Alexia Reed

While in reality Alexia Reed resides in Ontario, she likes to say that she lives in her own little world. A lover of all things scientific and the paranormal, Alexia uses her books as a way to straddle the realms of fact and fiction—and always with a healthy dose of romance thrown in.

[scienceisbeauty]

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

by Randall Munroe (aka XKCD)

In his new book Munroe explains stuff using only the thousand most common English words. He even has created a utility to facilitate the task himself and then he has shared it with everyone.

Also starting in November he will visit several cities in North America, you may check the schedule here.

[foodffs]

ZODIAC CONSTELLATION CAKE

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

Show me what you cooked!

[themedicalstate]

New design of a system that ‘interrogates’ and shows how the brain relearns

Monitoring the rehabilitation of patients with neurological damage caused by a stroke, has encouraged Mexican scientists to work in the design and manufacture of a functional infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS -FD) instrument capable of identifying the affected areas of the brain and the sites that were activated while analyzing the oxygen content in blood flow during therapy.

"It’s a device consisting of a headband or helmet equipped with emitters and light detectors, oximeter (to measures oxygen levels), a monitor and software. Its operation is based on infrared light, which passes through the scalp to the skull leather and displays and “interrogates” brain activity in order to obtain information on cell metabolism, alterations in blood flow and amount of oxygen,” explains Carlos Gerardo Treviño Palacios, researcher at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) in Mexico.

He highlights that so far they are ending the development of an oximeter and software to display images. Also, they analyze information that will be provided to the base hardware and detectors, and work in the construction helmet. This will not only help rehabilitate patients, but will create a map of the brain to detect which parts are replacing areas that died in the motor cortex after stroke and watch how the body relearns with the help of rehabilitation.

"The aim is to build a non-invasive imaging system to avoid secluding the patient into a box camera during the shooting of brain "photography" with the limitations of the procedure, as happens with an MRI," says Treviño Palacios.

He notes that although the latter method also measures the concentration of oxygen, infrared spectroscopy despite having a lower resolution does not require the patient to lie still and requires only the use of a helmet, allowing the physician to observe brain activity and progress while continuing the patient’s rehabilitation therapy. Additional advantages are system portability and low cost.

"In parallel, we are looking for a fast optical signal, ie, a series of changes that occur a few milliseconds before the neuron is active in the images, which shows the action potential of the nerve cell,” says the researcher at INAOE.

This project is jointly implemented by INAOE and the National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery of the Mexican Ministry of Health, where collaboration comes naturally to raise an investigation into an imaging modality based on the interaction of light with matter, after a previous collaboration where a rehabilitation therapy system was developed.

"The particular characteristics of the optical imaging system make it a unique tool in certain problems where the in-vivo and in- situ neuroimaging is required noninvasively and continuously for long periods of time. This is the case of the study of brain plasticity in patients going through motor rehabilitation, which should be monitored while practicing neuro-rehabilitation exercises during therapy sessions that can last from 45 minutes to an hour,” says  Treviño Palacios.

[jedavu]

Artist Creates Incredible Realistic Drawings On Wooden Boards by Singapore artist Ivan Hoo

[starlingchildgazingatthestars]

What sorcery is this?! O_O

[alexiareed]

Talented artist!

[explore-blog]

How wonderful that a Google Doodle is celebrating the 215th birthday of Mary Anning, the self-trained, citizen-scientist fossil hunter who discovered the very first dinosaur skeleton.

[alexiareed]

Awesome

[bookporn]

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (via reapergrellsutcliff)

[byron130]

18.05.2014 I learned yesterday that when you see a bee on the ground that isn’t moving, it’s not necessarily dead, it’s probably just dead tired from carrying lots of pollen and needs re-energising. So if you mix a tiny bit of water with some sugar and let it drink it will give it the boost it needs to continue on its way. Bizarrely, this exact thing happened today! I found a knackered bee, mixed up some sugar water, gave it a drink and watched it guzzle and guzzle then suddenly come back to life. It was amazing! Thank you patrick, it was an excellent tip that i’ll never forget and will continue to pass on to others!

[jonnovstheinternet]

[alexiareed]

Pretty

[ultrafacts]

See more facts Here

[egofan4evr]

Now THIS is something I’ll wake up to.

[alexiareed]

I'd wake up to bacon...

[valdanderthal]

Clyde Snow, a Sleuth Who Read Bones From King Tut’s to Kennedy’s, Is Dead at 86

With ghoulish geniality, Clyde Snow liked to say that bones made good witnesses, never lying, never forgetting, and that a skeleton, no matter how old, could sketch the tale of a human life, revealing how it had been lived, how long it had lasted, what traumas it had endured and especially how it had ended.

He was a legendary detective of forensic anthropology, the esoteric science of extracting the secrets of the dead from skeletal remains. His subjects included President John F. Kennedy, the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, the “disappeared” who were exhumed from mass graves in Argentina, victims of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and even Tutankhamen, the pharaoh who lived 3,300 years ago.

More, Dr. Snow, who testified against Saddam Hussein and other tyrants, was the father of a modern movement that has used forensic anthropology in human rights drives against genocide, war crimes and massacres in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chile and elsewhere.

He died at 86 on Friday at a hospital in Norman, Okla., where he lived. His wife, Jerry Whistler Snow, said the cause was cancer and emphysema.

Beginning in the 1960s, long before DNA experts perfected their forensic magic, Dr. Snow exposed ghastly crimes, solved mysteries, brought killers to justice, identified victims of disasters, and helped the commercial aviation industry redesign seat restraints and escape systems by analyzing the ways people died in plane crashes.

Though he was no Indiana Jones, he was known to turn up in jungles, deserts and other exotic places in a rumpled jacket and cowboy boots, a cheerful chain smoker with a Texas drawl. He collected skulls mutilated by bullets and bludgeons.

Unlike forensic pathologists, who usually work on fresh bodies, forensic anthropologists, who number about 100 in America, usually have only bones to study. Using calipers, micrometers and other low-tech instruments to measure, probe and analyze remains, Dr. Snow could determine the sex, race, age and other characteristics of the dead, like left- or right-handedness, and often a full identity.

He used computers when they came along, but his stock instruments were like those of the late 19th century, when the celebrated French forensic expert Alphonse Bertillon developed the first successful system for identifying the dead from body measurements. The Bertillon method, notable in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, was widely used until superseded by fingerprint identification, which is useless in skeletal examinations.

—

Applications were legion. In Argentina in 1985, Dr. Snow and students he had trained excavated a mass grave where military death squads had buried some of the 13,000 to 30,000 civilians who vanished in a seven-year “dirty war” against dissidents. They found 500 skeletons, many with bullet holes in the skulls, fractured arms and fingers, and abundant signs of torture and murder.

As chief witness at a trial of generals and admirals, Dr. Snow identified victims and causes of death, evidence that led to five convictions, galvanized public opinion and brought some comfort to loved ones.

Widely sought after for his services, he would respond to pleas for help by assembling forensic teams of analysts, including dentists, and travel to all parts. In El Salvador, he and a team found the skeletons of 136 infants and children killed by army squads. In Croatia, he exhumed the remains of 200 hospital patients and staff members executed by troops. And he helped build criminal cases against military and government leaders behind the atrocities. As a consultant to human rights organizations, he also exposed mass murders in Guatemala, Ethiopia and Iraqi Kurdistan.

In 1985 he went to Brazil for the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center and helped identify the remains of the long-sought Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death” who directed gruesome medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz and sent 400,000 to the gas chambers. After World War II, Mengele fled to Brazil, assumed a new identity and died in 1979. Dr. Snow used many measurements, including Mengele’s hat size (retrieved from Nazi SS records) to confirm his true identity.

Dr. Snow helped identify many victims of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. At the behest of Congress, he confirmed that X-rays taken at Kennedy’s autopsy were indeed those of the assassinated president. With Betty Pat Gatliff, a medical artist, he reconstructed the face of Tutankhamen, whose tomb was discovered in 1922. In Baghdad, in 2006, he testified against Saddam Hussein, who was convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged.

Dr. Snow had a doctorate in anthropology, but his forensic anthropology skills were self-taught, a result of decades of experience extracting the secrets of bones. He taught at the University of Oklahoma and lectured to law-enforcement and forensic groups. Dr. Snow was not always successful in his bone hunting. He once traveled to a remote mining village in Bolivia in a futile search for the remains of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the notorious turn-of-the-century outlaws celebrated in the 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. But, with a forensic pathologist and a dentist in 1980, he determined that a skull sent from Germany was not Hitler’s.

“Bones can be puzzles,” he told The New York Times in 1991, “but they never lie, and they don’t smell bad.”

Clyde Collins Snow was born in Fort Worth on Jan. 7, 1928, the only child of Wister and Sarah Isobell Collins Snow. He grew up in Ralls, a panhandle town. His father was a physician, and his mother, though not a trained nurse, assisted in their home clinic and maternity ward. The boy accompanied his father on house calls and trips to accident scenes and morgues.

When he was 12, he saw his first pile of bones on a hunting trip with his father, who recognized the mingled skeletons of a man and a deer. The older Snow hypothesized that the man shot the deer and died of a heart attack dragging it away. A set of keys in the remains was the only clue. But a deputy sheriff recalled the disappearance of a local hunter and the keys opened doors at the man’s home, establishing his identity.

An indifferent student, Dr. Snow was expelled from high school over a firecracker prank. Packed off to the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, he graduated after four years but soon flunked out of Southern Methodist University. He attended other schools before settling down at Eastern New Mexico University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951.

He flirted with medical studies at Baylor, but quit and earned a master’s degree in zoology at Texas Tech in 1955. After three years in the Air Force, he studied archaeology at the University of Arizona, learning excavation techniques that proved invaluable. (He later switched to anthropology for his doctorate in 1967.)

He also worked in the 1960s for an agency of the Federal Aviation Administration, studying ways to make airplanes safer in a crash. He discovered that many passengers died of smoke inhalation, not impact injuries, and that those seated near exits had the lowest fatality rates — facts used in the redesign of seat restraints and exit strategies.

Dr. Snow married Jerry Whistler in 1970. He had several previous marriages. Besides his wife, he is survived by four daughters from his marriage to Donna Herring: Jennifer Boles, Tracey Murphy, Cynthia Wood and Melinda McCarthy; a son, Kevin, from his marriage to Loudell Fromme; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

In 1979, Dr. Snow helped identify many of the 33 boys and young men killed by Mr. Gacy, most of them buried in a crawl space under his suburban Chicago home. That year he also helped identify many of the 273 people killed when an American Airlines flight crashed and burned on takeoff from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, then the nation’s worst air disaster.

His career was a thread running through Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover’s book “Witnesses From the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell” (1991), a study of forensic anthropology. For decades Dr. Snow taught his skills to thousands of students, especially in nations where war crimes and human rights abuses were fast receding into the mists of history.

“Witnesses may forget throughout the years, but the dead, those skeletons, they don’t forget,” he told The Times in 2002. “Their testimony is silent, but it is also very eloquent.”

Source: NY Times

Interview about Saddam Hussein’s Trial 

[sizvideos]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson Ruins Your Zombie Fantasies Forever - Video

[alexiareed]

Heh... :p

[we-are-star-stuff]

What It Means to Live in a Holographic Universe

When you look in the mirror, the image you see looks a lot like you - not exactly the same, because when you raise your right hand, your mirror-self raises its left. What’s more, the mirror image is merely an assemblage of reflected light, without a physical body behind it. Despite these differences, you can see an important connection between you and your reflection.

This type of mirror relation is a familiar and powerful form of symmetry. We can say that a Valentine heart is symmetrical because the left side is a reflection of the right. But the symmetry of your mirror image is different and deeper. A heart is symmetrical because the left and right side happen to have a similar shape. The symmetry between you and your reflection is due to the laws of physics. The nature of light requires your reflection to be symmetrical to you. It is an example of a powerful and subtle type of symmetry known as duality.

Duality is a connection between two things where the properties of one defines the properties of the other. For example, imagine a book lying on a table, with a nail taped to its front cover, pointing up. No matter how you hold the book, the nail will point outward from its cover. If you know what direction the nail is pointing, you also know the orientation of the book. If you know the orientation of the book, you know where the nail is pointing. Thus, there is a duality between the nail and book.

So does the the nail determine the orientation of the book, or does the book determine the direction of the nail? That seems to be a nonsensical question. The duality between nail and book isn’t about one object determining the orientation of the other, but about the connection that exists between two of the nail-and-book’s fundamental properties, neither of which is caused by the other. You could say the same thing about quantum theory when someone asks if light is a particle or a wave.

The duality between particles and waves is a central part of quantum theory. Light is clearly a wave: it has a wavelength that determines its colour, and light waves can interact with each other to produce things like lasers. Light is also clearly a particle: it interacts with atoms as discrete photons; a single photon can be deflected like a billiard ball. Particle-wave duality means that quantum objects like light have a symmetry between their particle and wave aspects. They are particles with wave properties and waves with particle properties. They are both, and they are neither. The power of quantum theory is that you don’t need to distinguish between particles and waves. They are simply quantum objects with a duality between their particle and wave natures.

Perhaps the most powerful duality in physics is known as the holographic principle. This principle is often misrepresented as the idea that the universe is actually a hologram, but it is more accurate to say there is a duality between a volume of space and the surface enclosing that volume. The holographic principle states that all the information contained within a region of space can be determined by the information on the surface containing it. Mathematically, this means the volume of space can be represented as a hologram of the surface, hence the idea’s name.

This idea is less crazy than it sounds at first. Imagine a hotel with a guard at the entrance. Since everyone entering or leaving the hotel must pass the guard, he can count the number of people entering or leaving to know how many people are in the hotel. Thus information gathered by the guard (at the surface) tells us about the number within (the volume).

The holographic principle extends that idea to volumes and surfaces in general, and it applies to everything from black holes to cosmology. With a black hole, for example, we can’t observe the interior because the gravity near a black hole is too strong for light to escape. But the black hole has a “surface” known as the event horizon, and we could observe everything outside of that. So, from information near the event horizon, we can understand the interior of a black hole.

Does that mean that the universe is a hologram? Not quite. It means there is a duality: ours is a Universe with hologram properties, or a hologram with Universe properties. Within the mathematical formalism, you don’t need to distinguish between one or the other, which is what gives the holographic principle its power.

Of course we came to this idea by looking in a mirror. Does the duality between us and our reflection doesn’t mean that the image in the mirror is as real as us? In a way it does. Suppose the mirror-you were real (not just an image of you in a mirror, but a physical, mirrored version of yourself), and you merely the reflection. The meaning of left and right would be reversed, and the dials on your watch would move widdershins rather than clockwise, but the underlying physics would be the same. The duality between you and your reflection means we could just as easily describe the mirror Universe as we do our own.

[Read More →]

[alexiareed]

Interesting

[amirdrassil]

[pottsfanatic]

Raptors in a shopping mall. :) Loved this one.

[alexiareed]

One of my favourite episodes.

[bleed-out-pain]

[fer1972]

Surreal Artworks by Akexander Rommel

[from-dust-of-stars]

from-dust-of-stars: Fucking awesome surreal art! Damn

[alexiareed]

AWESOME

[drunk-on-books]

[alexiareed]

Oooh want!

[neurosciencestuff]

Forget Smart Watches, ‘Smart Skin’ May Be the Next Big Thing in Wearable Computers

Parkinson’s patients could one day ditch their pills for a stretchy skin patch with a mind of its own. Using specialized sensors, the patch would monitor the wearer’s vital signs, beam the information to a doctor, and administer medication as needed. While such devices still face substantial obstacles before wide-scale implementation, two teams of researchers have announced innovations combining standard electronics with flexible materials that may bring the futuristic concept closer to reality.

Conventional electronics, such as those found in computers and smartphones, are built on stiff slabs of silicon. While durable, the design makes for bulky and uncomfortable wearable devices. Flexible electronics instead print circuits onto limber strips of silicone or plastic. The bendable base layers make devices twist and stretch when attached to the skin, but they are limited by a lack of key components such as batteries and processors that currently do not exist in flexible form.

Researchers from Seoul National University led by bioengineer Dae-Hyeong Kim have now developed a patch that automatically delivers medication to Parkinson’s patients. Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that causes movement impairments such as hand tremors that require regular medication to suppress. Typically, patients take pills every few hours, leading to a spike in medication levels followed by a gradual decline that causes the tremors to return. The team’s skin patch instead supplies a series of smaller measured doses as needed by using a tremor-detecting sensor. Because the device needs to track the tremors over time, they utilized a newly invented memory format called resistive random-access memory to create the first flexible data storage for wearable devices. The new format can be used in a thin, low-power form, making it ideal for inclusion in wearable electronics.

Read more