain habitable conditions. All seven of the discovered exoplanets orbit closer to TRAPPIST-1 than Mercury does to the sun.
Of the different planets discovered, one is immensely Earthlike, having a similar sizeand receiving roughly the same amount of light as Earth. This place could be a whole lot more like home than anything we’ve found yet. Another planet is a potential water-world, getting about as much light as does Mars (with an atmosphere, yes, it could be a liquid water world).
So close do these planets all orbit near to each other that if you were to go to one and look up, you could see the other planets in the sky above you… and they’d be as big as *or larger than the Moon is in our sky*. It must be one of the most beautiful sights.
So what’s the big deal right? NASA’s already found over 3000 exoplanets – what makes these ones special?
A few remarkable things:
One, TRAPPIST-1 is a member of the M-class stars – stars which make up 70% or so of all the stars out in the Milky Way. Knowing that such stars can host magnificent habitable planetary systems means the search for life just got blown wide open to 70% of the stars in our galaxy.
Two, though 39 light years seems far, this is actually unimaginably close. We’re basically neighbors. The fact that TRAPPIST-1 is so close means that astronomers will be able to subject this place to decades of intense research.
As NASA begins to turn space telescopes such as Hubble, Kepler and Spitzer on TRAPPIST-1, I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from it soon.
Before you go, please consider joining the Planetary Society. If TRAPPIST-1 intrigues you, just wait until you see what else we have happening.
At the Planetary Society we have a radio show with some of the most groundbreaking material to include exoplanet hunters, engineers designing interstellar missions and interviews with astronauts. Most important though, we go to D.C. and make sure the politicians continue funding NASA and space science, and we reach out to people and try to show them what could be.
On that note, here are some artist conceptions of the TRAPPIST-1 star system and what could be:
So good job to the team that made this discovery (especially lead author Michaël Gillon) and I can’t wait to learn more about this place soon.
“The emergent analogy for gender and sexuality, “ Cosima said, “Instead of a spectrum is that of the cosmos. The reason to me is that life, by definition, wants to self-replicate but it also wants to diversify. It wants to reach out and expand into new possibilities and new realities. So like rather than imagining two static poles with people grouped around them and a handful of expressions falling in between, folks try to imagine a living, opening, continuing variation on life, right, and within life on expression of gender and sexuality. And that, that really makes sense to me.
“Maybe it jives with my experience more ‘cause I get to witness all these other people living my same biological experience. Yet we’re all so different. Like, maybe if we had tools good enough, those variations in all of us could be tracked back to unseen variations in our genes. But the whole point to me is that we were made as a patented product – made to be the same. But life, it has a way of tending towards self-expression – not of sameness, but of variance.
“It’s really not hard for me to see easily how something like sexual anatomy gets managed by medical science for the benefit of someone or even something other than the people who are being ‘treated,’ even though that’s how it’s always framed. Technically, even though it doesn’t show in like social markings for gender expression, I have different sexual anatomy than most females as a direct result of intentional manipulations meant to keep me from being able to procreate, because my body was all intended to be a patented. Many of my sisters died because of that genetic intervention, and I got sick and nearly died. But what’s most fascinating to me is that it didn’t work. I mean. we actively intervened to wrest control back from the corporate entity that wanted to decide our biology. It’s hard to study that. But also, my sisters Sarah and Helena, who are identical twins, their biology essentially overwrote a synthetic sequence designed to make us all infertile to express a wild type of our genetics. That’s just miraculous basically. That’s science against the direct actions of scientists, which was them attempting to make copies of the same. You can’t override the innate qualities of biological life.” (x)
If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.
I was making a chart this morning, but by the time I got to the twentieth configuration of primary sex characteristics, I got bored and angry, so just fucking slap them. Don’t bother giving them a chart, it’s a pain in the ass to produce anyway.
Here’s some non-chart-form lists.
Primary sex is defined by taking one or more item from each list (roughly, because just as there are double dominant intersex conditions there are double recessive ones too and it’s a whole thing). All potential combinations of these options can be said to constitute their own primary sex category.
Chromosomes:
XX
XY
X/X0
Mosaic
XXY
XXXY
XXX
XYY
Others (there are so many, like I think you can live with up to five chromosomes? So many)
Hormones
Estrogenized
Androgenized
Double dominant (high levels of both estrogenic and androgenic hormones)
Double recessive (low or no sex hormones)
Gonads
Testicle/es
Ovary/ies
Ovotestes
Gonads
Testicular agenesis
Gonadal dysgenesis
Probably more, I’m not a professional here
Genitals
Penis
Vagina
Pseudovaginal pouch
Clitoromegaly
Micropenis
Hypospadias
Diphallia
Definitely more but I am Tired™
There’s like at least several dozen primary sexes, and that’s before secondary characteristic development comes into play and the point is biological sex is a fucking mass hallucination. Slap anyone who says otherwise.
(This is not a professionally sourced and cited resource post please do not treat this like it’s some kind of all powerful reference work I literally just made it in a fit of rage in abt ten minutes based on stuff I already know I didn’t even research it be careful use google etc and so forth)
It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.
WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS
This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.
My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED
These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements.
Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes). There is plenty of room for variation, too – a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)
Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX.
Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY – and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.
And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes – we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well – take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens – the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.
So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex – if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.
So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around – but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to – just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual – their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.
Pregnancy gets weirder, too – decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain – where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man.
Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear – surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?
Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies.
Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.”
Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)
Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage – those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own – you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death.
There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.
Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.
The Doctor Is Out 