01 maio 2015

MESSENGER's Last Day on Mercury


The first to orbit Mercury, the MESSENGER spacecraft came to rest on this region of Mercury's surface yesterday. Constructed from MESSENGER image and laser altimeter data, the scene looks north over the northeastern rim of the broad, lava filled Shakespeare basin. The large, 48 kilometer (30 mile) wide crater Janacek is near the upper left edge. Terrain height is color coded with red regions about 3 kilometers above blue ones. MESSENGER'S final orbit was predicted to end near the center, with the spacecraft impacting the surface at nearly 4 kilometers per second (over 8,700 miles per hour) and creating a new crater about 16 meters (52 feet) in diameter. The impact on the far side of Mercury was not observed by telescopes, but confirmed when no signal was detected from the spacecraft given time to emerge from behind the planet. Launched in 2004, the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemisty and Ranging spacecraft completed over 4,000 orbits after reaching the Solar System's innermost planet in 2011.

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Thank You

Thank you all for flooding my inbox with the positive feedback about this blog. You all are amazing. 

- Neuromorphogenesis

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mercury & solar corona, photographed by stereo b, march...



mercury & solar corona, photographed by stereo b, march 2013.

mercury, the bright dot moving right-to-left, is on the far side of the sun from stereo b. earth would be out of frame right. 

63 images, 17th-20th march.

image credit: nasa/stereo. animation: ageofdestruction.

age
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Mapa de tesouro e mão encontrados num sótão + Ritual da Mão da Glória


A família de Mike Lopez chegou à conclusão de que fazer uma limpeza na casa pode ser algo mais interessante do que aparenta, após ter encontrado um baú com seis moedas, um mapa e uma mão humana no sótão da casa dos seus avós. Os avós de Mike vivem na Flórida e após a família ter apanhado o susto de ver uma mão humana dentro da caixa, decidiu enviar todos os objetos para um curador de um museu.

Rodney Kite-Powell, que trabalha no Centro Histórico de Tampa Bay, declarou que a mão humana era verdadeira e que o mapa datava as décadas de 1920/30. Já as moedas, eram demasiado finas para serem autênticas.

Segundo Lopez, esses artefatos foram encontrados pela sua irmã, numa caixa, que tinha ainda uma fotografia do casamento dos seus bisavós.
De acordo com o dono da casa, no mapa estava escrita a palavra ''Gaspar'', o que poderia ser uma referência à lenda do pirata José Gaspar, que surgiu na Flórida, no século XVIII.

Quando esta notícia se tornou famosa, muitos começaram a dizer que a mão poderia ser uma Mão da Glória. Este artigo é usado como um instrumento de rituais de necromancia, que, segundo consta, é capaz de imobilizar uma pessoa quando vê a Mão.
É uma mão mumificada usada pelos necromantes para impedir que os residentes de uma casa se possam mover ou então, que adormeçam, de modo a que o necromante possa fazer o que lhe apetecer com a casa. Foi originalmente desenvolvida por assaltantes que assumiam o controlo das Artes Negras e era usada tanto para atacar pessoas comuns e também outros feiticeiros.


Para elaborar um ritual de Mão da Glória, o material seguinte será necessário:

-A mão esquerda ou direita de um criminoso condenado e já morto (de preferência enforcado num patíbulo à beira de uma estrada);
-Um pedaço de mortalha;
-Um vaso de barro;
-Verdete;
-Nitrato;
-Sal;
-Pimentas compridas;
-Gordura do enforcado;
-Cera virgem;
-Gergelim;
-Gordura do criminoso;
-Esterco de cavalo.

Após a mão do criminoso ter sido cortada, ela deve ser embrulhada numa mortalha. Vale acrescentar que a mão não pode ter muito sangue a escorrer dela. Depois, a mão terá de ser colocada num vaso de barro com nitrato, sal, verdete e pimentas (tudo isto esmagado). A mão permanecerá assim durante 15 dias e depois deve ser retirada do vaso e exposta ao sol até ficar totalmente seca e se a energia solar não for suficiente, pode ser colocada num forno, junto com folhas de feto e verbeno.
A vela é produzida através da gordura do criminoso, cera virgem, gergelim e esterco de cavalo. A mão deve ser usada como um candelabro para a vela, sendo que esta tem de estar colocada entre os dedos médio e anelar.

Outro método é usar usar a gordura, cera, gergelim e o esterco para cobrir os cinco dedos e fazer velas para cada um deles. Assim, a Mão poderá também enfeitiçar outros magos.

Depois, só será necessário entrar numa casa e dizer a frase ''Deixe que todos os que estão a dormir continuem a dormir e os que estão acordados continuem acordados". A partir daí, todos os residentes entrarão num sono profundo e geralmente, outros magos não são afetados, nem mesmo as pessoas que eles enfeitiçaram, como ''método de auto-defesa''. Para cada entidade não adormecida, uma das velas se apagará, servindo como uma advertência.

A única pessoa que pode apagar as velas (daí, apagando o feitiço), é o próprio necromante. A não ser que a Mão seja embebedada com leite por uma pessoa qualquer, não será possível terminar o feitiço através de ''fatores externos''.

via @notiun

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Built some 2500 years ago by King Darius the Great, Persepolis...



Built some 2500 years ago by King Darius the Great, Persepolis was known as “the richest city under the sun” and the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. It stretched all the way from the borders of present day India to Greece, Egypt and Russia. Regarded as “the King of Kings,” Darius the Great ruled over 28 other kingdoms within his realm. Him and his successors were surprisingly tolerant for the times, too. Within the empire, any religion was allowed and women had much more rights than in contemporary states. The city of Persepolis currently lies in ruins, pillaged and burnt down by Alexander the Great in 330 BC, but back in its heyday this metropolis was like no other

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How Einstein’s Brain Ended Up at the Mütter Museum in...







How Einstein’s Brain Ended Up at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia

In the early morning hours of April 18, 1955, Albert Einstein died at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on duty that night, performed the autopsy and determined that the professor had died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. What he did next has been the subject of great controversy over the last half-century—quite simply, Harvey took Einstein’s brain without permission, which some would call “stealing.” 

Sixty years later, the only permanent place to see pieces of the brain that changed the world is at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. One of America’s most interesting medical museums, the Mütter contains a tremendous assemblage of anatomical specimens, instruments and medical models. Chang and Eng (the original “Siamese Twins”), the Hyrtl skull collection and the Soap Lady are among the most distinctive exhibits, alongside pieces of Einstein’s brain. The genesis of the museum dates to 1858, when a revolutionary 19th-century American plastic surgeon donated 1,700 medical objects to Philadelphia’s College of Physicians in hopes of improving medical education across the country. Thomas Dent Mütter’s stipulations were that the college must also hire a curator, increase the collection, hold annual lectures and build a fireproof building. Today, the Mütter Museum is one of Philadelphia’s more popular tourist attractions.

“People come to our museum because we as humans are fascinated with how we work … it is our nature as human beings to be curious about that which is extraordinary,” says Anna Dhody, the curator of the museum and director of the Mütter Institute.

It’s hard to say what Einstein would have thought about his brain’s ultimate destination: He was rather direct about what he wanted to happen to his body after he died. “I want to be cremated so people don’t come worship at my bones,” he told his biographer Abraham Pais. That is exactly what happened less than 24 hours after his death—in a secret ceremony, family and close friends scattered Einstein’s ashes along the Delaware River. But those ashes did not include his brain or his eyes (which are now rumored to be in a safe deposit box in New York or New Jersey).

In Harvey’s defense, what he did wasn’t particularly unusual at the time. As pointed out in Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses ​(by Smithsonian.com contributing writer and editor Bess Lovejoy), hospitals in those days often took organs they deemed relevant or interesting for study. While Harvey didn’t have permission for his extraction, he was later able get the okay from Hans Albert Einstein, the professor’s oldest son, for keeping the brain, so long as he used it only for scientific study.

Soon after the autopsy, Harvey took Einstein’s brain to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to be dissected into hundreds of blocks and thousands of slides. While he kept some of the brain for himself, he also eventually sent slides to prominent neuropathologists around the county in hopes that they could help him unlock the secrets of Einstein’s brain and what made it work so well. However, due to various delays, it took decades for studies to appear. In 1985, a study by UCLA neuroscientist Marian Diamond showed that Einstein’s brain might have more glial cells (which surround and support neurons) than normal brains, although other researchers have argued that her findings should be regarded as inconclusive, and scientists have treated later studies of the famous brain with skepticism. As Dhody explains, studying dead brains can be tricky: “There’s a night-and-day difference between a living brain and a dead brain … A living brain has infinite amounts of things you can study and learn. It is pretty finite in what you can learn from a dead brain.

“In November 2011, the Mütter Museum received a call from Lucy Rorke-Adams with an offer of one of Harvey’s boxes of slides. “Dr. Rourke-Adams received the box of slides from another neuropathologist, who got it from a neuropathologist, who got it from Harvey,” Dhody explains. Due to the excitement over the donated specimens, the Mütter Museum was asked to get a working exhibit up in a matter of days. The slides have been on display ever since, and form the only permanent exhibit of Einstein’s brain in the world. (The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, received a box of slides too, but only puts them on display occasionally.)

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vox: Many of us are going gluten-free without any scientific...



vox:

Many of us are going gluten-free without any scientific reason for doing so, and gluten is being blamed for a plethora of pathologies, including dementia, depression, obesity, autism, and ADHD. Some people also insist that abstaining from gluten can actually help with weight loss — a major reason acolytes avoid grains in their diets. Science, as you might expect, suggests the relationship between gluten and health is much more complicated than that.

Here are 8 facts to counter the madness.

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Ten-Engine Electric Plane Prototype Takes Off


A team at NASA's Langley Research Center is developing a concept of a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. The prototype, called Greased Lightning or GL-10, is currently in the design and testing phase.

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The first documented cases of cancer were found on papyrus manuscripts in Egypt dating to around...

The first documented cases of cancer were found on papyrus manuscripts in Egypt dating to around 3000 BCE. This particular papyrus is a copy of part of an ancient Egyptian textbook on trauma surgery. It lists eight cases of breast tumors or ulcers, and that they attempted to remove the cancer by cauterization with a tool called the fire drill. The writing says about the disease, “There is no treatment.”

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npr: If you can live stream movies, why not live stream medical...



npr:

If you can live stream movies, why not live stream medical care?

Insurance company UnitedHealthcare will start covering visits to the doctor’s office — via video chat. Patients and physicians talk live online — on smartphones, tablets or home computer — to get to a clinical diagnosis. This move to cybermedicine could save insurers a ton of money — or have unintended consequences.

The Doctor Will Video Chat With You Now: Insurer Covers Virtual Visits

Photo Credit: Doctor On Demand

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May 1st 1776: Illuminati foundedOn this day in 1776, the famous...


Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830)


1776 Illuminati pamphlet - featuring the Owl of Minerva at the bottom

May 1st 1776: Illuminati founded

On this day in 1776, the famous secret society - the Illuminati - was founded in Bavaria. Established by Adam Weishaupt, the German philosopher and professor at University of Ingolstadt, the exact purpose of the semi-masonic society is unknown. The group was made up of Enlightenment thinkers, and some sources claim the order wanted to promote equality, while others suggest it was intended to combat religious zeal and promote rational argument. Weishaupt founded the Illuminatenorden, or Order of Illuminati, in 1776, and the group adopted the Owl of Minerva as their symbol. Members claimed aliases, with Weishaupt as ‘Brother Spartacus’, and others took similarly classical inspired names. Critics at the time charged that the Illuminati was created to infiltrate European governments, with some even claiming the order was behind the French Revolution. The society grew in size and influence, before being banned as seditious in 1784, with Weishaupt forced to leave his job and flee Bavaria. While it is widely acknowledged that the Illuminati never truly reformed, the society is a staple of conspiracy theories to this day, and is often implicated as being a shadowy organisation manipulating world affairs.

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