Laser cut solar system necklace by Simone Giertz

Simone Giertz from Tested made a laser cut solar system necklace

Edit: Not sure if this was done on their Glowforge. I asked and will update if I hear back.

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Nice, but looks like Pluto is missing!!! When I make one, it is going to have 9 planets! Pluto is still a planet to me! Long live Pluto.

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Today’s USA Today news.

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If you include Pluto, then you need to include Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Ceres, as they’re all dwarf planets too. (Eris for sure, as it’s pretty much exactly the same size as Pluto and actually quite a bit heavier than Pluto.)

And it’s probably fair to include Sedna, Quaroar, and Orcus, which pretty much everyone agrees should be classified as dwarf planets. Salacia and some other objects are likely to be recognized soon as well.

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This is a great reminder that science is a process of consensus and not fiat by any one scientist, nor bound to folk wisdom. I’ve used the whole discussion of this to teach scientific principles to grade school students. That we have so much better instruments to know the rest of the story and that classification is always open ended is a foundational principle.

But we so want to tie things up into immutable categories and feel secure in what we know.

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@marmak3261 Another great example of this principle is the use of DNA as a new tool for placing plants in the proper Order, Family, Genus, etc. A few have moved around as a result of this relatively new tool to provide additional information.

Kind of like the TV ad where the fellow thinks he is German but DNA shows him to be Scottish genetically.

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That’s funny this popped up today. One of the online new agencies I read (AP, USA Today, CNN, etc.) ran an article about how scientists at NASA are pushing to include Pluto in the list of planets again :smile:

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not just plants. anything we’ve classified by visual observation has been aided by cheap dna analysis. i mean, we’ve discovered that there can be two “bacterial” cells that are more different from each other than we are from sponges.

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Yeesh, she still has to be able to hold her head up.

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Stop fat shaming Eris. :smiling_imp:

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Yeah, like almost everything we thought about dog breeds was hogwash (dogwash?) and that when you DNA test a dog, it’s frequently not the breed you “bought” or that the vet thought it was (and I’m married to a vet).

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absolutely. i always think of diatoms, which tend to be classified by morphology alone - i mean i used to boil away all the organic matter in nitric acid before mounting them on slides for petes sake.

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The humane society told me that my dog was probably a german-shepard/rottweiler/siberian husky mix…maybe.
Instead of DNA testing, I decided that he is a purebred Gerberian Huskweiler, and that’s what I tell people who ask.
The reaction is generally “oh, yeah, those are great… wait, what?”

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Hybrid vigor. The way to go.

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Well…not so sure, but not going to open that can of worms here :relaxed:

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