scott-gotankgo:

Frank Frazetta - 1995

It always bugs me when artists put horse’s eyes on the front of the skull. This is the equivalent of putting a human’s eyes above their ears. Horses do not hunt, so they have evolved eyes on either side of their heads to detect predators, like most herbivores. Except for a very small area near their spines, horses have almost 360 degree vision. Humph.

(via isamizdat)

nomoretexasgovernorsforpresident:

Affordable Care Cat, Canadian edition.

(Corollary: You can move to England too, if you don’t like socialism. ;D )

No, in Canada we have Affordable Care Lynx (Felis lynx). Maybe that will make a difference as to whether you move or not.

(Source: affordablecarecat)

shortformblog:

Fun guy chillin’ in South American rainforest finds plastic-eating fungi

Seriously, though this is kind of a big deal. Know that big problem we have? You know, the one involving a crapload of used plastic hanging around in landfills with nowhere to biodegrade for a couple million years? Well, Jonathan Russell might’ve solved that problem. See, Russell and his fellow Yale students went to Ecuador, where they found a new kind of fungus they’re calling Pestalotiopsis microspora. Big deal, you’re thinking. Anyone can find fungus anywhere! Well, something his fellow students found out after the fact is that this fungus can live on a diet of polyurethane alone — and even crazier, it doesn’t even need air to do so! In other words, we could potentially put it at the bottom of a landfill and cover it with plastic, and it would do the rest of the work. This might be game-changing if it works as advertised. (photo via Flickr user dbutt; EDIT: Updated with link to research abstract) source

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There was an SF book I once read called Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters. It was about a bacterium, though, not a fungus. Still, it didn’t turn out well. There’s lots of stuff made out of plastic that we depend on to exist.

(Source: shortformblog, via darylelockhart)

the-star-stuff:

Everywhere in a Flash: The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis

By hitting single molecules with quadrillionth-of-a-second laser pulses, scientists have revealed the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis, the process used by plants and bacteria to capture light’s energy at efficiencies unapproached by human engineers.

The quantum wizardry appears to occur in each of a photosynthetic cell’s millions of antenna proteins. These route energy from electrons spinning in photon-sensitive molecules to nearby reaction-center proteins, which convert it to cell-driving charges.

Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in multiple places at once, and always finds the shortest path.

Image: Bùi Linh Ngân/Flickr

This all made total sense until the last sentence. 

(via darylelockhart)

alysian-fields:

Shadow People

Shadow People are specters that generally only appear at night, usually while someone is in bed.  The witness usually wakes to find themselves paralyzed while a shadowy figure moves through their room.  It’s the paralysis that makes Shadow People different than “normal” ghosts; witnesses rarely if ever can move while the ghost is in their presence.

Another identifying feature of Shadow People is also the reason for their name: they have no distinct features.  Most ghosts appear as they did in life, or perhaps as decaying forms, but Shadow People have very few defining features to identify who they might be.  It can be impossible to tell if they are male or female, and often they lack any sort of facial or physical features other than a vague humanoid outline.  In some cases the eyes of the figure are visible or possibly glowing.  Reports of Shadow People wearing old 1930s style fedoras are also common.

While Shadow People are most commonly seen in bedrooms, there also exists a subset of these ghosts that appear on the roadside.  Reports of these types of Shadow People usually involve someone driving at night or dusk.  They see what appears to be someone standing by the side of the road, possibly a hitchhiker, but as they pass instead of the figure becoming more distinct, it remains nothing but an inky outline that seems to watch them as they pass by.

Via Mask of Reason

I knew a guy who worked at the same oil technology firm  I did - At one point, as a tech on site in a far-off land, he was pulling 36 hours shifts at the well, taking data. This was all okay until one night, at o-dark-thirty, he was driving home and saw a human sized penguin in a top hat with his wing stuck out, standing by the side of the road, as if he was hitchhiking. The guy slowed to a stop, rolled down the passenger’s side window, and planned to address the penguin and give him a ride.

He was stopped by one of his coworkers, who was sleeping in the passenger’s seat, at least until the window opened. Then he looked out at the empty roadside, then back at my coworker, and asked “What the fuck are you doing?” The driver obviously did not want to explain, and so he ceded the wheel to his more rested companion. 

In the telling of this story to me, the guy said, that until the passenger raised the question, the penguin in the top hat was as real as I was in front of his desk, listening to this tale. Only the passenger’s question broke the spell.

The mind is a very, very complex thing. And when it malfunctions, lots of impossibilities can surface rather quickly.

(via thren0dies)

psydoctor8:

New chemical reagent turns biological tissue transparent.

As someone who worked with fluorescence labeling & microscopy using immunohistology, this groundbreaking reagent seems promising. The resulting 3D images provide a deeper understanding of spacial depth and detail as well as better sub-cellular resolution, it seems pretty fantastic. These scientists use mouse brains, which we didn’t, but I wish we had this when I was doing that. 

So, what’s the benefit? ABOVE: A 3D shot of the hippocampal neurons from the Dentate gyrus to the surface. And a little more exciting to me, since I compared left Dentate gyrus to right. BELOW we have something that can show the whole enchilada all at once in 3D. Amazing, just look at that detail. The Japanese scientists have plans to use this technique on other organs as well in living tissue.

Images and article via. H/T@TheNeuroScience

Yes, Virginia, there is a soundtrack for that:

psydoctor8:

Why time is fly. “It’s up to your brain how long a moment lasts”.

The experience of time is not linear. Fear and joy stretches time as do stimuli that move towards us.  (…) When we experience something as “taking a long time” it is really the result of three inter-twined processes: the actual duration of the event, how we feel about the event, and whether we think the event is approaching us.     Via  Abstract.

In addition, here are just a couple more ways to look at this: these guys came  up with a new hypothesis, that the “experience of duration is a signature of the amount of energy expended in representing a stimulus, i.e. the coding efficiency”. Something other researchers talk about is the odd ball effect: which is when a “unique stimulus is embedded in a train of repeated standard stimuli, its duration can seem relatively exaggerated”, but newer studies show the relationship is all about predictive coding meaning a “representation of the environment requires that brain actively predicts what its sensory input will be, rather than just passively registering it”.  So what? Who cares?  Well, abnormal time encoding is theorized to be linked to psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, depression and anxiety. So there’s that to think about.

There’s a ton of literature stretching at least back to the 50’s about the mystery of neural networks and time encoding. At the end of the day:  ”What we perceive as the external reality is in fact the organization and interpretation of this sensory data and is one of the fundamental aspects of consciousness. Thus, it seems that time is a creation of consciousness”  and the more we learn about one, the other may follow.      Via Image 1,2

Does this post need a soundtrack? What’s that you say? Exactly. I’ve got just the thing right here, preserved in Rock from the age when Hendrixsaurus ruled the world: