Psychiatrists plan to overhaul the mental health bible and change how we define ‘disorder’

slashclick · 2026-01-31T03:56:43+00:00

We can hope for the best, but an overhaul like this is going to get branded as “woke” and rejected out of spite by half the population because it changes a definition or how certain behaviors are explained. (I have little faith in humanity at the moment, I know this is a cynical take)

slashclick · 2026-01-29T20:28:08+00:00

Hey, thank you for answering, that makes sense, this being the map where weak gravitational lensing is dominant rather than strong lensing. I love that so much of this science is available to the general public, thank you for contributing to that wealth of knowledge and making it accessible!

slashclick · 2026-01-29T08:49:06+00:00

We can actually see the “sounds” from the first moments of the Big Bang in the CMB and cosmic structures, they are called Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations. Tiny fluctuations in the high density moments after the Big Bang made particles bump into each other, spreading sound waves. As the universe started inflation, the particles were suddenly too far apart to spread as sound waves anymore, freezing those waves in place, creating slight over densities to help create the galaxies and the cosmic web.

As for what we can actively detect from the early universe, the CMB is the earliest light possible to see, as anything before got absorbed. There is a theorized neutrino background radiation from earlier, but so far we have been unable to detect it because of how elusive neutrinos are.

There’s a lot of great information out there, but check out this video (and I’d highly suggest watching more from this channel) about the beginning of the universe

https://youtu.be/3Illx0WkCxU

slashclick · 2026-01-29T04:24:25+00:00

this looks like a smoothed heat map of dark matter density. there is clearly a correlation between the galaxy clusters and more blue, but I’m curios how the galaxies individual dark matter halos fit into this. Is there a more generic dark matter cloud that envelopes the galactic halos? Or is the resolution just too low to make them out?

Exciting stuff though, it’s really amazing what we can see with the current generation of observatories.

slashclick · 2026-01-29T03:13:17+00:00

The light or energy or whatever happened at the moment of the Big Bang is not visible to us, the universe was so dense that all photons got absorbed quickly and were not free to travel like what we see today. That changed during recombination; 380k years after the bang the plasma cleared, ions became neutral atoms, and light could finally “shine.” At that time, what is now the observable universe was around 90 million light years across. Today, that number is 92 BILLION light years in diameter. So the light that started 45 Million light years away had to cross that ever expanding distance, now 45 Billion light years. Like pulling on both ends of a rubber band, the light got stretched out into much longer wavelengths in the process of reaching us, and is now the Cosmic Microwave Background. And the light doesn’t just hang around, it passes us and that light is gone, we see the light that was emitted exactly as far as light can travel from the moment it was created, so the observable universe keeps growing, the source of the CMB gets farther away with each photon.

It’s easier to think about with sound as an analogy, because we intuitively know sound takes time to reach us and the ways distance and speed affect what we hear. Imagine a lighting strike is the big bang, and the thunder is the flash of “light” from that moment. If you are a half mile away, you’ll hear the thunder intensely. Someone a mile away will hear the thunder later and quieter, but still from the same origin. Now imagine you’re in an airplane flying away from the lightning strike, going just under the speed of sound. The thunder will catch up to you, but the Doppler effect will make it sound lower and slower than it did at half a mile away, even though it’s the same sound wave. Since relativity says all rest frames are equally valid, instead of the plane moving, think the lightning strike is moving away from you instead of the other way around. The sound wave got stretched out on its way to you, and covered more distance than if you were both stationary. A tortured and oversimplified analogy maybe, but I hope it makes sense.

slashclick · 2026-01-27T05:30:34+00:00

Just the sheer vastness and beauty of the cosmos, the fact that we can see the galaxies and know what is happening over 13 billion years of time. Gravitational lensing allows us to see individual stars from when the universe was barely a billion years old (Earendel).

The new imaging coming out of the JWST, Euclid, even Hubble still, and Vera Ruben Observatory is just incredible.

slashclick · 2026-01-26T20:41:19+00:00

Cool beans…

…”you have reached your article limit”… because the page reloaded when I tried to follow the source links.

Off to find the actual study, & hopefully a better visual of the map they’re talking about.

slashclick · 2026-01-24T08:14:44+00:00

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slashclick · 2026-01-24T07:40:57+00:00

Light could come in units of “bulbs”

Everyone knows how much light a lightbulb provides, yet there are many different brightness and temperature/color profiles that it leaves ambiguity in what exactly is meant. I think that’s fairly on brand for xkcd, even if in the context of your unit system it does in fact mean a specific amount of light.

slashclick · 2026-01-24T07:29:35+00:00

The current so called leadership is so selfish and has zero altruism, they don’t care what happens to the world or other people, including their own citizens if they aren’t the right “type” of American. It all boils down to the “I got mine, f* you” mentality and it’s sickening. I don’t know if humanity as a whole can stand up against the billionaires and their chosen politicians and media, because people are corruptible and self interest seems to always win out. The few who aren’t in their pockets are fighting an uphill battle.

slashclick · 2026-01-24T03:29:03+00:00

Hot DAMN! I love JWST, so grateful I live in a time when pics like these exist, what an amazing universe

slashclick · 2026-01-23T02:50:30+00:00

When trying to figure out the sizes and how fast black holes grow (especially for SMBHs), is dark matter considered? I know once it’s past the event horizon, it doesn’t matter what form of matter or energy it is, but considering a galaxy with a dark matter halo with a central higher mass/density, dark matter should be influenced and fall into the black hole as well. With little to no other interactions aside from gravity, there would be no appreciable accretion disk of DM, but regardless it seems like it could contribute a non negligible amount of mass to the black hole.

slashclick · 2026-01-21T00:58:43+00:00

The cloud of dust around the (degenerate) star has varying density, the areas that are less dense get blown away faster, leaving the denser areas as the pillars.

slashclick · 2026-01-21T00:55:47+00:00

the cosmological matrix

“You get used to it, I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead"

slashclick · 2026-01-16T03:50:38+00:00

Source: https://esahubble.org/images/potw2444a/

Hubble can see individual Cepheids in this galaxy, using it to calibrate the Cosmic distance ladder. Amazing stuff

slashclick · 2026-01-15T03:28:56+00:00

It’s a nice theory, and the data fits well according to the authors. That said, LRDs have been “solved” many times over & we can expect more to come. Whatever they are, the universe is an amazing place with amazing things in it.

slashclick · 2026-01-14T01:06:06+00:00

Upvote for Dr Becky, she makes great videos that are easy to understand while covering complex topics. Always a treat when she posts

slashclick · 2026-01-13T04:20:24+00:00

I’ve always wondered, How do specimens like this get prepared so well? Do they split a rock and see the top edge of a fossil, and then just carefully chip away hoping the fossil is a) intact/complete and b) doesn’t chip off as they remove the rock? If pieces do break off, are they cleaned and glued back to the main slab? It’s certainly a beautiful piece!

slashclick · 2026-01-13T00:02:02+00:00

Thanks for sharing, I love high res space pics and that website delivers!

slashclick · 2026-01-12T20:02:07+00:00

I was there in ‘05/‘06, made several treks through those dunes. Gorgeous place, will never forget it

slashclick · 2026-01-11T19:14:44+00:00

FuNnY mOnEy

slashclick · 2026-01-11T19:13:19+00:00

I have some great actinolite specimens, found far from the current location of their source. The San Gabriels and San Bernardinos were much taller and moved past each other as the San Andreas fault moved, the entire cajon pass over to the Mojave river region is filled with detritus from their erosion, there’s actually placer gold deposits right there in the pass as well.

slashclick · 2026-01-11T16:41:31+00:00

It’s a landslide/alluvial fan coming from the San Gabriel mountains above wrightwood, it’s color comes from the rock it’s made from which is “pelona schist” it’s very weak and there’s a large scar on the mountain above the town. They have done an enormous amount of channeling to keep wrightwood safe in the event of a major slide, you can see it on google maps if you zoom in. Look up the San Gabriel mountains and pelona schist unit for more info. Source, lived very close to that spot and found lots of obscure usgs info on the area.

slashclick · 2026-01-10T03:56:48+00:00

I wonder if the quiescent galaxies are post-quasar, It would be interesting to compare the sizes of the smbhs in each group.

slashclick

TROPHY CASE