Women in Lit

jtotheizzoe: Let’s talk about the cosmos. (from Jenny Chen’s...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:43:02 -0400

Let’s talk about the cosmos.

(from Jenny Chen’s Animated GIFs Of A Pop-Up Book For Adults at Co.Design)

discoverynews: Runts of Stellar Litter Rarer than...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:42:06 -0400

Runts of Stellar Litter Rarer than Thought

Observations by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer have revealed a surprise.

keep reading

explore-blog: Cantor Set omelet, and other scientific concepts...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:41:12 -0400

explore-blog:

Cantor Set omelet, and other scientific concepts rendered in food by Kevin Van Aelst.

mothernaturenetwork: Plastic is found in virtually everything...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:40:58 -0400

mothernaturenetwork:

Plastic is found in virtually everything these days. Your food and hygiene products are packaged in it. Your car, phone and computer are made from it. And you might even chew on it daily in the form of gum. While most plastics are touted as recyclable, the reality is that they’re “downcycled.” A plastic milk carton can never be recycled into another carton — it can be made into a lower-quality item like plastic lumber, which can’t be recycled.
16 simple ways to reduce plastic waste

ikenbot: Couple Planets Couple Trees The two brightest planets...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:40:23 -0400

ikenbot:

Couple Planets Couple Trees

The two brightest planets of the night sky, Venus (the brighter) and Jupiter, meet in the evening sky of Brittany, France.

"Decision-making isn’t logical, it’s emotional, according to the latest findings in neuroscience. A..."

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:39:22 -0400

“

Decision-making isn’t logical, it’s emotional, according to the latest findings in neuroscience. A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.

So at the point of decision, emotions are very important for choosing. In fact even with what we believe are logical decisions, the very point of choice is arguably always based on emotion.

”

- Decisions Are Emotional, not Logical: The Neuroscience behind Decision Making | Experts’ Corner | Big Think (via myserendipities)

contemplatingmadness: Your DNA Changes as You Age While our...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:38:35 -0400

contemplatingmadness:

Your DNA Changes as You Age

While our bodies age, scientists believe that our DNA at least remains constant. New research, however, reveals that, even though its sequence remains constant, subtle chemical changes occur to our DNA as we age—and it could explain why the risk of developing disease increases as we get older.

DNA is made up of four basic chemical building blocks, called adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. It’s the sequences of those chemicals in a strand of DNA that determines what function a gene has, and one of the ways the resulting genes are controlled is a process called methylation. That just means that a methyl group — one carbon atom and three hydrogen atom—bonds to part of the DNA and subtly change its function.

New research, published in PNAS, however, shows that as we grow older our DNA’s susceptibility to methylation changes. A team of researchers from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, extracted DNA from white blood cells of twenty newborn babies and twenty people aged between 89 and 100 years old, then compared their respective degrees of methylation.

In a newborn baby 80.5 percent of cytosine nucleotides were methylated, while in centenarians that figure dropped to 73 percent. An intermediary example, taken from a 26-year-old male subject, exhibited 78 percent methylation. It’s not clear why it happens, but the researchers speculate that it could be due to extremely subtle age-related changes to the DNA.

But what the hell does it all mean? Well, taking a closer look at the samples, the researchers discovered that a third of the methylated groups which were in different positions in the elderly compared to the young are already known to be linked to cancer risk.

If you think about the DNA strand as “hardware” and the added methyl groups as “software”—which isn’t actually a bad analogy—you can think of the inappropriately placed methyl groups as software bugs that accumulate with age. It’s just that, for humans, those bugs leads to increased risk of terminal disease. Fortunately, these kinds of findings should help scientists troubleshoot our internal apps. [PNAS via Science]

fyeahuniverse: Hawaiian Bobtail Squid; Euprymna...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:37:29 -0400

fyeahuniverse:

Hawaiian Bobtail Squid; Euprymna scolopes

Bioluminescence can be a very helpful evolutionary feature for creatures who live in the deep ocean where sun-produced-light is scarce. The Hawaiian bobtail squid doesn’t bioluminesce itself, but rather it hosts colonies of bioluminescent Vibrio fischeri bacterium in a mutualistic relationship.

Image via animalword

experimentsinmotion: Water Weight: Effects of Surface...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:35:52 -0400

experimentsinmotion:

Water Weight: Effects of Surface Tension

(via Kuriositas)

bashford: The installation ‘bios [bible]’ (2007) by Robotlab...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:34:39 -0400

bashford:

The installation ‘bios [bible]’ (2007) by Robotlab consists of an industrial robot which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision - like a monk in the scriptorium.

samaralex: Viking Car Polo by Brian Marshall

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:34:01 -0400

samaralex:

Viking Car Polo by Brian Marshall

Girl Broken Down: I’m cutting into my skin. Slicing into the pretty bits that are easy...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:31:31 -0400

Girl Broken Down: I’m cutting into my skin. Slicing into the pretty bits that are easy...:

girlbrokendown:

I’m cutting into my skin.
Slicing into the pretty
bits that are easy to see,
the bits that everyone seems
to like so much and I am
Removing them from me,

So that they may discover
a part of me in secrecy
to witness my failings,
the weakness of my heart
reading the intentions…

Photo

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:28:56 -0400

hiromitsu: The Big Buddhas at Maijishan by mke1963 on Flickr.

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:25:49 -0400

hiromitsu:

The Big Buddhas at Maijishan by mke1963 on Flickr.

nimnimnum: Going up … by *JACAC

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:24:58 -0400

nimnimnum:

Going up … by *JACAC

modus-arch: (via Hanging Garden of Barcelona. | DETAIL daily)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:24:19 -0400

modus-arch:

(via Hanging Garden of Barcelona. | DETAIL daily)

2headedsnake: michaeljantzen.com Michael Jantzen Deconstructing...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:23:21 -0400

2headedsnake:

michaeljantzen.com

Michael Jantzen

Deconstructing The Churches

One from a series of photo collages that are part of a larger series of photos, which visually deconstruct parts of the real world that we normally think of as stable. Sections of the photos are simply rotated out of their normal positions relative to the whole image in order to create the illusion of fragmentation, and then reconstructed into a new hybrid image. This new hybrid image then begins to suggest the possibility of an alternative universe of subsets, capable of endless potential.

romeo: hey i just met you.

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:19:31 -0400

romeo: hey i just met you.
romeo: and this is crazy.
romeo: but i saw you at your dad's party that i wasn't supposed to attend and i thought you were pretty cute so i followed you and we kissed but then your nanny called you away and i found out you were a capulet and got bummed so i sneaked into your back yard in the middle of the night and climbed your balcony uninvited to profess my undying love after an hour even though i wanted to bone rosaline like two scenes ago.
romeo: so marry me maybe.

lunchtrae: The glasses John Lennon wore when he got shot, 31...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:17:14 -0400

lunchtrae:

The glasses John Lennon wore when he got shot, 31 years ago.

omg

Best Author-on-Author Insults in History

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:34:29 -0400

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling: How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw: An idiot child screaming in a hospital.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen: Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning: I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.
Mark Twain on Jane Austen: Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.