14 abril 2015
Celebs That Made Holocaust-related Blunders
Celebs That Made Holocaust-related Blunders: suggitup: kanyewildwestern: I knew Justin Bieber...
7 Craziest Addictions from My Strange Addiction
7 Craziest Addictions from My Strange Addiction: minanobody: kanyewildwestern: THE MATTRESS-EATING...
Things That Secretly Turn Men Off
Things That Secretly Turn Men Off: princess-kitten-cumslut: kanyewildwestern: me reading this...
Knuckle Tattoos Gone Terribly Wrong
Knuckle Tattoos Gone Terribly Wrong: kitten-indeed: kanyewildwestern: smh at that last one The...
webofgoodnews: 10-year-old girl saves man by giving CPR she...
10-year-old girl saves man by giving CPR she had just learned how to do
A story about a 10-year-old girl in Seoul has gone viral after she saved a man’s life by giving him cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which she had learned only three hours earlier.
On Monday, Gangseo Fire Station in southwestern Seoul awarded Lee Soo-bin for her bravery last Thursday when she saved the unconscious man in his 50s after he suffered a heart attack at an apartment complex in the district.
The man was taken to a nearby hospital by the emergency crew, but was able to return home the day after.
Things That Secretly Turn Men Off
Things That Secretly Turn Men Off: kanyewildwestern: me reading this entire list:like we exist for...
good-news-network: Village in India Plants 111 Trees Whenever a...
Village in India Plants 111 Trees Whenever a Girl is Born
Typically in Asian cultures, the birth of a girl is considered an unfortunate responsibility because of the dowry system that puts financial stress on the parents’ future. For this reason, daughters were never as celebrated as sons.
But in one village in India, the residents celebrate the birth with a unique ritual of planting one hundred and eleven fruit trees.
7 Craziest Addictions from My Strange Addiction
7 Craziest Addictions from My Strange Addiction: kanyewildwestern: THE MATTRESS-EATING LADY...
Celebs That Made Holocaust-related Blunders
Celebs That Made Holocaust-related Blunders: kanyewildwestern: I knew Justin Bieber would be on...
"The courts have been crystal clear on this matter. You have a right, under the First Amendment of..."
“The courts have been crystal clear on this matter. You have a right, under the First...
Knuckle Tattoos Gone Terribly Wrong
Knuckle Tattoos Gone Terribly Wrong: kanyewildwestern: smh at that last one
Why does Hodor in Game of Thrones only say one word?...
Why does Hodor in Game of Thrones only say one word? Neuroscience explains
Hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor? Hodor. Hodor-hodor. Hodor!
Oh, um, excuse me. Did you catch what I said?
Fans of the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, the fifth season of which premiered last Sunday, know the reference, anyway. Hodor is the brawny, simple-minded stableboy of the Stark family in Winterfell. His defining characteristic, of course, is that he only speaks a single word: “Hodor.”
But those who read the A Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R R Martin may know something that the TV fans don’t: his name isn’t actually Hodor. According to his great-grandmother Old Nan, his real name is Walder. “No one knew where ‘Hodor’ had come from,” she says, “but when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the only word he had.”
Whether he intended it or not, Martin created a character who is a textbook example of someone with a neurological condition called expressive aphasia .
Losing speech ability
In 1861, French physician Paul Broca was introduced to a man named Louis-Victor Leborgne. While his comprehension and mental functioning remained relatively normal, Leborgne progressively lost the ability to produce meaningful speech over a period of 20 years. Like Hodor, the man was nicknamed Tan because he only spoke a single word: “Tan.”
Just a few days after meeting Broca, Leborgne passed away. Broca’s autopsy determined tissue damage, or a “lesion”, in the frontal lobe of Leborgne’s left brain hemisphere, just next to a brain fold called the lateral sulcus. Over the next two years, Broca acquired brains from 12 more patients with Leborgne’s symptoms – all of the autopsy evidence was strikingly consistent.
Neuroscientists are still examining this small region of the brain, now often referred to as “Broca’s area” to work out its many functions. While most research has focused on a patient’s inability to form syntactically complex sentences when this area is damaged, more recent work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has also reported that Broca’s area is active during language comprehension tasks, interpretation of movement, and comprehending various gestures also associated with speech, such as waving goodbye.
Telegraphic speech and brain damage
In collaboration with French scientists in 2007, a group at the University of California revisited the brains of Leborgne and Lelong (another of Broca’s patients who could only speak five words) using magnetic resonance imaging. One of their most interesting findings was that their lesions extended much deeper than Broca had reported, suggesting that multiple brain regions were probably contributing to their speech deficits.
This evidence of widespread damage is unsurprising. Leborgne, Lelong – and even Hodor – are actually more extreme examples of individuals with expressive aphasia. More commonly, a person with the disorder will express themselves in “telegraphic speech”, which usually comprises three or so words, including a noun and a verb. For example, someone may say, “Anne, dog, walk” to mean “I walked the dog with Anne today.”
The most common cause of expressive aphasia is stroke, which occurs when a blood clot blocks a vessel in the brain, resulting in tissue damage due to lack of oxygen. It’s estimated that expressive aphasia occurs in 12% of stroke patients, while roughly 35% of stroke patients suffer from a language aphasia of some form.
Expressive aphasia can also be caused by a tumour, haemorrhage, a haematoma in the membrane covering of the brain, or trauma to the head. It has been reported that Leborgne suffered from epileptic seizures as a child – some have speculated that he may have experienced head trauma during one such episode.
So what’s Hodor’s story? Did he sustain a blow to the head, suffer a stroke, or was he simply a giant baby dropped by his mother?
He may only speak one word, but like the other characters in the show, Hodor too may have a quite an interesting backstory.
A dark night is good for your health Today most people do not...
A dark night is good for your health
Today most people do not get enough sleep. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has called insufficient sleep an epidemic. While we are finally paying attention to the importance of sleep, the need for dark is still mostly ignored.
That’s right. Dark. Your body needs it too.
Being exposed to regular patterns of light and dark regulates our circadian rhythm. Disruption of this rhythm may increase the risk of developing some health conditions including obesity, diabetes and breast cancer
Light regulates our sleep and wake patterns
The physiological processes that control the daily cycle of sleep and wake, hunger, activity levels, body temperature, melatonin level in the blood, and many other physiological traits are called the endogenous circadian rhythm.
On its own, the endogenous circadian rhythm is nearly, but not exactly, 24 hours. Our bodies rely on the Sun to reset this cycle and keep it at precisely 24 hours, the length of our days. The light – and the dark – are important signals for the cycle. This circadian rhythm has developed over three billion years as life evolved on Earth in the context of the Sun’s day/night cycle. It is built deeply into our genetic makeup.
During the night, in the dark, body temperature drops, metabolism slows, and the hormone melatonin rises dramatically. When the Sun comes up in the morning, melatonin has already started falling, and you wake up. This natural physiological transition into and out of night is of ancient origin, and melatonin is crucial for the process to proceed as it should.
If you were to put someone in a dark cave with no time cues at all, the cycle will last about 24 hours, but not exactly. Without time cues like those from the Sun, eventually that person would become out of sync with people outside. In fact many profoundly blind people, who cannot perceive light, must cope with this de-synchronization in their daily lives.
What does your body do in the dark?
Many things happen to our bodies during the dark. Levels of the hormone leptin, which helps control hunger, go up. High levels of leptin mean we do not feel hungry while low levels make us hungry.
Why does leptin go up in the dark? Since we evolved without artificial light at night, one theory holds that leptin goes up at night because it would be good to not be hungry during the night, rather than needing to forage in the dark and possibly get into trouble.
This fasting that should happen every night, and why we call the first meal in the morning “breakfast.” Experiments in human beings have shown that sleep disruption and turning on lights lowers leptin levels which makes people hungry in the middle of the night.
In the last decade or two it has become clear that the genes which control the endogenous circadian rhythm (the “clock genes”) also control a large part of our entire genome including genes for metabolism (how we process the food we eat), DNA damage response (how we are protected from toxic chemicals and radiation), and cell cycle regulation and hormone production (how our cells and tissues grow).
Light at night disrupts these processes. The changes that result from exposure to electric light at night have biological connections to disease and conditions that are common in the modern world today including obesity, diabetes, cancer and depression.
Blue light, red light, no light
Not all light is the same – some kinds of light make you more alert and more awake, and others have less of an effect.
Light from the Sun is strong in blue, short wavelength light, although it includes all other colors as well. That’s important in the morning when we need to be alert and awake. But when it comes in the evening or during the night, it fools the body into thinking it’s daytime. We now know that this bright blue light has the strongest effect on lowering melatonin during the night.
Your tablet, phone, computer or compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) all emit this kind of blue light. So using these devices in the evening can prevent that primordial physiological transition to night from occurring. This makes it harder to sleep and might also increase the longer term risk of ill-health.
Other kinds of light, like dimmer long wavelength yellow and red light, have very little effect on this transition. This is the kind of light from a campfire or a candle; even the old fashioned incandescent light bulb is dimmer and redder than the new CFL.
Only in the last 20 years have we acquired a basic biological understanding of how the eye’s retina tells the circadian system it is daytime. Now we know that blue, short wave-length light is captured by the newly discovered photopigment melanopsin in the retina, and that when blue light stops, we start our physiological transition to nighttime mode.
Electricity changed the way we sleep
Before electricity, people experienced bright, full-spectrum days of sunlight and dark nights. We slept in a different way than we do now. The dark lasted about twelve hours and during this time people slept for eight or nine hours in two separate bouts, and were awake, but in the dark, for another three or four hours.
Everything changed when electric lighting was invented in the latter part of the 19th century. Since then there has been an ever increasing assault on dark. Outdoor environments are relentlessly lit, and more and more people use computer tablets and smart phones at all hours, bathing their faces in bright blue light at times of day when they should be transitioning to nighttime physiology.
When people get away from the city and its artificial light to go camping, they often notice a marked improvement in their sleep. A recent study has verified this effect.
Today, most of us get too little light during the day and too much at night for our circadian rhythm to function at its best. It is the rare person who sleeps in a completely dark bedroom, and many people get very little sunlight because they work inside all day long.
What can you do for your circadian health? Get bright, blue light in the morning (preferably from the Sun), and use dim, longer wavelength light (more yellow and red like incandescent) in the evening. And sleep in the dark.
This will certainly improve sleep, and may reduce risk of later disease.
whyshoulddothing: If you don’t follow ListHacks.tumblr.comYOURFUCKINGLOSS
whyshoulddothing: If you don’t follow ListHacks.tumblr.comYOURFUCKINGLOSS
SpaceX Launches NASA Cargo and Research To International Space Station
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying the Dragon resupply spacecraft on the sixth commercial resupply services mission to the International Space Station. Liftoff was at 4:10 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, April 14. Research that will help prepare NASA astronauts and robotic explorers for future missions to Mars is among the two tons of cargo on its way to the International Space Station aboard Dragon. The mission is the company's sixth cargo delivery flight to the station through NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract. Dragon's cargo will support approximately 40 of the more than 250 science and research investigations that will be performed during Expeditions 43 and 44, including numerous human research investigations for NASA astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission in space. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
from NASA http://ift.tt/1PJqGyI
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Are you African American? This is not a racist question but the simple fact is that if you are African American, you will have a bias. All facts you post are only facts that help your side. You pretend to present all the facts yet you conveniently leave out others. Please stick to posting little facts of cats, change your name, or report ALL facts and present an argument for both sides. These topics are controversial for a reason so report facts that come from both sides please.
I am white. I’ll post what I want on MY blog. You don’t even have an icon or any posts. Clearly just...
Well of course people are gonna unfollow. I'm sure the majority of us want to see cool little facts, not controversial topics.
Controversial topics? They’re facts too. Facts people need to see! Sorry but my blog isn’t...
freedom-rayne-of-terror: listhacks: A+ Studying Life Hacks -...
Cadáveres de pedra
Nascido a 13 de Junho de 1793, Girolamo Segato foi um cartógrafo, anatomista e naturalista italiano. Ele ficou conhecido pelo seu trabalho, através de experiências, na petrificação de cadáveres humanos.
De 1818 para a frente, Girolamo participou em várias expedições no Egipto e tornou-se num especialista em técnicas de mumificação. Até ao seu regresso a Florença, apenas em 1823, Girolamo estudou e conseguiu desenvolver uma técnica semelhante ao processo de mumificação, mas com uma exclusividade: para além de poder remover a água dos corpos, o método de Girolamo consistia em tornar um corpo em pedra.
Rapidamente surgiram boatos que alegavam que Girolamo era um feiticeiro que tinha aprendido a manejar a magia egípcia. Estorvado pela mentalidade antiquada da sociedade da época, Girolamo foi forçado a destruir todas as suas anotações e estudos. Ele levou o seu segredo para o túmulo e embora muitos estudiosos tivessem tentado copiá-lo, nunca ninguém conseguiu desvendar o mistério. Diz-se também que após a sua morte, o seu amigo Pellegrini iria divulgar a técnica de Girolamo, mas ele acabou por morrer antes de poder transmitir qualquer coisa.
Girolamo faleceu a 3 de Fevereiro de 1836 e encontra-se sepultado na Basílica da Santa Cruz, em Florença. Alguns dos pedaços de corpo humano petrificados por ele estão no Museu do Departamento de Anatomia de Florença.
Adaptado de: wikipédia
via @notiun
"It has been said, not truly, but with a possible approximation to truth, that in 1802 every..."
“It has been said, not truly, but with a possible approximation to truth, that in 1802 every hereditary monarch was insane.”
- Walter Bagehot. In 1802, the English king was mad, the Danish king had definitive mental health problems, Napoleon was consul (take that as you will), and the Queen of Portugal was insane. Ironically, around the world, no heads of state outside of Europe were insane in 1802.
- Walter Bagehot. In 1802, the English king was mad, the Danish king had definitive mental health problems, Napoleon was consul (take that as you will), and the Queen of Portugal was insane. Ironically, around the world, no heads of state outside of Europe were insane in 1802.
sciencenetlinks: Turn out your lights to view the night sky...
Turn out your lights to view the night sky during International Dark Sky Week, which runs April 13-19. This annual weeklong event, created by a high school student, was created to call attention to the negative impact of light pollution on night sky viewing. Click to learn more.
stopwhitepeopleforever: White people will go back nearly 30...
White people will go back nearly 30 years to try and criminalize a man who was shot 8 times in the back while UNARMED. I’m tired.
kateoplis: “I won’t deny that I knew the magnitude of this, and...
“I won’t deny that I knew the magnitude of this, and I even thought about erasing the video. I felt that my life, with this information, might be in danger. I thought about erasing the video and just getting out of the community, you know Charleston, and living some place else.”
“I recorded the video so that maybe he can feel that someone is there. There were just the three of us in that moment. I couldn’t tell what was going to happen, so I just wanted him to know that he’s not by himself.”
23-year-old Dominican immigrant, Feidin Santana, Who Recorded the Walter Scott Shooting: “I’m Still Scared.”
Black People Murdered by Police (2015 and 2014)
pantherthepoet: I am sure there are SEVERAL names missing from the list but, here are the names of...
Get over yourselves. Black and white people are killed all the time. it's time to admit it and not try to stir up hate based on some graph showing only 6 months of numbers. What's this really about? Slavery? Inequality? I never had a slave or BET
Are you blind to the numbers? Blacks are killed disproportionately more than whites. I’m not...
Your graph below the"police violence is increasing" shows from Sept '14 to current (~6months). Which showing a sharp drop Sept '14 to Oct '14. Even with a "71%increase.. previous month" it's still less than sept 2014. Overall its down. Scare tactics
Scare tactics? Overall its down? THE GRAPH INDICATES IT’S UP can you read? I am genuinely asking. I...
Why Does Scratching an Itch Make It Itchier? To scratch an...
Why Does Scratching an Itch Make It Itchier?
To scratch an itch is to scratch many itches: placing nails to skin brings sweet yet short-lived relief because it often instigates another bout of itchiness. The unexpected culprit behind this vicious cycle, new research reveals, is serotonin, the so-called happiness hormone.
Scientists thought itch was merely a mild form of pain until 2009, when Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues at the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University in St. Louis discovered itch-specific neurons in mice. Though not identical, itch and pain are closely related; they share the same pathways in certain brain areas. Because of the doubling up, activating one suppresses the other, which is why scratching blocks the itch sensation momentarily. The act, however, also triggers the release of the chemical serotonin, which helps to alleviate pain. It is that burst that makes scratching feel good, but recent work by Chen’s group showed that it exacerbates the itch-scratch cycle, too.
Itch-sensing neurons have a set of receptors that facilitates pain relief and another that induces itch. Serotonin can bind only to the pain-related receptor, but because the two sets sit close to each other and physically interact, the chemical’s arrival indirectly enhances the itch pathway. When Chen and his colleagues activated both receptors simultaneously in mice, the rodents scratched much more than if the itch-inducing receptor was turned on alone. In another experiment, mice lacking the cells that produce serotonin scratched less than normal mice when exposed to a skin irritant. The findings were published in the journal Neuron.
Scientists have yet to locate itch-specific neurons in humans (macaques have them). For now it is safe to say: think twice before you twitch to the itch.
April 14th 1759: Handel diesOn this day in 1759, the German...
George Frederic Handel (1685 - 1759)
The monument to Handel in Westminster Abbey
April 14th 1759: Handel dies
On this day in 1759, the German composer George Frederic Handel died aged 74. Famous for his Baroque pieces, Handel was born in Germany in 1685 but moved to Britain later in life. He gained a reputation there for his Italian operas, and some of his works were performed for Queen Anne and her successors on the British throne. Handel enjoyed royal patronage, and his music is regularly played at royal coronations even to this day. However, he is perhaps best known for his biblical choral masterpiece: Messiah. Handel died in 1759, and was honoured with a state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey. Alongside his grave is a monument, sculpted by Louis Francois Roubiliac, which was unveiled in 1762 and features a statue of Handel which supposedly has the exact likeness of his death mask.
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