{ASDKJHADSFKJDSHFquestionmark. Also, broccoli.}

thedailywhat:

Case For Sunscreen of the Day: This man is 69 years old.

He drove a truck for 28 years.

The premature aging from sun damage to the left side of his face is extensive enough to warrant a feature in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Trucker or not, don’t forget your sunscreen.

[gizmodo]

I’m always paranoid about getting a tan on half my face when I drive but it never passed my mind to consider the other effects of prolonged sun-light exposure.

June 02, 2012, 1:16pm

jtotheizzoe:

Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

The world is just freaking amazing. Imagine being trapped in a body with barely functioning motor control for 15 years. This woman has lived that life, after having a stroke.

Thanks to Leigh Hochberg’s team at Brown University, a tiny chip implanted in her brain now lets her control a robotic arm. It’s called BrainGate2. She can reach out, grab, and manipulate objects with no more effort than her thoughts. The same effort that each of us make when we move our own arms.

This is such a heartwarming example of dedicated, hardcore scientific research affecting lives for the better. Just look at her face as she sips from the thermos (it’s at about 1:55, and you might get some dust in your eye).

Sure, space is an amazing frontier for inspiration. But if that doesn’t work out, we’ve got a whole lot of lives to change down here. And science is getting a great start.

Previously: A paralyzed man controls a prosthetic arm with his mind, high fives his girlfriend for the first time in years. (Additional face-water warning)

(via Wired Science)

Yep, dust in my eye.

May 26, 2012, 12:22pm

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Tethered Up

Each cell in our body is encompassed by a lipid-filled “sandwich sac”, or membrane. These bilayered fatty sacs take on a variety of different forms when our cells move or change shape. Finger-like projections from their surface (tethers) help transport nutrients and ‘talk’ to neighbouring cells. Tethers can take up any slack when new lipids are made or if the cell shrinks. Despite their importance, little is known about their molecular structure. So researchers are generating computer models of lab-made lipid bilayers to simulate tether formation. Applying forces from different angles, they can watch the membrane as it stretches and deforms into a tether (as the image shows).

May 24, 2012, 9:12pm

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

We’ve seen the effects of vibration on shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluids here on Earth before in the form of “oobleck fingers” and “cornstarch monsters”, but, to my knowledge, this is the first such video looking at the behavior in space.  The vibrations of the speaker cause shear forces on the cornstarch mixture, which causes the viscosity of the fluid to increase. This is what makes it react like a solid to sudden impacts while still flowing like a liquid when left unperturbed. In microgravity there is one less force working against the rise of the cornstarch fingers, so the formations we see in this video are subtly different from those on Earth.

(Source: physicscentral.com)

May 24, 2012, 9:07pm

massivesalmon:

thenewenlightenmentage:

Like attracts like?

Everything you thought you knew about electrostatics is probably wrong.

Make two metal spheres positively electrically charged, bring them close together, and what happens? They’ll repel one another, because like charges repel – right?

Wrong. According to physicist John Lekner at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, they will most probably attract one another, violating the intuitions of basic physics. The counterintuitive result was published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A¹.

Continue Reading

Science! In New Zealand!

Read the full article!

May 24, 2012, 7:29pm

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

Development of the Human Embryonic Brain from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

We were shown this video in class as part of a lecture on the biology of learning and memory. No matter how you look at it, it is impressive how much the brain grows in size, swelling with newly formed neurones who spread their fingerlike synapses impulsively through the far corners of the neurological system.

(Source: hhmi.org)

May 22, 2012, 12:30pm

so-is-a-bee:

Because someone has to do it.

One of the things that has been bothering me lately is when I look for images of these particular wild cats: the cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus), the leopard (Panthera Pardus), and the jaguar (Panthera Onca); whenever I look for cheetahs or cheetah patterns, I see a lot of leopard and jaguar pelt patterns; it seems like people are confused about which cat is which.

First, let’s examine the pelts:

Cheetah: Evenly distributed spots.

Leopard: Has spots called rosettes, they are close together and pretty small.

Jaguar: Also has rosettes, but the rosettes are much bigger and blotchier with a spot in the center.

Also, the body structures of these cats are not the same:

Cheetahs are slender cats with small heads, small muzzle [they are more related to house cats than they are the genus Panthera (lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars).], a deep chest, and long legs; leopards are more muscular and have a large head with a long muzzle; jaguars have a similar build as a leopard, but a jaguar’s head is much bigger and the jaguar is more stocky than the leopard.

Sorry for the crappy drawing and if the colors are off; I just made this up on a whim.

Edumacation for the day.

May 21, 2012, 9:12pm