Twoclaw Shrimp by swdirector This shrimp was hanging out about a foot inside of a tube sponge.
XKCD’s excellent presentation on historical global temperature and anthropogenic global warming.
[After setting your car on fire] “Listen, your car’s temperature has changed before.”
(Source: xkcd.com, via sagansense)
(Source: megabluethunder, via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
House Science Committee cites Breitbart in climate change tweet
Those concerned about President-elect Donald Trump’s position on climate change will probably be distressed by a recent tweet from the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. The Committee, which is part of the United States House of Representatives, cited a story from right-wing site Breitbart News on Thursday, whose headline read: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” Read more
follow @the-future-now
(Source: mic.com, via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)
(Source: zavone, via fandomsandfeminism)
Stygiomedusa gigantea is a species of giant deep sea jellyfish. With only 115 sightings in the last 110 years it is a jellyfish that is rarely seen, but believed to be widespread throughout the world. It is thought to be one of the largest invertebrate predators in the deep sea ecosystem.
(via generic-franchise)
Watch: Bernie Sanders explains who this election is really about. It isn’t Clinton or Trump.
Listen to Bernie. Go and vote.
(Source: mic.com, via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)
Don’t guess on election day. This site is your guide to the other 40,000 people running for office →
After a presidential campaign that has seemed interminable, voters in the United States are tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But Aviva Rosman, COO of BallotReady, an online voter guide, estimates that there are about 40,000 other candidates running for local political office on Nov. 8. They include people running for offices like city council, sheriff, school board member, county water board member, county coroner, tax collector and justice of the peace. And, Rosman says, voters tend to be much less informed about these lower-profile down-ballot races.
Unable to rely on traditional party prisms to make a decision, voters find it hard to choose a candidate they like for local political office. About 30% of votersenter the voting booth and then leave part of the ballot blank. In fact, voter choices about down-ballot races are often so random that candidates listed first on the ballot are likely to get 5% more votes. Many guess based on name, gender and ethnicity, favoring those who share their race or gender.
About 30% of voters enter the voting booth and leave part of the ballot blank. Rosman experienced this problem first hand when she got into local politics. In 2014, when Rosman, a public school teacher, decided to run for local school council in Chicago, she reached out to her friend Alex Niemczewski for her vote. Though Niemczewski is generally a civically engaged person, she was unaware that there was an election for local office and who the candidates were. As they started talking to people they realized that the problem was widespread.
“We discovered that we are not alone, everyone is unprepared to vote when it comes to local elections so they end up guessing or just leaving blanks,” said Rosman.
They looped in a third friend, Sebastian Ellefson, and they set out to try to find a way to help people vote with confidence all the way down the ballot. They built a very basic version of the website for the Chicago mayoral elections in 2015 and spent $140 to advertise on Facebook. Despite the basic design and low budget, 400 people visited—convincing them that there was demand for such a site. They won funding from the University of Chicago Social New Venture Challenge and the National Science Foundation and began to build the website.
Today, BallotReady, is covering every race up and down the ballot in 10 states—Arizona, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. In these states alone, there are 10,291 candidates on the ballot. Voters can go on the website, enter their home address and view their ballot, get aggregated information about their candidates and save their choices to take with them to the polling booth.
The site gathers information on candidates’ education, career, families, stances and policy positions, endorsements and news. In order to research the thousands of candidates on the ballot, the team uses structured crowdsourcing, posting specific questions such as where a candidate went to school on sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace. If multiple responses concur, then editors add that information to the site. The information is compiled from candidates’ websites, endorsing organizations, media coverage and board of elections data. Candidates are also able to offer additional information on policy stances that they would like to add. So far, the site has had over 250,000 people visit, with more expected closer to Election Day.
“There’s so much focus on the presidential election this year and that’s really important but 96% of our elected officials are at the local level,” said Rosman. “They have a huge impact on schools, environment and communities, so it’s very important that people take the time to vote informed down their entire ballot.”
Tomas Libertiny - The Unbearable Lightness, 2010 - a beeswax body built by 40,000 bees
(via freshphotons)
Giant Artwork Reflects The Gorgeous Complexity of The Human Brain
The new work at The Franklin Institute may be the most complex and detailed artistic depiction of the brain ever.
Your brain has approximately 86 billion neurons joined together through some 100 trillion connections, giving rise to a complex biological machine capable of pulling off amazing feats. Yet it’s difficult to truly grasp the sophistication of this interconnected web of cells.
Now, a new work of art based on actual scientific data provides a glimpse into this complexity.
The 8-by-12-foot gold panel, depicting a sagittal slice of the human brain, blends hand drawing and multiple human brain datasets from several universities. The work was created by Greg Dunn, a neuroscientist-turned-artist, and Brian Edwards, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and goes on display at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
“The human brain is insanely complicated,” Dunn said. “Rather than being told that your brain has 80 billion neurons, you can see with your own eyes what the activity of 500,000 of them looks like, and that has a much greater capacity to make an emotional impact than does a factoid in a book someplace.”
To reflect the neural activity within the brain, Dunn and Edwards have developed a technique called micro-etching: They paint the neurons by making microscopic ridges on a reflective sheet in such a way that they catch and reflect light from certain angles. When the light source moves in relation to the gold panel, the image appears to be animated, as if waves of activity are sweeping through it.
First, the visual cortex at the back of the brain lights up, then light propagates to the rest of the brain, gleaming and dimming in various regions — just as neurons would signal inside a real brain when you look at a piece of art.
That’s the idea behind the name of Dunn and Edwards’ piece: “Self Reflected.” It’s basically an animated painting of your brain perceiving itself in an animated painting.
To make the artwork resemble a real brain as closely as possible, the artists used actual MRI scans and human brain maps, but the datasets were not detailed enough. “There were a lot of holes to fill in,” Dunn said. Several students working with the duo explored scientific literature to figure out what types of neurons are in a given brain region, what they look like and what they are connected to. Then the artists drew each neuron.
Dunn and Edwards then used data from DTI scans — a special type of imaging that maps bundles of white matter connecting different regions of the brain. This completed the picture, and the results were scanned into a computer. Using photolithography, the artists etched the image onto a panel covered with gold leaf.
“A lot of times in science and engineering, we take a complex object and distill it down to its bare essential components, and study that component really well” Edwards said. But when it comes to the brain, understanding one neuron is very different from understanding how billions of neurons work together and give rise to consciousness.
“Of course, we can’t explain consciousness through an art piece, but we can give a sense of the fact that it is more complicated than just a few neurons,” he added.
The artists hope their work will inspire people, even professional neuroscientists, “to take a moment and remember that our brains are absolutely insanely beautiful and they are buzzing with activity every instant of our lives,” Dunn said. “Everybody takes it for granted, but we have, at the very core of our being, the most complex machine in the entire universe.”
Image 1: A computer image of “Self Reflected,” an etching of a human brain created by artists Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards.
Image 2: A close-up of the cerebellum in the finished work.
Image 3: A close-up of the motor cortex in the finished work.
Image 4: This is what “Self Reflected” looks like when it’s illuminated with all white light.
Image 5: Pons and brainstem close up.
Image 6: Putkinje neurons - color encodes reflective position in microetching.
Image 7: Primary visual cortex in the calcarine fissure.
Image 8: Basal ganglia and connected circuitry.
Image 9: Parietal cortex.
Image 10: Cerebellum.
Credit for all Images: Greg Dunn - “Self Reflected”
Source: The Huffington Post (by Bahar Gholipour)
(Source: gregadunn.com, via sagansense)
The Ozone hole over the South Pole is finally healing
There’s some good news regarding the environment for a change. In the mid 1980s, scientists first noticed a gaping hole in the ozone layer at the South Pole. Now for the first time ever, there are signs that the hole is mending —
(via micdotcom)