The Hills Have Eyes — The Legend of Sawney Bean

The Hills Have Eyes — The Legend of Sawney Bean
According to the legend, Sawney Bean was born in East Lothian, Scotland in the 13th century.  Unable to make an honest living Bean moved to a cave in the wilderness with his wife.  Lacking a trade, it was Sawney's plan to support his new wife on the proceeds of robbery.  It proved a simple enough matter to ambush travellers on the lonely narrow roads that connected the villages of the area.

Then it dawned on him that in order to help make sure that he could never be identified for his crimes, he should murder his victims.  To avoid those unnecessary visits to the shops for provisions whilst at the same time disposing of any evidence, he came on the bright idea of butchering the bodies to provide a high protein diet of human meat for himself and his wife.

Eventually Bean had a number of children with his wife, who in turn produced a number of grandchildren through incest.  Soon the Bean clan reached 48 people, most of whom where born of incestuous brother and sister relationships.  In order to feed all the hungry mouths the clan turned to cannibalism, murdering and consuming any who were unfortunate to be ambushed in the nearby countryside.  

One day the Bean’s attacked a man and wife on horseback who were returning from a local country fair.  Skilled in combat the man was able to fend off the Bean’s with his sword and pistols, although his wife was kidnapped, killed, and eaten.  The traumatized man reported the events to the magistrate, who in turn reported the murder to the king.  

The king organized a hunting party of 400 heavily armed soldiers and a number of hounds.  When they entered the large cave they were able to corner and capture the Bean family.  Scattered among the cave were various human body parts, pickled human meat, personal belongings of victims, and human bones.  

The Bean clan was taken to Edinburgh, where they were locked up in Tollbooth Prison.  A short time later they were executed, with the men hung, drawn, and quartered and the women burned at the stake.

Reference:
http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Sawney-Bean-Scotlands-most-famous-cannibal/

#history   #legendsofScotland   #meatandbonesdiet

Arp 299: Black Holes in Colliding Galaxies

Arp 299: Black Holes in Colliding Galaxies
Is only one black hole spewing high energy radiation -- or two? To help find out, astronomers trained NASA's Earth-orbiting NuSTAR and Chandra telescopes on Arp 299, the enigmatic colliding galaxies expelling the radiation. The two galaxies of Arp 299 have been locked in a gravitational combat for millions of years, while their central black holes will soon do battle themselves.

Featured, the high-resolution visible-light image was taken by Hubble, while the superposed diffuse glow of X-ray light was imaged by NuSTAR and shown in false-color red, green, and blue. NuSTAR observations show that only one of the central black holes is seen fighting its way through a region of gas and dust -- and so absorbing matter and emitting X-rays.

The energetic radiation, coming only from the galaxy center on the right, is surely created nearby -- but outside -- the central black hole's event horizon. In a billion years or so, only one composite galaxy will remain, and only one central supermassive black hole. Soon thereafter, though, another galaxy may enter the fray.  

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, GSFC, Hubble, NuSTAR

#nasa   #space   #blackholes   #galaxy   #science

Vertex vacay

Vertex vacay
One word for this - sick. My fusimotors are salivating.

Work by Charlie Deck.

#math   #animation   #processing

Vrai

Vrai
...you are only the sum of the stories you can tell.

#wordsofwisdom

NASA's new warning system has spotted an incoming asteroid

NASA's new warning system has spotted an incoming asteroid
NASA's new space-monitoring system has detected a large asteroid hurtling towards Earth, which is scheduled to pass us safely in the next few hours.

The asteroid, which was first spotted last week, is estimated to clear us with a comfortable distance of around 498,000 km (310,000 miles) - around 1.3 times further away than our Moon. But thanks to NASA's new software, we had days rather than hours to assess and prepare for the risk.

Source:
http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-s-new-warning-system-has-spotted-an-incoming-asteroid

References:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K16/K16U84.html

#nasa   #space   #asteroids   #science

Ghost Aurora over Canada

Ghost Aurora over Canada
What does this aurora look like to you? While braving the cold to watch the skies above northern Canada early one morning in 2013, a most unusual aurora appeared. The aurora definitely appeared to be shaped like something , but what?

Two ghostly possibilities recorded by the astrophotographer were "witch" and "goddess of dawn", but please feel free to suggest your own Halloween-enhanced impressions. Regardless of fantastical pareidolic interpretations, the pictured aurora had a typical green color and was surely caused by the scientifically commonplace action of high energy particles from space interacting with oxygen in Earth's upper atmosphere. In the image foreground, at the bottom, is a frozen Alexandra Falls, while evergreen trees cross the middle.  

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Yuichi Takasaka 

#naturalphenomena   #aurora   #astrophotography

October 29 is reserved to Fabiola Gianotti

October 29 is reserved to Fabiola Gianotti
Happy birthday to particle physicist and CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti! Born in 1960 in Rome, Gianotti earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Milan in Italy. She has spent almost all of her professional career at CERN, where she was a member of several experiment teams, including the UA2 experiment, which discovered the W and Z bosons in 1983, and the ATLAS experiment, which discovered the Higgs boson along with the CMS experiment in 2012. Gianotti led ATLAS from 2009 to 2013 and presented the details of the Higgs discovery to a packed crowd of physicists on 4 July 2012. In 2016 she became the first woman to hold the position of CERN director-general.

Bio:
https://press.cern/biographies/fabiola-gianotti-born-1960-italian

#history   #physics   #womeninstem

Puffing sun gives birth to reluctant eruption

Puffing sun gives birth to reluctant eruption
The upper atmosphere of the Sun is dominated by plasma filled magnetic loops (coronal loops) whose temperature and pressure vary over a wide range. The appearance of coronal loops follows the emergence of magnetic flux, which is generated by dynamo processes inside the Sun.

Emerging flux regions (EFRs) appear when magnetic flux bundles emerge from the solar interior through the photosphere and into the upper atmosphere (chromosphere and the corona). The characteristic feature of EFR is the Ω-shaped loops (created by the magnetic buoyancy/Parker instability), they appear as developing bipolar sunspots in magnetograms, and as arch filament systems in Hα.

EFRs interact with pre-existing magnetic fields in the corona and produce small flares (plasma heating) and collimated plasma jets. The GIF below show multiple energetic jets in three different wavelengths. The light has been colorized in red, green and blue, corresponding to three coronal temperature regimes ranging from ~0.8Mk to 2MK.

Source & further reading:
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/puffing-sun-gives-birth-to-reluctant-eruption

Image Credit: SDO/U. Aberystwyth

#nasa   #space   #SDO   #science   #sun

Shocks in the early universe could be detectable today

Shocks in the early universe could be detectable today
Physicists have discovered a surprising consequence of a widely supported model of the early universe: according to the model, tiny cosmological perturbations produced shocks in the radiation fluid just a fraction of a second after the big bang. These shocks would have collided with each other to generate gravitational waves that are large enough to be detected by today's gravitational wave detectors. 

The physicists, Ue-Li Pen at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, and Neil Turok at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, have published a paper on the shocks in the early universe and their aftermath in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

As the scientists explain, the most widely supported model of the early universe is one with a radiation-dominated background that is almost perfectly homogeneous, except for some tiny waves, or perturbations, in the radiation.

In the new study, Pen and Turok have theoretically shown that some of these early, tiny perturbations, which are small-amplitude waves, would have spiked to form large-amplitude waves, or shocks. These shocks would have formed only at very high temperatures, like those that occur immediately after the big bang.

The physicists also showed that, when two or more shocks collide with each other, they generate gravitational waves.
The results suggest that both colliding shocks and merging black holes—like those detected earlier this year by the LIGO experiment— contribute to the gravitational wave background.

Some researchers have previously speculated that the mergining black holes may have formed from the same perturbations that created the shocks and, further, that black holes of this size may make up the dark matter in our galaxy.

Source & further reading:
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-early-universe-today.html#jCp

Image: Simulation showing cosmological initial conditions (left) evolving into shocks (right).
Credit: Pen and Turok 2016 American Physical Society 

  #physics   #universe   #shocks   #gravitationalwaves   #science

It's all in your mind

It's all in your mind
A new study shows that people benefit more from exercise when they believe it will have a positive effect.

Everyone knows exercise is supposed to be good for your health, but is the belief that exercise will have a positive effect more important for our well-being than the exercise itself? The psychologist Hendrik Mothes from the University of Freiburg’s Department of Sport Science and his team have conducted a study demonstrating that test subjects derive more psychological as well as neurophysiological benefits from exercise if they already have positive mindsets about sports. Moreover, the team provided evidence that test subjects can be positively or negatively influenced in this regard before engaging in the exercise. The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.

Source & further reading:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=166975&CultureCode=en

Paper:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10865-016-9781-3

#neuroscience   #exercise

Haunting the Cepheus Flare

Haunting the Cepheus Flare
Spooky shapes seem to haunt this jeweled expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds faintly visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood on planet Earth, they lurk along the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away.

Over 2 light-years across and brighter than the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Within the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. 

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Thomas Lelu

#nasa   #space   #science   #nebula

STEREO Mission's 10 Year Retrospective

STEREO Mission's 10 Year Retrospective
STEREO or Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory is celebrating its 10th birthday this week.
STEREO consists of two space-based observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind. With this new pair of viewpoints, scientists will be able to see the structure and evolution of solar storms as they blast from the Sun and move out through space.

Check out this video for a few highlights from its decade in space!
Read STEREO Mission's 10 Year Retrospective:
https://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/10year/

Video via NASASunEarth

#nasa   #space   #STEREO   #science

H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. long Before ‘Patient Zero’

H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. long Before ‘Patient Zero’
In the tortuous mythology of the AIDS epidemic, one legend never seems to die: Patient Zero, a.k.a. Gaétan Dugas, a globe-trotting, sexually insatiable French Canadian flight attendant who supposedly picked up H.I.V. in Haiti or Africa and spread it to dozens, even hundreds, of men before his death in 1984.

But now a  new genomic study has shown that HIV traveled to New York City from the Caribbean in 1971, clearing the name of the man mistakenly dubbed “Patient Zero.”

Paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19827.html

Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/health/hiv-patient-zero-genetic-analysis.html?_r=0

#HIV   #history   #research   #medicine   #genome   #health   #AIDS

A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat

A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat
 Very faint but also very large on planet Earth's sky, a giant Squid Nebula cataloged as Ou4, and Sh2-129 also known as the Flying Bat Nebula, are both caught in this cosmic scene toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Composed with almost 17 hours of narrowband image data, the telescopic field of view is 4 degrees or 8 Full Moons across.

Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula's alluring bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently completely surrounded by the reddish hydrogen emission region Sh2-129, the true distance and nature of the Squid Nebula have been difficult to determine.

Still, a recent investigation suggests Ou4 really does lie within Sh2-129 some 2,300 light-years away. Consistent with that scenario, Ou4 would represent a spectacular outflow driven by HR8119, a triple system of hot, massive stars seen near the center of the nebula. The truly giant Squid Nebula would physically be nearly 50 light-years across.

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Rolf Geissinger

#space   #nasa   #science   #nebulae

Days before Halloween... when silliness is mandatory and everything else is optional.

Days before Halloween... when silliness is mandatory and everything else is optional.

#cutsandguts   #personalnonsense

Scents...

Scents...

#personalnonsense   #insidemycortex   #calvaria

Llamas VS Alpacas

Llamas VS Alpacas
Scientifically, alpacas and llamas are very closely related. They look similar, but put them side by side and you’ll see that the alpaca is much, much smaller than the llama. Llamas have long been used for pack animals, valued for their strength and endurance. Alpacas are raised almost solely for their finer wool, called fleece, and were exported from their native South America almost a century after their llama cousins.

Read & Learn:
http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/12/15/the-difference-between-a-llama-and-an-alpaca/

Infographic:
A comparative chart of llamas and alpacas.
Credit: ncillustration/ Nicholas Carter

#biodiversity   #llamas   #alpacas   #coolcritters

VIV or Vortex-induced vibration

VIV or Vortex-induced vibration
Sitting at a traffic stop on a windy day, you may have noticed the beam holding the traffic lights shaking steadily up and down. This phenomenon is called vortex-induced vibration. When the wind flows over the beam, it looks something like the flow animation shown below.

Airflow follows the shape of the beam until near the backside, where the air separates from the surface and creates a vortex that sloughs off into the beam’s wake. These vortices form asymmetrically on the beam – first on one side, then the other. This creates unequal pressures on either side of the beam, and those pressure differences create a force that moves the beam. Because vortices are being steadily shed off the beam, it will keep moving back and forth as long as the wind is strong enough.

VIV - read & learn:
http://web.mit.edu/13.42/www/handouts/reading-VIV.pdf

Reference:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889974604000350

h/t FYFD

Animation:
Numerical simulation of VIV due to the flow around a circular cylinder
Credit: Aphex82

#physics   #VIV   #fluidDynamics   #science

Dubai from ISS

Dubai from ISS
taken by Scott Kelly

#space   #ISS   #nasa

Propeller Shadows on Saturn's Rings

Propeller Shadows on Saturn's Rings
What created these unusually long shadows on Saturn's rings? The dark shadows -- visible near the middle of the image -- extend opposite the Sun and, given their length, stem from objects having heights up to a few kilometers. The long shadows were unexpected given that the usual thickness of Saturn's A and B rings is only about 10 meters.

After considering the choppy but elongated shapes apparent near the B-ring edge, however, a leading theory has emerged that some kilometer-sized moonlets exist there that have enough gravity to create even larger vertical deflections of nearby small ring particles. The resulting ring waves are called propellers, named for how they appear individually.

It is these coherent groups of smaller ring particles that are hypothesized to be casting the long shadows. The featured image was taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn. The image was captured in 2009, near Saturn's equinox, when sunlight streamed directly over the ring plane and caused the longest shadows to be cast.

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute

#space   #nasa   #cassini   #saturn   #science

Structure of key DNA replication protein solved

Structure of key DNA replication protein solved
A research team led by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) has solved the three-dimensional structure of a key protein that helps damaged cellular DNA repair itself. Investigators say that knowing the chemical structure of the protein will likely help drug designers build novel anti-cancer agents.

The study, published in the October 21 issue of the journal Science Advances, involved a team of investigators from multiple institutions, who worked for more than two years to decipher the unusual configuration of the protein PrimPol, whose function was discovered in 2013. PrimPol is used in cells when normal repair proteins encounter damaged sections of DNA, often caused by anticancer chemotherapy drugs. The protein can skip over the damage to rescue DNA replication, says the study's senior investigator, Aneel K. Aggarwal, PhD, Professor of Pharmacological and Oncological Sciences at ISMMS.

"PrimPol can counter the anti-cancer action of common chemotherapeutic agents such as cisplatin. By inhibiting PrimPol, we believe that we can increase the efficacy of chemotherapeutic agents in the treatment of many cancers," he says.

Source & further reading:
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-key-dna-replication-protein.html

Paper:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1601317

#DNA   #medicine   #research   #cells   #microbiology   #science

Europa

Europa
Europa is the sixth closest moon of Jupiter and is the smallest of the Galilean moons discovered by Galileo. Even though it is the smallest of the Galilean moons, Europa is still the sixth largest of the 181 moons in the solar system.

Europa is a frozen, icy world and is a unique object in the solar system – scientists believe that beneath the frozen layer of ice on Europa’s surface, there is a salt-water ocean in contact with a rocky seafloor. If this is proven to be true, Europa may be a promising place for life to exist beyond Earth.

The moon is named after a phoenician noblewoman who became queen of Crete in Greek mythology.

Europa was a noblewoman which the continent of Europe was named after. Europa was abducted by Zeus – the Greek counterpart for the Roman Jupiter – after the god of the skies transformed into a bull. He took her to the island of Crete to be his lover. She became the queen of Crete and had a number of children with Zeus.

Sources:
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/europa/indepth
http://theplanets.org/europa/

Made using: Celestia & GIMP

#universe   #space   #nasa   #europa   #science

Harvard researchers create the first printed heart on a chip with integrated sensors.

Harvard researchers create the first printed heart on a chip with integrated sensors.
Built by a fully automated, digital manufacturing procedure, the 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip can be quickly fabricated and customized, allowing researchers to easily collect reliable data for short-term and long-term studies.

This new approach to manufacturing may one day allow researchers to rapidly design organs-on-chips, also known as microphysiological systems, that match the properties of a specific disease or even an individual patient’s cells. 

Organs-on-chips mimic the structure and function of native tissue and have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional animal testing. Harvard researchers have developed microphysiological systems that mimic the microarchitecture and functions of lungs, hearts, tongues and intestines.

However, the fabrication and data collection process for organs-on-chips is expensive and laborious. Currently, these devices are built in clean rooms using a complex, multi-step lithographic process and collecting data requires microscopy or high-speed cameras.

Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBK4_byRvc

Source & further reading:
https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/10/3d-printed-heart-on-chip-with-integrated-sensors

Paper:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4782.html

#research   #innovation   #organprinting   #medicine   #3dprinting

Saturn's mysterious hexagon has changed from blue to gold

Saturn's mysterious hexagon has changed from blue to gold
These two natural color images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show the changing appearance of Saturn's north polar region between 2012 and 2016.
 
Scientists are investigating potential causes for the change in color of the region inside the north-polar hexagon on Saturn. The color change is thought to be an effect of Saturn's seasons. In particular, the change from a bluish color to a more golden hue may be due to the increased production of photochemical hazes in the atmosphere as the north pole approaches summer solstice in May 2017.

Researchers think the hexagon, which is a six-sided jetstream, might act as a barrier that prevents haze particles produced outside it from entering. During the polar winter night between November 1995 and August 2009, Saturn's north polar atmosphere became clear of aerosols produced by photochemical reactions -- reactions involving sunlight and the atmosphere. Since the planet experienced equinox in August 2009, the polar atmosphere has been basking in continuous sunshine, and aerosols are being produced inside of the hexagon, around the north pole, making the polar atmosphere appear hazy today.

Other effects, including changes in atmospheric circulation, could also be playing a role. Scientists think seasonally shifting patterns of solar heating probably influence the winds in the polar regions.
Both images were taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera.

Photo and info via NASA Photojournal:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21049
Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Hampton University

  #nasa   #space   #saturn   #cassini   #science

Impact of prion proteins on the nerves revealed for the first time

Impact of prion proteins on the nerves revealed for the first time
When prion proteins mutate, they trigger mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Although they are found in virtually every organism, the function of these proteins remained unclear. Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Hospital Zurich now demonstrate that prion proteins, coupled with a particular receptor, are responsible for nerve health. The discovery could yield novel treatments for chronic nerve diseases.

What are prions?
Although they start out as harmless brain proteins, when prions become misfolded, they turn into contagious pathogens that recruit any other prions they come into contact with, grouping together in clumps that damage other cells and eventually cause the brain itself to break down.

If that's not bad enough, mutated prions can't easily be killed by heat or radiation, meaning once they've come into contact with something like surgical tools, they can potentially spread to other patients.

In the 1990s, they were responsible for the BSE epidemic more commonly known as mad cow disease. In humans, they cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other neurological disorders that are fatal and untreatable.

Meanwhile, we know that infectious prions consist of a defectively folded form of a normal prion protein called PrPC located in the neuron membrane. The infectious prions multiply by kidnapping PrPC and converting it into other infectious prions.

But what are the repercussions for the organism if the prion protein is deactivated?
Absent prion proteins cause nerve diseases

This discovery solves a key question that has long puzzled neuroscientists and points towards future applications in hospitals.

Source & further reading:
http://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2016/Prion-Proteine.html

Image:  Without the prion proteins, the so-called Schwann cells around the sensitive nerve fibers no longer form an insulating layer to protect the nerves.
Credit: NatureReview / Neuroscience

#neuroscience   #prionproteins   #humanbrain   #medicine   #health

No, the Universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, say physicists

No, the Universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, say physicists
Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding - it was expanding at an accelerating rate.

The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up. 

Earlier this year, NASA and ESA scientists found that the Universe could be expanding around 8% faster than originally thought.
By all accounts, the discovery was a solid one (Nobel Prize solid) but it posed a very difficult question - if the collective gravity from all the matter expelled into the Universe by the Big Bang has been slowing everything down, how can it be accelerating?

Since scientists first proposed dark energy, no one's gotten any closer to figuring out what it could actually be.
But now an international team of physicists from institutions say don't worry about it, because it probably doesn't even exist, and they've got a much bigger database of Type 1a supernovae to back them up.

By applying a different analytical model to the 740 Type Ia supernovae that have been identified so far, the team says they've been able to account for the subtle differences between them like never before.

They say the statistical techniques used by the original team were too simplistic, and were based on a model devised in the 1930s, which can't reliability be applied to the growing supernova dataset. They also mention that the cosmic microwave background isn't directly affected by dark matter, so only serves as an "indirect" type of evidence.

Instead of finding evidence to support the accelerated expansion of the Universe, Sarkar and his team say it looks like the Universe is expanding at a constant rate. If that's truly the case, it means we don't need dark energy to explain it.

Source & further reading:
http://www.sciencealert.com/no-the-universe-is-not-expanding-at-an-accelerated-rate-say-physicists?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1

Paper:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep35596

#physics   #space   #research   #universe

HI4PI: The Hydrogen Sky

HI4PI: The Hydrogen Sky
Where are the Milky Way's gas clouds and where are they going? To help answer this question, a new highest-resolution map of the sky in the universe's most abundant gas -- hydrogen -- has been completed and recently released, along with its underlying data.

Featured  below, the all-sky map of hydrogen's 21-cm emission shows abundance with brightness and speed with color. Low radial speeds toward us artificially colored blue and low radial speeds away colored green. The band across the middle is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, while the bright spots on the lower right are the neighboring Magellanic Clouds.

 The HI4PI map collects data from over one million observations with the northern Eiffelsberg 100-Meter Radio Telescope in Germany and the southern Parkes 64-Meter Radio Telescope in Australia, also known as "The Dish". The details of the map not only better inform humanity about star formation and interstellar gas in our Milky Way galaxy, but also how much light this local gas is likely to absorb when observing the outside universe. Many details on the map are not yet well understood.  

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit: Benjamin Winkel & the HI4PI Collaboration

#space   #nasa   #galaxy   #science   #magellanicClouds

Total number of neurons— not enlarged prefrontal region —hallmark of human brain

Total number of neurons— not enlarged prefrontal region —hallmark of human brain
A new scientific study puts the final nail in the coffin of a long-standing theory to explain human’s remarkable cognitive abilities: that human evolution involved the selective expansion of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

It does so by determining that the prefrontal region of the brain which orchestrates abstract thinking, complex planning and decision making contains the same proportion of neurons and fills the same relative volume in non-human primates as it does in humans.

“People need to drop the idea that the human brain is exceptional,” said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who directed the study. “Our brain is basically a primate brain. Because it is the largest primate brain, it does have one distinctive feature: It has the highest number of cortical neurons of any primate. Humans have 16 billion compared with 9 billion in gorillas and orangutans and six-to-seven billion in chimpanzees. It is remarkable, but it is not exceptional.”

In her popular science book The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable (MIT Press: March 2016), Herculano-Houzel explains how human brains grew so large, even larger than the brains of gorillas and orangutans, whose bodies are larger than ours. Her answer is surprisingly simple. It is the invention of cooking.

Cooking allowed early humans to overcome the energetic barrier that limits the size of the brains of other primates, she has determined. However, when the human brains grew larger they maintained the basic structure of the primate brain, including the size of the prefrontal cortex, her latest study has found.

The comparison of the relative size of the prefrontal region in primate brains is described in a paper titled “No relative expansion of the number of prefrontal neurons in primate and human evolution” by Herculano-Houzel and postdoctoral fellow Mariana Gabi published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences early edition.

PR:
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/08/09/total-number-of-neurons-not-enlarged-prefrontal-region-hallmark-of-human-brain/

Book:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/human-advantage

#neuroscience   #humanbrain   #evolution   #science   #neurons   #research

Vrai

Vrai
It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

#wordsofwisdom   #detachyourheart   #andsoitgoes

Heads Up!

Heads Up!
If you're living in the Eastern Hemisphere, the Black Moon will arrive on Oct. 30 or, if you live in eastern Asia, Japan, Australia or New Zealand, not until Oct. 31.

The Black Moon is a somewhat unusual celestial event — they occur about once every 32 months.
Why would a bright full Moon suddenly become dark? Because it entered the shadow of the Earth.

What is a Black Moon?
While a full moon refers to the moment when the moon's Earth-facing side is fully illuminated by sunlight, a new moon refers to the moment when the moon's Earth-facing side is fully in shadow. (Unfortunately, that means the Black Moon will be more or less invisible, even if the moon is high in the sky).

More info:
http://www.space.com/34162-black-moon-guide.html

Animation: time lapse of a total lunar eclipse
Video source:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140428.html

#nasa   #space   #blackmoon   #eclipse   #science

Two of the stones I've seen at the Senckenberg Museum . One of them is amethyst, do you know what's the other one?

Two of the stones I've seen at the Senckenberg Museum . One of them is amethyst, do you know what's the other one?

Amethyst is a violet variety of quartz. The name comes from the ancient Greek "amethystos", which means "not drunken", a reference to the belief that the stone protected its owner from drunkenness.

The ancient Greeks wore amethyst and made drinking vessels decorated with it in the belief that it would prevent intoxication. It is one of several forms of quartz. Amethyst is a semiprecious stone.

Reference:
http://www.minerals.net/mineral/amethyst.aspx

#geology   #minerals   #stones   #amethyst

Cheerios Cube work in progress

Cheerios Cube work in progress
I don't like colored animations too much...but here I'm trying to play with a cheerios cube and in the same time to test a bit the octane's native motion blur. Renders fast...but still has a few bugs.

#C4D   #animation   #cube   #math   #design

Fractal based on Steiner chains

Fractal based on Steiner chains

Steiner chain what is it?
In geometry, a Steiner chain is a set of n circles, all of which are tangent to two given non-intersecting circles, where n is finite and each circle in the chain is tangent to the previous and next circles in the chain.

Read & learn:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SteinerChain.html

Animation via reddit

#math   #geometry   #steinerchain   #fractals   #animation

Cerro Tololo Trails

Cerro Tololo Trails
Early one moonlit evening car lights left a wandering trail along the road to the Chilean Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Setting stars left the wandering trails in the sky. The serene view toward the mountainous horizon was captured in a telephoto timelapse image and video taken from nearby Cerro Pachon, home to Gemini South.

Afforded by the mountaintop vantage point, the clear, long sight-line passes through layers of atmosphere. The changing atmospheric refraction shifts and distorts the otherwise steady apparent paths of the stars as they set. That effect also causes the distorted appearance of Sun and Moon as they rise or set near a distant horizon.

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Babak Tafreshi (TWAN), AURA

#space   #astrophotography   #nasa

Camera on Mars Orbiter Shows Signs of Latest Mars Lander

Camera on Mars Orbiter Shows Signs of Latest Mars Lander
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has identified new markings on the surface of the Red Planet that are believed to be related to Europe's Schiaparelli test lander, which arrived at Mars on Oct. 19.

The new image shows a bright spot that may be Schiaparelli's parachute, and a larger dark spot interpreted as resulting from the impact of the lander itself following a much longer free fall than planned, after thrusters switched off prematurely. It was taken by the Context Camera (CTX) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and is available online, as a before-and-after comparison with an image from May 2016, at: http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=8131

Source:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6658

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

#nasa   #space    #marslander   #exomars   #science

Jupiterrise

Jupiterrise
It’s the great pumpkin! ;)
This image of the sunlit part of Jupiter and its swirling atmosphere was created by a citizen scientist (Alex Mai) using data from Juno's JunoCam instrument. JunoCam's raw images are available at https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.

Source:
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jupiterrise
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Mai

#space   #nasa   #juno   #jupiter   #science

Otober 21 is reserved to Wolfgang Ketterle

Otober 21 is reserved to Wolfgang Ketterle
Wolfgang Ketterle was born today in 1957 in Heidelberg, West Germany. After earning his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Ketterle began working at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.

In 1995, the team he was leading was one of the first to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and provided some of the earliest studies on the substances. For this work he was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, who led the group that was the first to create a BEC). He has continued to study the behavior of supercold atoms, creating the first molecular BEC in 2003 and demonstrating high temperature superfluidity in a fermionic condensate.

What is BEC? you ask
The Bose-Einstein condensate is a phase of matter formed by bosons to a close temperature of absolute zero. Under these conditions, a large fraction of atoms reaches the lowest quantum state, and in these conditions the quantum effects can be observed on a macroscopic scale.

The existence of this state of matter as a consequence of quantum mechanics was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1925, following the work done by Satyendra Nath Bose. The first such condensate was produced seventy years later by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nK (nano Kelvin) MERRY birthday for the Nobel Prize Wolfgang Ketterle born in 1957 in Heidelberg, West Germany.

Bio:
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2001/ketterle-bio.html

Reference:
https://www.reference.com/science/bose-einstein-condensate-32e9326e91cc8b48

#history   #physics   #BEC   #science

Woohoo it's Friday!!! Oh wait...I'm a mother.

Woohoo it's Friday!!! Oh wait...I'm a mother.
Music always sounds better on Friday, at least ;)

#personalnonsense   #tunesinsidemyhead

Sea urchins are visually arresting, hazardous to swimmers, and to some cultures delicious.

Sea urchins are visually arresting, hazardous to swimmers, and to some cultures delicious. The marine invertebrates are important links in the marine food chain. Fish pick at the urchins, which feed on bits of algae.

Sea urchins are perhaps best known for their armor of spines. But their mouths may be even more daunting—urchin teeth can literally chew through stone without getting dull.
Urchins feed on algae and invertebrates, a recent study found that the sound of their teeth scraping on reefs can cause a rise in ocean noise.

The teeth are mosaics of two kinds of calcite crystals: fibers and curved plates. The crystal shapes are arranged crosswise to each other and are bound together with a superhard cement of calcite nanoparticles.

Between the crystals are layers of weaker organic material. By striking the teeth with microscopic, diamond-tipped probes, the scientists found that the teeth break along these organic layers.

The scientists think the organics are predetermined weak spots in the teeth that allow parts of the material to "tear" away, similar to perforations in a sheet of paper. This means the teeth, which grow continuously, can regularly shed damaged areas to keep a well-honed edge.

References:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101228-sea-urchin-teeth-self-sharpening-tools-science-animals/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100205-sea-urchins-spines-eyes/

#biodiversity   #seaurchin   #coolcritters

Full Moon in Mountain Shadow

Full Moon in Mountain Shadow
On October 15, standing near the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea and looking away from a gorgeous sunset produced this magnificent snapshot of a Full Moon rising within the volcanic mountain's shadow. An alignment across the Solar System is captured in the stunning scene and seeming contradiction of bright Moon in dark shadow.

The triangular appearance of a shadow cast by a mountain's irregular profile is normal. It's created by the perspective of the distant mountaintop view through the dense atmosphere. Rising as the Sun sets, the antisolar point or the point opposite the Sun is close to the perspective's vanishing point near the mountain shadow's peak.

But extending in the antisolar direction, Earth's conical shadow is only a few lunar diameter's wide at the distance of the Moon. So October's Full Hunters Moon is still reflecting sunlight, seen through the mountain's atmospheric shadow but found too far from the antisolar point and the Earth's extended shadow to be eclipsed.  

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Greg Chavdarian

#space   #nasa   #Science   #fullmoon   #naturalphenomena

Thought of the day

Thought of the day
Death of passion = being married to a child
Is always nice to meet up and see old friends...till everyone starts to complain about relationships, marriages, sex life...children etc.
What I've concluded today after I saw some of my old friends?

Well, if you've ever been married you know that there are some moments when we have to be a “mother” to our husbands/partners and they have to be a “father” to us. But too many of us play the “mothering” role virtually all the time, and it is not a very sexy role for either husband or wife.

A wife who always acts like a man’s mother will often find that her husband acts like an inhibited, undemonstrative and certainly unromantic child in bed; and a man who routinely treats his wife like his mother will frequently find that she is losing sexual interest in him.

Likewise, a man who acts like his wife’s father is soon apt to find her a reluctant, nervous lover, just as a wife who repeatedly asks her husband to assume the role of father may find him drifting into sexual disinterest and apathy.

Roles die hard and, inevitably, we play parent to our partner at least some of the time. But it is only one of many roles we assume.

For Ra sake...grow up! You're a parent to your child, a lover to your partner and a porn star in bed, if not, move on and don't cross our paths!!!

I don't want to hear anymore stuff regarding dysfunctional relationships. Love & passion ended...move on and start over!

#personalnonsense   #stripyourmind   #lickyourthoughts   #dysfunctionalrelationship

Seasonal allergies could change your brain

Seasonal allergies could change your brain
Hay fever may do more than give you a stuffy nose and itchy eyes, seasonal allergies may change the brain, says a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.

Scientists found that brains of mice exposed to allergen actually produced more neurons than controls, they did this using a model of grass pollen allergy.

The research team examined the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for forming new memories, and the site where neurons continue be formed throughout life. During an allergic reaction, there was an increase in the numbers of new neurons in the hippocampus, raising the question: what could be the consequences of allergies on memory?

The formation and functioning of neurons is linked to the brain’s immune cells, the microglia.
To the scientists surprise, they found that the same allergic reaction that kicks the body’s immune system in high gear, has opposite effect on resident immune cells of the brain. The microglia in the brain were deactivated in brains of these animals.

Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/f-sac080816.php

Journal article:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncel.2016.00169/full

#neurobiology   #neuroscience   #immunology    #medicine   #health   #allergies

ExoMars TGO reaches Mars orbit while EDM situation under assessment

ExoMars TGO reaches Mars orbit while EDM situation under assessment
The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) of ESA’s ExoMars 2016 has successfully performed the long 139-minute burn required to be captured by Mars and entered an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet, while contact has not yet been confirmed with the mission’s test lander from the surface.

TGO’s Mars orbit Insertion burn lasted from 13:05 to 15:24 GMT on 19 October, reducing the spacecraft’s speed and direction by more than 1.5 km/s. The TGO is now on its planned orbit around Mars. European Space Agency teams at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, continue to monitor  the good  health of their second orbiter around Mars, which joins the 13-year old Mars Express.

Source & further reading:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/ExoMars/ExoMars_TGO_reaches_Mars_orbit_while_EDM_situation_under_assessment

Woohoo congrats! Keep rolling!

#space   #science   #exomars   #esa   #exploration

The Tulip in the Swan

The Tulip in the Swan 
Framing a bright emission region this telescopic view looks out along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the nebula rich constellation Cygnus the Swan. Popularly called the Tulip Nebula, the glowing cloud of interstellar gas and dust is also found in the 1959 catalog by astronomer Stewart Sharpless as Sh2-101.

About 8,000 light-years distant and 70 light-years across the complex and beautiful nebula blossoms at the center of the composite image. Red, green, and blue hues map emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. Ultraviolet radiation from young, energetic stars at the edge of the Cygnus OB3 association, including O star HDE 227018, ionizes the atoms and powers the visible light emission from the Tulip Nebula. HDE 227018 is the bright star very near the blue arc at the center of the cosmic tulip.

Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh

#space   #science   #nasa   #galaxy   #nebula

Birds nap in flight without dropping out of sky

Birds nap in flight without dropping out of sky
The debate has finally been put to bed. Wearable brainwave recorders confirm that birds do indeed sleep while flying, but only for brief periods and usually with one half of their brain.

We know several bird species can travel vast distances non-stop, prompting speculation that they must nap mid-flight. Great frigatebirds, for example, can fly continuously for up to two months. On the other hand, the male sandpiper, for one, can largely forgo sleep during the breeding season, hinting that it may also be possible for birds to stay awake during prolonged trips.

To settle this question, Niels Rattenborg at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and his colleagues fitted small brain activity monitors and movement trackers to 14 great frigatebirds.

During long flights, the birds slept for an average of 41 minutes per day, in short episodes of about 12 seconds each. By contrast, they slept for more than 12 hours per day on land. Frigatebirds in flight tend to use one hemisphere at a time to sleep, as do ducks and dolphins, but sometimes they used both.

“Some people thought that all their sleep would have to be unihemispheric otherwise they would drop from the sky,” says Rattenborg. “But that’s not the case – they can sleep with both hemispheres and they just continue soaring.”

Sleep typically took place as the birds were circling in rising air currents, when they did not need to flap their wings.

Source & further reading:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2099687-first-evidence-birds-nap-in-flight-without-dropping-out-of-sky/

#biodiversity   #research   #birds   #sleep

A zookeeper gives penguins a delightful shower from a watering can. (1930)

A zookeeper gives penguins a delightful shower from a watering can. (1930)

#history   #vintage

…And secretly I hoped that we all deserved to be looked at that way, like nothing else in the world mattered or ever...

…And secretly I hoped that we all deserved to be looked at that way, like nothing else in the world mattered or ever would again.

#insidemycalvaria   #personalnonsense   #feelingsmemo

Size/s

Size/s
Does size matter?
It's a topic that has yet to go away and probably never will: does penis size matter? Well, does it? Studies have found that when it comes to penis size, 84% of women are just fine with what their partner has. In fact, the people who seem to be the most concerned with penis size are men, as if a smaller penis suggests he’s less manly, and to attain excessive manliness one must have a gigantic dick ― something most women don’t even want.

Well, obviously the "jar penises" I saw at the Senckerberg Museum were nonhuman penises, however my disturbed mind would have liked that ;) .

Well, no, size doesn't really matters because good sex is much more a result of healthy emotional connection than body part size...at least that's my opinion for the moment, ha ;)

How Women Feel About Penis Size:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201411/how-women-really-feel-about-penis-size

How Men Fell About Penis Size:
http://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/health/does-penis-size-matter-20150916

#dirtythoughts   #personalnonsense   #psizes

Ideally, if you end up in Frankfurt... ;)

Ideally, if you end up in Frankfurt... ;)

#personalnonsense   #streetphoto   #frankfurt

Wayward Field Lines Challenge Solar Radiation Models

Wayward Field Lines Challenge Solar Radiation Models
New models show solar energetic particles spiraling out much wider and farther than previous models predicted – explaining how SEPs find their way to even the far side of the sun.

What are SEP's?
Solar energetic particles (SEP) are high-energy particles coming from the Sun. They were first observed in the early 1940s. They consist of protons, electrons and HZE ions with energy ranging from a few tens of keV to GeV (the fastest particles can reach 80% of the speed of light).

This animation compares the two models for particle distribution over the course of just three hours after an SEP event. The white line represents a magnetic field line, the general path that the SEPs follow. The line starts at an SEP event at the sun, and leads the particles in a spiral around the sun. The animation of the updated model, on the right, depicts a static field line, but as the SEPs travel farther in space, turbulent solar material causes wandering field lines. In turn, wandering field lines cause the particles to spread much more efficiently than the traditional model, on the left, predicted.

Read & Learn:
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/wayward-field-lines-challenge-solar-radiation-models

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/UCLan/Stanford/ULB/Joy Ng, producer

#nasa   #SEP   #space   #science   #sun   #particles