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What is in its 'golden age' but not enough people know about it?

There's so much good out there if you know where to look.

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From astronomy to knitting, some fields of human endeavor are having a heyday.

When you peruse the news headlines or dive into discussions on current events on social media, it's pretty easy to feel despondent. Doom and gloom sells, unfortunately, and our natural negativity bias that's meant to protect us can be overworked by a 24/7 bombardment of humanity's challenges.

There is an anecdote to all of that, though: Curating and cultivating the good. Sometimes it's just knowing where to look to find examples of problems being solved, discoveries being made, innovation taking huge leaps and other evidence that humans are moving our collective life forward in incredible ways.

Someone on Reddit asked, "What is currently in its 'Golden age,' but not enough people know about it?" and thousands of people responded. Reading through the answers is an enlightening and uplifting glimpse of things we might not personally be involved with but are happy to see having a heyday. Like, who wouldn't like to know that we're in a golden age of astronomy and paleontology. Space and dinosaurs? It's like realizing our 5-year-old selves' ideal future.

Here are some of the top things that are experiencing a "golden age":

Astronomy

The amount that scientists have learned about the final frontier in recent decades is mind-blowing.

"Astronomy is currently experiencing a golden age. It has changed radically in the last 30ish years. Think on this, if you are 30 + years old, you were born into a world that wasn't sure if planetary systems were rare or common. We now know that nearly all stars are likely to have planets. We know of 5000+ exoplanets. Mars was not considered a place we could find signs of life by most. The generation of spacecraft exploring Mars since the year 2000 changed that. Now some argue that discovering signs of past life on Mars is a matter of when, not if. We found multiple worlds in our solar system with liquid water oceans. This is just scratching the surface. New technologies like JWST promise to keep the momentum for the foreseeable future." – Slimjerry

"A hundred years ago, we were debating if the Milky Way was the entire universe. It’s crazy to think about how far astronomy and cosmology have come. And it’s not just huge existential topics either. Galaxy evolution has been completely reversed in the past 20 years. Elliptical aka 'early type' galaxies are the end result of mergers of spiral and irregular aka 'late types.'" – snoogans235

"42 year old, you're not even doing the scope justice. When I was a little kid, it's not that we didn't know if planetary systems were rare or common, it's that we didn't know if there were other planetary systems! It was just an assumption we extrapolated from the fact that THIS star had them, a statistical contrivance! It could have just as easily proven true that our sun was profoundly weird, the only one this happened with. Think about that next time you're watching some classic B sci fi flick about going to another planet; that was a MUCH bigger leap in logic when that film was made than it is now." –Of_Mice_And_Meese

Knitting and Crocheting

The fiber arts have been around a lonnnng time, but it's never been a better time to be a knitter.

"Knitting. First, we're in the golden age of yarns. There are hundreds of indie dyers putting amazing colors on a truly mind-boggling range of yarn bases (both fiber content and weight). Even "cheap" yarn is better quality, and comes in a wider range of colors and bases, than ever before. There's an abundance of wool yarn soft enough to wear next to your skin (although you can get scratchy yarn if that's your jam).

Then there are the patterns. Thousands of them, many of them free online. Think of what you want to make, and there's a pattern out there.

Tools, too. How do you like your needles - wood, bamboo, steel, aluminum, plastic, casein? Circular with 15 sizes of interchangeable tips, straight, long short? They're out there.

If you're a knitting nerd, it's a great time to be alive."

– cwthree

"I believe it's both crochet and knitting!! i might be a lil biased as i crochet and not knit but all the points you made apply to crochet!"

– QUEERVEE

Paleontology

DINOSAURRRRRS!!! Who knew?

"Paleontology! So much tech bringing new stuff to light."

– foolishfoolsgold

"And archaeology. LiDAR's power to identify probably human-made structures under layers of jungle canopy is just incredible."

– ModusPwnins

"And completely overhauling existing knowledge. DNA studies have changed to much in paleontology that there are joke papers published about it.

A lot of people's life work has been proven incorrect because of a few DNA studies despite those folks using the best methodologies available to them at the time."

– guynamedjames

Cooking

So many recipes. So many documentaries. "The Great British Baking Show." All at our fingertips.

"Cooking! I'm 30 now and it's so easy to find amazing recipes, good cooking supplies, and with so much information I can save money on food in so many ways. Literally youtube is teaching me to make so many great things."

– BootsRubberClumsy

"Yup, and this influx of easy information has created a nexus of global cuisines in almost all major cities. the blending of ingredients and techniques from Asia, Europe, latin America, etc is creating some really incredible stuff. I worked at a three Michelin when I was younger that had a classically trained French chef who focused on Japanese ingredients, it was really quite something."

– ThewFflegyy

"Dietary options. No matter what issue you have, there's a pantry full of food that will meet that restriction AND taste good."

– deathbrusher

Board Games

This one might be surprising, considering the internet and digital entertainment and screen usage. Perhaps board games are having a great run because of, not in spite of, those things?

"Board games have been having a great run for the past 10 years, tons of amazing games coming out every year."

– jraff_dot_net

"The combination of the internet and the inability to copyright rules have opened a floodgate of innovation in board games." – SuperPants73

"Here are some great modern games that are considered gateway games. I would definitely call them favorites also. (Edited for formatting)

Ticket to Ride
Carcassonne
Pandemic
Dominion
Splendor
Azul

King of Tokyo"

– HabeLinkin

Music Production Equipment

Excellent news for creatives with little $$$.

"Playing guitar and recording music. You can buy a quality guitar online for crazy cheap now and some pro recording software out there is free." – leatherwolf89

"Seriously! 'Starter' instruments these days are so far ahead of the starters of the 90's/00's- it's insane how much quality you can get these days for much, much less." – Fortune090

"Keyboards, both synthesizers and mechanical.

It's possible to get a synth that sounds identical to a $5000 Minimoog for $200 and a decent mechanical keyboard for less than that." – the_slanted_slope

"To add to that, DAWs (sound/song editing software, like photoshop for music) are amazing these days!

Some have plug-ins that can mimic orchestras so accurately that you can tell them which way a violin bow's stroke is moving and configure valve sounds into saxes. Some digital flautists come with breath sounds! Like it'll blow a long riff, then a sound like the musician is lightly inhaling.

Off key? Add a little auto-tune. Drummer's all 'not quite my temp' on you? Align it to a digital metronome. Now your drum tracks sound like they're made by an app? Add a little random error into the mix to "humanize" it.

That shit used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now $5k gets you a moderately professional studio rig. (But the price for top-end stuff will always be 'how much ya got?')" – hendergle

Home Television Sets

For real. We've all experienced the opposite of inflation with home TVs and it's been a glorious thing.

"Home TVs. The sort of hardware you can get for even $300 is absolutely absurd compared to what the 1980s through 2000s knew." – NotAnotherEmpire

"32-inch, 2006 from Best Buy for $1,700.

I can’t come to terms with the fact that only 18 years later I’m watching a TV twice as big that cost 40% less and carries a picture quality that’s so good it gives me chills sometimes." – frawgster

"Accurate. Just got a 55" Samsung LCD for $350. Hard to beat that value." – Pac_Eddy


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Heroes

In 1437, Korean scientists watched a star go nova. Modern scientists finally found it.

As any historian of medieval East Asia or player of Civilization V: Brave New World will tell you, 15th century Koreans were really, really, really good at science.

[rebelmouse-image 19475372 dam="1" original_size="700x467" caption="A statue of King Sejong the Great in Seoul. Thanks, guy! Photo by Republic of Korea/Flickr." expand=1]A statue of King Sejong the Great in Seoul. Thanks, guy! Photo by Republic of Korea/Flickr.

Under the judicious rule of Sejong the Great, the kingdom's top researchers spent a lot of time looking at space and making maps of it.

In 1437, during one of these looking sessions, a bunch of scientists thought they discovered a bright new star, one that easily outshone everything else in the sky (eat it, Luyten 726-8A).

14 days later, it disappeared.

Unbeknownst to the ancient sky-watchers, the "new star" was not new at all. It was, instead, what's known as a "classical nova" — an ultra-dense, white dwarf star that sucks so much matter off a neighboring star it causes a giant, nuclear explosion. The star gets super bright for a short period of time before once again fading into the cosmic background — like a stellar version of Pokémon GO.

The problem is, 15th century Korean scientists didn't exactly keep the best records. For starters, it was the 15th century, and pretty much everyone had rickets. Also, the modern Korean alphabet wouldn't be invented for another seven years.

You'll be shocked to learn the location of the star that went nova was lost to time.

Until now.

After 580 years of searching, a team of researchers from four continents has finally located the star, making it the oldest such nova to have its location accurately documented.

Lead researcher Michael Shara had spent nearly 30 years looking for remnants of the stellar explosion, known as Nova Scorpii. (A great name for any Dutch speed metal band that might be looking, btw. Don't sleep on it!)  

Shara told The Atlantic's Marina Kornen that attempting to locate the site had been like "searching for a needle in a billion haystacks." Initially, the American Museum of Natural History curator and his team believed they'd find the nova between two stars in the constellation Scorpio. With the aid of online astronomical catalogs, which weren't a thing the first time Shara looked back in the 1980s, the astronomers combed through records of hundreds of millions of stars until, eventually, they focused in on a planetary nebula near the original search area.

In a classic "That's no moon, it's a space station" moment, the team rapidly realized that the nebula was the nova — or at least the remnants of it. They had been looking between the wrong two stars the entire time.

The team published its findings in the August edition of Nature.

"When we relaxed our criteria as to where to look in the constellation, we found the nova in 90 minutes," Shara told Space.com.

Image by K. Ilkiewicz and J. Mikolajewska.

This 2016 image, taken by a telescope in Chile, shows the star — indicated by two long, red hashmarks — surrounded by the cloud of hydrogen it ejected in 1437. The smaller red "plus sign" in the center shows the star's location at the time it went nova almost six centuries ago.

Thanks to research by Shara and others, we know a lot more about novas than we did in 1437 — and even more now that Nova Scorpii has been tracked down.

In addition to classical novas, astronomers have observed frequent "dwarf novas" — much smaller explosions — across the visible universe. Shara has long suspected that both types of novae arise from the same star systems at different points in time rather than from different systems altogether.

Images from the 1930s and '40s, published in the paper, show the star pair that produced the 1437 nova undergoing a series of dwarf novae — lending Shara's theory some weighty backup.

Whether you specifically care about the dynamics of matter exchange in binary star systems of not, it's hard to deny that — holy crap — this is amazing.

[rebelmouse-image 19475374 dam="1" original_size="700x364" caption="Image by tyrogthegatekeeper/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Image by tyrogthegatekeeper/Wikimedia Commons.

When those 15th century Korean astronomers looked at the sky, they knew they were witnessing something important about their universe.

With the right tools, some tenacity, and a bit of luck, human beings have made it possible to find out what that is. Even after a 600-year search.

Science, then, as now, totally rules.

Heroes

Astronomer Vera Rubin passed away Sunday. You should know about her if you don't.

Astronomer Vera Rubin passed away Dec. 25, 2016, at the age of 88.

Vera Rubin. Photo by Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Rubin was a pioneer in her field — one of the few prominent women astronomers of her time, who, in an era of oppressive professional sexism, uncovered some of the best evidence of the existence of dark matter — the mysterious stuff that we can't see that binds the universe together.

In addition to contributing to one of the major scientific discoveries of the 20th century, she was also a no-nonsense badass who fought for gender equality in her field from the beginning of the career to the end of her life.

Here are just a few of the ways she showed up:

1. She was blunt about the problems women faced in science — and knew exactly where to place the blame.

Rubin (second from left) with colleagues at the Women in Astronomy and Space Science Conference. Photo by NASA.

According to her NPR obituary, Rubin was fantastically upfront about the injustice and institutionalized misogyny that kept women out of jobs in STEM fields, noting that Rubin carried three basic assumptions with her at all times:

"(1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.

(2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.

(3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women."



Hard to argue with that.

2. She presented her graduate thesis to a room full of the most prominent astronomers in the world — while pregnant.

While in graduate school in the 1950s, Rubin discovered something anomalous about the space just outside our cosmic neighborhood — a region that was more densely packed with galaxies than those that surrounded it.

But when her adviser suggested she present her findings to the American Astronomical Society, he offered to present it for her because Rubin was set to deliver her first child a month before the meeting and he assumed she would be too consumed with the demands of motherhood to attend.

"Oh, I can go,'" she said matter-of-factly. And go she did.

She stumped her way through the presentation, where her work was largely dismissed by the review panel of accomplished, skeptical male scientists (and never published). Years later, however, astronomers confirmed the significance of her findings: Rubin had discovered the super-galactic plane, the "belt" around the supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way — without anyone, including her, realizing it.

3. She once integrated the bathrooms at an all-male observatory by force.

"No girls allowed. Nah nah Pbbbbffffbbbtt." Photo by Coneslayer/Wikimedia Commons.

Early in her career, Rubin was invited to observe at Caltech's Palomar Observatory — the first woman ever allowed to work inside the testosterone-laden facility. The observatory was such a boys club that there was no ladies room on the premises.

"She went to her room, she cut up paper into a skirt image, and she stuck it on the little person image on the door of the bathroom," Neta Bahcall, a former colleague, told Astronomy Magazine in a June 2016 interview. "She said, 'There you go; now you have a ladies’ room.'"

4. She never won the Nobel Prize, and despite the many outraged on her behalf, she didn't really care.

No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics for over 50 years — not due, according to many professionals in the field, to lack of qualified candidates, of whom Rubin was the most prominent.

Rubin, however, was dismissive of the snub as she felt her work spoke for itself.

"Fame is fleeting," Rubin said, in a 1990 interview with Discover Magazine. "My numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that's my greatest compliment."

5. She was only active on Twitter for one day — and used that time to tell girls who love science to ignore the haters.

An OECD study from 2015 found that girls equaled or outperformed boys in school performance in most countries but expressed lower confidence in their math abilities.  

On Feb. 3, 2016, Vera Rubin signed on to Twitter. She tweeted this:

She signed off the social media site for good shortly after but not before tweeting one final look at the cosmos — a simulated image of all the dark matter in the universe a short time after the Big Bang.

Because of Rubin, we can do more than admire the beauty of the universe; we can start to break down the mystery piece by piece, layer by layer. And we can do it no matter who we are, where we come from, or however many barriers stand in our way.

Rest in peace.

Heroes

Hidden behind our own galaxy are clues to a mystery of epic proportions.

Like a pedestrian who is walking one mile per hour slower than everyone around them; like a person who is standing in the exact middle of an escalator; like a driver who doesn't understand the left lane is for merging: Our galaxy is in the way.

Image from Mike Durkin/Flickr.

What exactly is the Milky Way hiding?

Don't get me wrong, the Milky Way is really cool and super pretty. It's home to at least 200 million stars and has fascinated people for centuries. It's nearly as old as the universe itself. As pretty as it is, all that dust, gas, and stars block our view of what's behind it.

Astronomers even have a term for this — the Zone of Avoidance.

The ultimate photobomb. Image from Andrew Xu/Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists have finally found a way to peer through the Zone of Avoidance — and what they saw on the other side is astounding.

An artist’s impression of the galaxies found in the "Zone of Avoidance" behind the Milky Way. Image by ICRAR, used with permission.

In order to peek through the zone of avoidance, scientists didn't use regular telescopes, they used radio telescopes, specifically the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Through the radio telescope, scientists were able to observe nearly 900 galaxies — 240 of which had never been seen before.

The Parkes telescope is over 200 feet across. Image from Stephen West/Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike the kind of telescopes that show you visible light waves, radio telescopes look at radio waves, which can penetrate through the gas and dust of our galaxy, giving scientists a kind of X-ray vision. 

An annotated artist's impression showing radio waves travelling from the new galaxies, then passing through the Milky Way and arriving at the Parkes radio telescope on Earth (not to scale). Image by ICRAR, used with permission.

Unfortunately, this means there isn't a big beautiful photo to share showing what the new galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance look like. All the pictures from the radio telescope kinda look like this: 

Ooooh! Ahhhh! GIF via ICRAR/Vimeo.

While perhaps not as cool as a full color, high-res, high-def photo of hundreds of new galaxies, these radio wave pictures could go a long way in helping scientists solve one of space's biggest mysteries. 

Because there is something hiding out there. Something big.​ No one knows what it is — but we know it's there. And with these new radio wave pictures, we're getting closer to figuring it out.

No, it's not "The Guardians of the Galaxy" sequel. 

Image from BagoGames/Flickr.

For now, it's called the Great Attractor.

Our galaxy, along with its neighbors, are all hurtling through space at 14 million miles per hour toward one particular point on the universal map — something astronomers call the Great Attractor. Whatever it is, it's huge and has the gravitational force of a million-billion suns.

And nobody knows what it is.

Though we've had evidence about it since the 1970s, the Great Attractor is hidden in that same Zone of Avoidance that was blocking our view of these recently discovered galaxies.

So are these recently discovered galaxies the Great Attractor? Or are they just one more piece of the puzzle?

Maybe? It's not clear at the moment.

“An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars," astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg said in a press release. "So finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now.”

That said, scientists need to do follow-up studies to see if the new galaxies measure up or whether there's still something else out there.

The fact is, there's still a ton of stuff out there for us to find.

The universe is huge, and though we have some awesome tools and awesome people exploring it, there are still big mysterious things out there for us to discover. And that's pretty cool.

GIF from "Mystery Men."

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