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When it comes to dragons, the human imagination has been stuck in one gear for centuries. Whether it be the Loong dragon of Chinese astrology, the Fafnir of Viking legend, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Smaug, or Westeros’s “fire-made flesh,” the formula of flight, ferocity and volcanic breath hardly changes. Which leads us to ask, are these storytellers onto something?

The new HBO drama House of the Dragon gave us an excuse to bug some reptile and dinosaur experts, and have them share their scientific interpretations of these magical hellfire beasts.

The House of the Dragon reptiles look pretty ho-hum to me. They are your standard Western dragon we’re all pretty familiar with, pretty much all the same form and likely the same species, and are only about as different from each other as two Komodo dragons. In a show boasting 17 dragons, I would have loved to see some of the many other forms dragons have taken in mythology and folklore, whether that be a many-headed hydra, a legless wyrm, or an Eastern dragon, similar to the Chinese dragons with antlers and fish fins.

In Game of Thrones, Reign of Fire, and Dragonheart, the obvious dragon characteristics include a giant size, leathery wings, and the ability to breathe fire. Some of these traits are more plausible than others. Giant reptiles have soared over the skies, so large that they could travel between continents. Quetzalcoatlus was a pterosaur with a wingspan about 33 feet across. That’s pretty impressive, especially when you consider that this flier was the same stature as a giraffe on the ground. It also flew on wings made up of a resilient membrane stretched out on an extraordinarily-elongated fourth finger, so that’s getting pretty close to traditional dragon territory. Of course, Quetzalcoatlus was pretty light for its size—in the neighborhood of 200 pounds—meaning that those House of the Dragon stars look a little too massive to be airborne. Pterosaur bones are paper thin and were likely much more fragile creatures than the burly dragons on our televisions.

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The Gila monster’s raised scales give it an armored appearance, not unlike a dragon’s. And then there’s that valuable venom. Deposit Photos

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Serena Wiliams’ husband, Alexis Ohanian, recently stepped down from the board of Reddit, a company he co-founded. Ohanian revealed his powerful reason for stepping down on his website, explaining that he wanted to one day be able to show his daughter, Olympia, that he stood by the Black community and fought against racism. “It is long overdue to do the right thing,” said Ohanian. “I’m doing this for me, for my family, and for my country.”

“I have resigned as a member of the Reddit board, I have urged them to fill my seat with a Black candidate, and I will use future gains on my Reddit stock to serve the Black community, chiefly to curb racial hate, and I’m starting with a pledge of $1M to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp,” wrote Ohanian. “I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now. To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop.”

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By Christine-Marie Liwag Dixon/Updated: Dec. 20, 2020, 7:14 pm EDT

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Serena Williams’ husband, Alexis Ohanian, has had a successful career in the business world. Ohanian is the co-founder of Reddit and is involved in the venture capital company Initialized. Ohanian noted on his Instagram profile that the company is valued at $36 billion. In an article he wrote for Inc., Ohanian described Reddit as the “front page of the internet.”

“We built Reddit in three weeks,” Ohanian explained on Inc. “It was just Web links and text submitted by users, with Interesting or Uninteresting buttons that you could click on underneath. Simple: That’s all it was. After a contentious debate, we added Comments. We knew our business was in our user base, that that was the most important part.”

Ohanian and his partner sold the company to Conde Nast in 2016 for between $10 to $15 million. The Reddit founder has an estimated net worth of $70 million, per Forbes. Ohanian’s newer project Initialized focuses on helping startups succeed by pairing them with an experienced panel of entrepreneurs.

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Getty  Serena Williams and her husband Alexis Ohanian arrive for the wedding ceremony of Britain’s Prince Harry and US actress Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018, in Windsor, England.

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It’s a long way from planet Earth to the Universe’s edge. Our tiny home world, seemingly massive, is merely 12,742 km (7,917 miles) across. We typically think linearly: where the Sun is ~10,000 times farther away than Earth’s diameter. But cosmically, logarithmic scales — where each multiplicative factor of “10” defines another mark on our cosmic ruler — serve us far better. On a logarithmic scale, the Sun, Mercury, and Mars are practically equidistant. Another factor of ~10,000 in distance takes us to the Oort cloud.  (see article for clarification)

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This horizontally-oriented logarithmic map of the Universe shows how, from left to right, we go from Earth-sized scales to the largest cosmic distances of all. As spectacular as this logarithmic view is, it “only” spans about 20 orders of magnitude: from the size of the Earth to the size of the present-day cosmic horizon.  Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi)

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New research could help scientists use gravitational lensing — the warping of light from distant galaxies — to investigate the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Scientists are still coming up empty in the hunt for flaws in Einstein’s theory of general relativity that could explain the mysterious force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. 

The researchers studied 100 million galaxies looking for signs that the strength of gravity has varied throughout the universe’s history or over vast cosmic distances. Any sign of such a change would indicate that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is incomplete or in need of revision. Variation could also shed light on what dark energy is, beyond that it’s the name scientists give to whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

Despite finding no such variations in gravity’s strength, the work will help two forthcoming space telescopes — the the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — also hunt for changes in the strength of gravity through space and back through time.

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An artist’s interpretation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. (Image credit: coffeekai via Getty Images)

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