That's Not How That Works

That is a huuuuuuuuge question! 

Worlds and worlds of no. 

Milk, like a lot of other things, is pasteurized for a reason: to kill off pathogens that might otherwise make you miserable (or in certain circumstances dead). Raw milk can be contaminated with all sorts of horrible things that you do not want inside you, even if they are all-natural and organic. 

Pasteurization does not fuck with the lactose content of the milk; does not affect its capability to trigger reactions in people with milk allergies; does not alter its nutritional content. It does not take out the magic of nature and replace it with government-issued chemical mind control agents. All it does is kill harmful microorganisms. 

Phosphenes!

They show up when the cells of your retina get stimulated by something other than light, such as pressure or magnetic fields. Pressure phosphenes are the ones you get when you press on your closed eyelids--those golden scintillating geometric patterns, or the sort of ring of blue-green light you see opposite the side of the eye you’re pressing on.

You can also get phosphenes via electrical stimulation of the visual cortex, sort of bypassing the whole retina-paying-attention-to-light input sequence. 

The current rice advice seems to be: yes, there’s arsenic in yo rice because rice plants naturally take up more arsenic from the soil than other types of grain; the levels found in rice and rice products, while detectable, are not high enough to cause any immediate or long-term health problems; and you can still eat rice and rice products, but don’t subsist entirely on them. 

Arsenic content varies a lot between types of rice and location where they’re grown. Here’s the FDA site on the issue and here’s the Consumer Reports version you mentioned (from November of last year). There are some ways to reduce the arsenic content, including cooking rice the way you cook pasta, in lots and lots of water, instead of just enough to cover it. Brown rice has a shitload more arsenic than white rice, because the outer husk of the grain is where a lot of the stuff collects; however, the outer husk is also where all the reasons they nag you to eat brown rice in the first place are located, so you win some and you lose some. (I am a bad adult and don’t like brown rice anyway.) Basmati rice from California is apparently lower in arsenic; rice grown in Texas is apparently higher in it.

Someone somewhere made a gif of a person displaying that wonderful :| bird-of-paradise mating dance and it was FANTASTIC.

Okay, yeah, that was not made clear in the original ask--it kind of came out of nowhere? Was that part of a post string that I missed the beginning of? I don’t think we’ve been discussing winged humanoids on this blog for a while now, so I wasn’t necessarily on the same page as you to begin with. 

Not 100% buying that a humanoid would find it easier to fly in higher gravity, simply because of the bone structure. Humans have pretty fucking heavy dense skeletons as it is--barring bone disease--and the amount of effort required to haul that much weight into the air is not inconsiderable: then you jack up the gravity and the effort to become airborne goes up right along with it. 

If you make the atmosphere as dense as water, you get into trouble with the mechanics of respiration. 

THAT IS NOT HOW THAT WORKS. 

Christ, io9, get your shit together. If you are going to post a picture of Cerenkov radiation in a pool-type reactor core, do not for the sake of all space accompany it with a vaguely written article about an element which demonstrates ionized-air glow. 

SING IT WITH ME:

IONIZED-AIR GLOW

IS NOT THE SAME THING AS

CERENKOV RADIATION. 

Actinium is, according to physicists, “about 150 times as active as radium, making it of value in the production of neutrons.” It’s sending off more electrons than radium – so many that it’s disturbing the air around it. The blue glow is the energy given off by the oxygen that actinium briefly ionizes. So, technically, if you put the element in a void, it wouldn’t glow. But if you ran across it in a sewer, and saw a bunch of baby turtles wallowing in it, it is one of the few elements that would let you know, just by looking, that they were being bathed in radiation.

Which is all well and good! But don’t accompany this with a shot of a pool-type reactor core glowing blue. Accompany it with a picture of the thing you are talking about, such as this one, which took approximately ten seconds to google. Look! Actinium! Glowing! 

Also, yeah, radium chloride and radium bromide DO glow. 

gawker media gets it right: THE CHEMTRAIL CONSPIRACY

My first reaction to this video was you have got to be fucking kidding me, but my second was wow, this is really sad.

In an age where elementary-school curricula are often circumscribed by “Religious Freedom,” air quotes intentional, it is not actually all that surprising that many people appear to possess the same understanding of basic scientific principles as a sackful of doorknobs. The woman’s position in the video represents ignorance compounded by paranoia, and it looks like just astonishing levels of stupid, but I don’t think it's helpful to automatically write this sort of thing off as “wow what a dumbass.”

(There are some instances of internet stupidity which I think can be safely put down to “this person is actually an idiot,” some of which can be extended to “this person is a criminally irresponsible manipulative fearmongering moron who would not be able to identify a fact if it came up and smacked them in the face with a copy of Baby’s First Introduction to the Exciting World of Critical Thinking,” such as the soi-disant Food Babe. Others, like Joseph “Lying for Fun and Profit” Mercola, may not actually be stupid, but they are dangerous.)

So instead of just pointing and laughing at the lady who thinks government conspiracies are responsible for rainbows appearing in the spray from her garden hose, I’m going to explain what is responsible for rainbows instead. It’s not under the control of any government organization in all the world, not even the shadowy cabals lurking in Washington DC to hush up McCarthyist alien illuminati chemtrails.

If you’ve ever seen one of those cut-glass suncatcher thingies hanging in a window on a sunny day, you already know that they give off lots and lots of little tiny rainbow-colored points of light. The suncatcher glass is doing the same thing as droplets of water in the air do: it is bending, or refracting, the sunlight that enters it. Since sunlight is made up of lots of different colors of light which have different wavelengths, and since each wavelength is refracted at a slightly different angle, the light passing through the prism is dispersed into individually visible bands. Think of the famous Pink Floyd poster.

If you stand with the sun behind you, looking at water droplets in the air--raindrops, or the spray from a waterfall, or even the spray from your garden hose or sprinkler--you will see at least part of an arc of these bands of color. Sunlight hitting the water droplets is partly reflected back off the surface, but part of it enters the drop. Water, like the glass of the suncatcher, bends light, so when it enters the drop the different wavelengths that make up the light are dispersed into the individual colors of the spectrum. Most of this refracted light bounces off the back of the raindrop, and as it passes out of the front of the drop it’s bent a second time, heading back out at about a 42 degree angle from where it went in. Here’s a page with diagrams, and here’s a picture from the Wiki entry showing the spectrum more clearly.

Rainbows, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder: they’re a function of your position with regards to the sun and the water droplets. Someone standing at a different position from you will not see the exact same rainbow you are seeing; and you cannot ever see a rainbow side-on. This is because of the angle at which the light is refracted from the raindrops. The best explanation of this I’ve come across is here: with the sun behind you, so that your shadow stretches out directly in front of you, the axis of the sunlight follows a line from your eye to your shadow’s head. Now imagine a line running at a 40 to 42 degree angle from that line, beginning at the level of your eye. This second line describes a cone, centered on the axis of the sunlight. Where raindrops or mist intersect the 40-42 degree arc, you will see the colors of the rainbow. Since the ground tends to get in the way of the bottom of the arc, rainbows seen from ground level aren’t going to be circular, but if you’re up high enough--like in a plane, or on top of a super tall building--it’s possible to see the whole thing. When the sun is low in the sky, its rays are closer to horizontal, so you can see almost half the whole arc of the rainbow instead of just the top edge of it.

Here’s Descartes’ sketch of this whole angle business. Only the little dude with the sword is able to view the rainbow; you would not be able to see it from the POV of this drawing.