But lets face it, every day of the week is equally appropriate for Symphony of Science videos. Relativity is nuts, man.

(via io9.)

The Brain Scoop, I think I’m in love.

“Sex is the most pervasive method of categorizing people. We are more likely to categorize people based on gender than race.”

These are the first words of a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Men and Women Are From Earth: Examining the Latent Structure of Gender,” headed by Bobbi J. Carothers and Harry T. Reis, a couple of lads from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rochester who aimed to provide empirical evidence that sex and gender are not the same thing.

Kaycie D. calls her thesis project Elements – Experiments in Character Design. In order to complete it for her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art, she completed a character design and factoid for each of the 112 named elements in the periodic table. And lest you think those elements have been written in stone, two elements that remained un-named when she finished her project in 2011 have been named since: Flerovium and Livermorium. With 112 drawings to choose from, it might not be surprising that it was hard to narrow them down to just a few for a post. But believe me, it was harder than even that. There’s some very cool designs in here, so you should definitely check out the tag page of her blog that features all of her elements.

A little while ago there was an XKCD picture that explained the Up-Goer Five, “the only flying space car that’s taken anyone to another world,” using only the ten hundred most used words in the very large group of words that I’m using right now. The Up-Goer Five is not easy to explain, so this was pretty funny, but also pretty interesting. Now on Tumblr, Theo Sanderson, Anne Jefferson, and Chris Rowan have a world wide computer place where men and women like the men and women who made the Up-Goer Five can explain how their jobs work, using only those same ten hundred words. They even made a world wide computer place that shows you what words to pick!

We think women who do things like making Up-Goer Fives are very cool, so we want to show you some of the things they do here on our world wide computer place! There are lots more at Sanderson, Jefferson, and Rowan’s world wide computer place. And in case you haven’t guessed already, these words were also written using their word-picking computer place.

Also, there is just no way you can measure Force sensitivity with a blood test. I refuse to accept that. George Lucas, you’ve tricked me for the last time.

Physics students at the University of Leicester took it upon themselves to discover what the view from a spaceship traveling near the speed of light would actually look like. And… well, it’s the right side of the image up above. Just a blurry circular gradient. Bummer.

Science in sci-fi movies is rarely all that accurate. We get that. It’s OK. Space battles wouldn’t be nearly so visually interesting if there weren’t any impossible explosions taking place in a vacuum. But some movies take their disregard for the basic principles of science to the next level. And according to Popular Science, the worst perpetrator from 2012 is…

The last science class I took was AP Biology in 2003. Well, that’s not true, the last science class I took was Astronomy 101, and before that Honors Physics, but I dropped out of the latter after a marking period. So, the last science class I took that offered a significant challenge to me was AP Biology. After nearly a decade, there isn’t much I remember about it other than my teacher explaining why we were using an online simulator for the fly genetics lab (because he did it with real flies once and they never left) and dissecting a fetal pig that we named Napoleon. Also, I was absent for the lab where we performed gel electrophoresis, a method of examining the length of DNA fragments.

So bear with me on this awesomely sciencey proposal.

Way back at the beginning of this summer, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation began a campaign of informational videos and advertising designed, they hoped, to normalize the idea of women in the sciences and get young laides interested in a STEM career. Their flagship offering, however, missed the mark by quite a bit. The video was almost a parody of its purpose, there was a significant backlash, and Science, It’s A Girl Thing was forced to give itself a hard self evaluation. I found the whole thing to be very disappointing, not least because the other videos they had in their flagship YouTube channel were exactly the right thing: well produced and edited microdocumentaries on the work of actual living female scientists and researchers. It seemed like their hearts were in the right place, but they’d stumbled on their first step.

After accepting critique, ECDGR decided to hold a contest for folks to film a new introductory video for their campaign, and the chosen winners will make you feel a lot better about them. Watch the first above (from France), and the second below (from Australia).

3D can be a controversial subject among film fans. On the plus side, it can turn out well if done properly, i.e. if the film is shot with 3D cameras and not converted in post-production (see: Hugo, Cave of Forgotten Dreams). However, that tends not to be the case, with a large number of films post-converted so the studio can tack a 3D surcharge onto ticket prices (see: Clash of the Titans, Green Lantern). Post-conversion has a bad rap, and for a good reason: It tends to not be good.

But post-conversion has a fan in J.J. Abrams, who spoke out recently about how Paramount forced him convert Star Trek Into Darkness to 3D… and he actually ended up liking it.

OK, Abrams. You have thirty seconds. Convince me.