archatlas:

Calculation Rafael Araujo

kuvaton:

[BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS]

cosmo-nautic:

This image displays Kepler’s second law of planetary motion.

“A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time” (Meaning that each triangle seen there has equal area.)

• The black dot represents a planet, the point where the black lines intersect represent the sun.
• The green arrow represents the planet’s velocity,
• The purple arrows represents the force on the planet.

(Image source: here)

thejunglenook:

Dogs Are People, Too

By GREGORY BERNS, Published: October 5, 2013

FOR the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in an M.R.I. scanner — completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs’ brains work and, even more important, what they think of us humans.

Now, after training and scanning a dozen dogs, my one inescapable conclusion is this: dogs are people, too.

Because dogs can’t speak, scientists have relied on behavioral observations to infer what dogs are thinking. It is a tricky business. You can’t ask a dog why he does something. And you certainly can’t ask him how he feels. The prospect of ferreting out animal emotions scares many scientists. After all, animal research is big business. It has been easy to sidestep the difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions because they have been unanswerable.

Until now.

By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviorism, M.R.I.’s can tell us about dogs’ internal states. M.R.I.’s are conducted in loud, confined spaces. People don’t like them, and you have to hold absolutely still during the procedure. Conventional veterinary practice says you have to anesthetize animals so they don’t move during a scan. But you can’t study brain function in an anesthetized animal. At least not anything interesting like perception or emotion.

From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons. We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child’s consent form but signed by the dog’s owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn’t want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer….

After months of training and some trial-and-error at the real M.R.I. scanner, we were rewarded with the first maps of brain activity. For our first tests, we measured Callie’s brain response to two hand signals in the scanner. In later experiments, not yet published, we determined which parts of her brain distinguished the scents of familiar and unfamiliar dogs and humans…

Although we are just beginning to answer basic questions about the canine brain, we cannot ignore the striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus.

Rich in dopamine receptors, the caudate sits between the brainstem and the cortex. In humans, the caudate plays a key role in the anticipation of things we enjoy, like food, love and money. But can we flip this association around and infer what a person is thinking just by measuring caudate activity? Because of the overwhelming complexity of how different parts of the brain are connected to one another, it is not usually possible to pin a single cognitive function or emotion to a single brain region.

But the caudate may be an exception. Specific parts of the caudate stand out for their consistent activation to many things that humans enjoy. Caudate activation is so consistent that under the right circumstances, it can predict our preferences for food, music and even beauty.

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions (continue reading).

*******************
Some comments from your friendly neighborhood Ethologist:

This is certainly intriguing research, but the cynic (or scientist) in me wants to see the data. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this publication – and hope I can get full access to it whenever and wherever it is published – because Neuroethology is a fascinating and rapidly developing field. However, I do have some (slight) issues with this article…

1) Behaviorism ≠ Ethology
No. I’m sorry but this may not seem like a huge issue to you, but to an Ethologist this is a pretty big difference.

Behaviorism is a philosophy of psychology not of science and it regards all acts as behavior, generally in the context of human psychology. Behaviorism considers that there are no differences between what can be measured scientifically (actions) and what cannot (internal processes like thought). (x)

Ethology is a scientific discipline combining lab and field studies which measure an animal’s actions and explain them with respect to that behaviour rather than some abstract idea of an animal’s thought process. Ethology sees the study of animal behavior in the context of what is known about animal anatomy, physiology, neurobiology, and phylogenetic history.

I can go into a whole ‘how Ethologists consider animal cognition and emotions’ thing here, but I’ll save that for another post if you all are interested.

2) Personhood.
The article goes on to suggest that perhaps there is a case in granting dogs personhood based on brain-imaging findings. Now I’m not particularly opposed to that, or to any legislation that could improve animal welfare, but we should look at the big picture. There are people all around you, who are not granted the rights of personhood. This legal marginalizing and abuse of our fellow human beings should be dealt with first. Once we learn how to treat all people like people, maybe then we’ll be mature enough to handle the responsibility of treating animals with the same respect. 

neuromorphogenesis:

Is this the most extraordinary human brain ever seen?

ONCE you know what it is, this apparently innocuous picture of a blob assumes a terrible gravity. It is an adult human brain that is entirely smooth – free of the ridges and folds so characteristic of our species’ most complex organ.

We can only imagine what life was like for this person. He or she was a resident of what is now North Texas State Hospital, a mental health facility,and died there in 1970, but that’s all we know. While the jar containing the brain is labelled with a reference number, the microfilm containing the patient’s medical records has been lost.

Photographer Adam Voorhes spent a year trying to track down more information about this and nearly 100 other human brains held in a collection at the University of Texas, Austin, to no avail. The label on the jar states that the patient had agyria – a lack of gyri and sulci, the ridges and folds formed by the normally wrinkled cerebral cortex. This rare condition, also known as lissencephaly, often leads to death before the age of 10. It can cause muscle spasms, seizures and, as it vastly reduces the surface area of this key part of the brain, a range of learning difficulties.

David Dexter, who runs the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank at Imperial College London, says he has never seen anything like this before: “We do get the odd individual where certain sulci are missing but nothing to the extent of this brain.” Dexter says he is not surprised the person survived to adulthood since the brain is so adaptive, though he guesses there would be deleterious effects.

Earlier this year the University of Texas took delivery of an MRI scanner to document the structure of the brains in the collection in detail. While this might teach us more about the brain itself, the identity of the person who had this extraordinary brain – and details of his or her life – seem to be lost forever.

ladieslovescience:

Mental Floss debunks (oh, yes, we are using “debunks" in this sentence) 50 Science Misconceptions in its new video. How many were you corrected on?

LLS

ricepattiesfromabove:

Sand when it’s struck by lightning

hadeniikuze:

bonjourentrez:

dawnofthesecondday:

How do Japanese multiply?

Well fuck my life if only I had known this in school >_____<

FUCK

THE

WHAT

GO

FUCK

YOURSELF

tristetriste:

In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joseph Kittinger flew thirty kilometers straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space. 

Then he jumped.

Mr. Kittinger free-fell for over twenty kilometers - at which point he was moving so fast that he broke the sound barrier.

He had all but left the earth’s atmosphere; the sky around him was pitch black; he could see the outlines of entire continents; and the haiku-like abstraction of his available reference points – earth, balloon, space – made it impossible to tell if he was really falling.

Does this sound like fiction? Luckily, there’s a film.

sciencesoup:

Lichtenberg Figures

One hundred lightning bolts strike Earth’s surface every second, each containing up to one billion volts of electricity. Cloud-to-ground lightning is caused by an electrical imbalance: precipitation collects at the base of storm clouds and creates a negative charge, while objects on the ground become positively charge—and nature remedies the imbalance by passing an enormous electrical current between them. Lightning actually moves in steps that work their way down to Earth with incredible speed, creating a fractal pattern—then the lowermost step is met by a surge of positive electricity from the target below, and electricity is channelled through as lightning. This surge can climb through a tree, a building, or even a person, so it’s unsurprisingly that approximately 2,000 people are killed by lightning each year. The lucky ones who survive being struckare sometimes left with remarkable fractal scarring on their skin, called Lichtenberg figures or “lightning trees”. Lichtenberg figures were discovered by German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who found that when an electrical discharge strikes insulating material, it’s reproduced on the surface or interior of the material. It looks like trapped lightning because it quite literally is, showing the fascinating pattern of the branching steps. It’s not the heat that causes the scarring, however; it’s hypothesized that the shockwave of the lightning current ruptures capillaries under the skin. Since they’re not burns, Lichtenberg figures generally only last from a few hours to a few days before fading from the skin. 

fyeahcutebugs:

maid-of-thyme:

idk what this mutation is called but i love it

It’s called gynandromorphism, and it’s really neat! It actually causes the organism to develop half (or part) of its body as one sex, and the other half as the other.

It mostly appears in insects and other arthropods, but it can happen in some birds, too! 

wwatevver:

sixthrock:

lavastormsw:

bolinsboo:

razzledazzy:

The photo above is the closest humanity has ever come to creating Medusa. 

If you were to look at this, you would die instantly. End of story.

The image is of a reactor core lava formation in the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s called the Elephant’s Foot and weighs hundreds of tons, but is only a couple meters across.

Oh, and regarding the Medusa thing? This picture was taken through a mirror around the corner of the hallway. Because the wheeled camera they sent up to take pictures of it was destroyed by the radiation. 

I wonder if they could get pictures in colour now or maybe get an accurate heat reading off of that thing, if it’s still all there.

It’s crazy to think that something can be that strong that it would kill you by just looking at it. Though it’s understandable. I’d like a heat reading off of it.

Oh my god

I have such a science boner right now

Do you know how fucking dense that must be to weigh hundreds of tons?

Pretty fucking dense.

Wow.

I found this video for anyone who wants to see a video of the thing (although it’s not the best quality). This thing is a serious monster. I have a little trouble deciphering this Wikipedia article, but from what I gather, this thing weighs 1,200 tons (2,400,000 pounds - a number I cannot even begin to fathom) and is only losing about 22 pounds of uranium per year. It resists its environment and if the shelter is improved, that loss is expected to drop.

Holy shit.

I am simply astounded by the sheer power and properties of radiation and nuclear power plants. This is seriously scary stuff. Not to mention its effects on humans. i find deformed humans very, very unnerving. The mutations that radiation cause are the worst, in my opinion, than say, genetic mutations. This video shows some of the mutations from the Chernobyl meltdown (warning: these are very disturbing images, so view at your own risk).

Here’s another website with a collection of Chernobyl pictures, mostly of the building itself (no mutation pictures, so unless you’re upset by major destruction, this is a really cool look-through). This is my favorite picture because it really shows the dripping of the radioactive fuel/debris lava out of the valve. I just find it so absolutely terrifying that something like this could ever happen. Radiation is seriously scary stuff. What I want to know is how they took that picture.

Oh holy shit this is terrifying. The color just makes it worse. It’s like a volcano erupted indoors. Which is probably a pretty accurate analogy, plus tons of radiation to go with it. “”Corium” is only formed during a reactor meltdown as a product of the solid fuel fissioning uncontrollably. This super-hot fuel turns into a liquid and melts its way through steel, concrete, and whatever else that might be in contact with it. So it’s a mixture of fuel and various building materials,” the admin says in the comments.

This article says that Chernobyl will stay radioactive for 100,000 years.

Radiation is just unfathomably scary stuff.

Daaaaamn.

All of this is just so incredibly terrifying and amazing at the same time. Just to think of the things humans are capable of now, and all the various horrible ways everything could go very very wrong if we’re too careless for just a second…

okay yeah fine I didn’t need to sleep tonight anyway ;_;

CHERNOBYL IS SO FUCKING INTERESTING.

joshbyard:

Researchers Build Robot Jellyfish From Silicon and Rat Cells

A half-inch-long juvenile jellyfish pulses and swims much like any of its compatriots in oceans all over the world. The major difference? It’s entirely man-made.

“It’s a biohybrid robot. It’s part animal, it’s part synthetic material,” said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University who led the jellyfish-building effort.

The ultimate aim of Parker’s little jellyfish isn’t to build animals, however. It’s to build artificial hearts for transplants in the future.

Parker, who has long studied heart cells, chose to reproduce a jellyfish first, so he could learn the basics of biological pumps. “The jellyfish was a first step in that we built a functioning pump with designer specs,” he told InnovationNewsDaily. “We’re going to continue to try it to ratchet it up by building harder and harder things until we’re ready for the heart.”

(via How Man-Made Jellyfish Could Help Heart Patients | LiveScience)

yaroumme:

illegalfag:

span-kun:

guys we watched this in science class today

just watch it you won’t regret it

are you serious

oh god omg

i almost choked on my drink when they mentioned ottawa at the very end OH MY GOD ODNT ASSOCIATE US WITH CRACK SPIDERS