Tom Booth is a visual storyteller. Even single images speak of adventure, childhood joy, and magic.
This time, however, he tells a sadder tale. Without words, he shows a man grieving the loss of the woman he loves. The woodworker finds himself carving her image into wood wherever he goes. As the years pass, he gets older and grayer. She stays just as young--and just as forever separated from him.
You can see the story of Booth's woodworker summarized at My Modern Met. And as you can see from Booth's Instagram feed, it has inspired sculptures, tattoos, and fan art.
Karl Patterson Schmidt was a renowned American herpetologist who had years of experience with snakes and other reptiles. But he was mistaken about one very important fact- how venomous a boomslang snake is. He was bitten on the thumb by a juvenile boomslang in 1957.
Karl Schmidt, like many herpetologists at the time, didn't believe that boomslang venom had the fatal dose necessary to kill humans, although peer-reviewed studies showed otherwise. Instead of treating his bite wound, Schmidt took the train home from work, and began to record the effect of the venom in his journal. Schmidt believed that accepting treatment would upset the symptoms he was documenting.
By treating the snake bite as an experiment to observe instead of an emergency, Schmidt didn't seek treatment until it was too late. However, it may have always been too late, since no antivenom was available in 1957. Read Schmidt's story at Amusing Planet.
Medina Dugger is a photographer in Lagos, Nigeria. She's fond of the work of the late Nigerian photographer J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, who documented the fanciful hairstyles of his homeland.
To commemorate his work, Dugger has taken up where 'Okhai Ojeikere left off, photographing the women of Nigeria who style their hair so expressively.
Redditor Stephen Hues brings us this interesting image. Wheeling up a hill can be tiring. So the urban planners have incorporated into the sidewalk a space where a wheelchair user can stop and rest.
If dogs could talk, then this world would certainly be a better place to live. I can imagine a thousand things I could talk about with them if they could really converse with us. Understanding them would be much easier, too.
Movies that are fiction have a disclaimer that tells the audience that it is fiction -even for such fantastical tales as comic book superhero movies. Like every common disclaimer, this one has an interesting story behind its use. The precedent involved, believe it or not, Rasputin. His story was such a good one, it had to made into a movie, even while the principles were still alive. That was a mistake, especially that one part that was fictionalized. Cheddar tells the story.
Found in East Lothian, Scotland, is the village of Stenton. It is a small agricultural village with a couple of buildings and patches of farmland. The main produce of this village back in the medieval period were grain, hides, and wool, all of which were sold at markets each week. Erected at a market was a public balance called a tron. At one time, trons became a common sight across rural Scotland.
Aging is a process all of us have to go through until our deaths. But can we slow it down? Scientists were able to prove that we can slow down aging, at least in these worms. By tweaking a couple of cellular pathways, they have extended the lifespan of these worms by a staggering 500 percent.
C. elegans is a humble little worm that often finds itself at the heart of aging studies. That’s because it shares many cellular pathways with humans, and it typically lives for three or four weeks, meaning any changes to that lifespan are quickly apparent and easy to measure.
In plenty of past studies, scientists have managed to use drugs or genetic engineering to increase the lifespan of C. elegans by 50 or 100 percent. If directly applied to the average human lifespan of about 80 years, that would be like living to between 120 and 160 years. But in the new study, the team unexpectedly made the worms live five times longer than usual – the human equivalent of which would be 400 years.
This is not a guarantee that this will translate to humans. However, it should be able to give scientists “a new avenue to explore in developing anti-aging techniques.”
Have you ever wondered how our finger names came to be? How the “thumb” came to be called the “thumb”? Why the “index” finger is called the “index” finger? Have you also thought about how other languages call these fingers?
The answers over at Kensy Cooperrider’s article, over at JSTOR Daily.
Once upon a time, way way before the innovation of agriculture, a group of early humans sat down for a meal inside a cave which is located today on the border of South Africa and Swaziland. The main course was cooked over an open fire. Some of the meal, however, was charred and beyond eating. It was lost in the ashes, and it remained there in the same place for nearly 200,000 years. Scientists were able to find out what food this group of early humans cooked.
Previously it was known that starchy foods made for good eating in Middle Stone Age Africa, based on findings of plant matter at the Klasies River Cave to the southwest. The new paper, published in the journal Science, analyzed finds from Border Cave, as it’s known, and was able to identify that a starchy foodstuff was eaten there as well—underground stems called rhizomes, from the genus Hypoxis, a plant group that includes what is known today as yellow star or African potato. This pushes back the date of the earliest cooked starches by some 50,000 years, to about 170,000 years ago.
Border Cave also holds a large collection of wooden digging sticks, leading researchers to hypothesize that they were used to harvest the meal. “It seems likely that wooden digging sticks were used to dig the rhizomes from the ground,” says Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and lead author of the new paper. “The plants are gregarious so quite a few could be harvested from a single place.”
Swiss animal behaviorist Désirée Brucks and German animal behaviorist Auguste von Bayern have been teaching African grey parrots to use money, and have found some surprising things about the birds. Quite a few different animals have been taught to earn an exchange medium and to trade those tokens for treats, and animals have long been observed to share food with each other. But the parrots have put those two things together, and are willing to share tokens so that their friends can buy treats.
After training eight African grey parrots and six blue-headed macaws to barter metal rings for walnuts, the researchers paired the birds up with same-species partners. They then put the parrots in clear chambers joined by a transfer hole, and gave one bird—the donor—ten rings, while the other was left with none.
Even without the promise of a reward for themselves, seven out of eight of the African grey parrot donors passed some of their available tokens through the transfer hole to their broke partners, usually shuttling them beak to beak. On average, about half the metal rings made it through, allowing the recipients to trade the trinkets for walnuts through another window.
“It was amazing to see,” Brucks says. “I thought that when they saw they weren’t gaining anything, they’d stop. But they just kept doing it … some transferred [all] ten of their tokens.”
To see how the birds understood their actions, the experiment was repeated without the walnuts being offered for sale. The transfer of tokens didn't stop, but it abated, showing that birds weren't just sharing the metal washers, but the opportunity to buy walnuts. The story was different with the trained macaws. Read more of what was learned from the experiment at Smithsonian.
Lee Loechler took his girlfriend Sthuthi David to see Sleeping Beauty at their local theater. What she didn't know was that Loechler had been working with illustrator Kayla Coombs for six months to make a customized version of the movie. She also didn't know that those other people in the darkened theater were their friends and family, waiting for the big moment. This is adorable. Don't miss the alternate ending! -via reddit
The things we do for science. See, cuttlefish have eyes that move independently of each other so that they can see all around them. The question was: can they use stereopsis? That is, do they judge depth and distance by merging the different views of their two eyes when focusing on prey? The method was to get them to watch 3D movies, which meant getting them to wear the glasses.
Not that every step went smoothly. Attempts to glue the glasses directly on to the molluscs left some at jaunty angles and risked skin damage when the cuttlefish reached up with their arms – of which they have eight – to pull them off. That was solved with a superglued velcro strip that the glasses then attached to.
The glasses posed another hurdle, however. “The first ones that wrapped around caught too much water, so if the cuttlefish swam backwards, the glasses would fly off,” Wardill said.
But with tenacity, the scientists overcame the problems. The cuttlefish – whose names included Supersandy, Long Arms, Inky and Sylvester Stallone – were ready to be trained and tested.
The Disney+ series The Mandalorian definitely has the heart of a Western, only set in the Star Wars universe. YouTuber kingkida pictures it as a Sergio Leone production from the 1970s, and frames it so well that you would expect to see Clint Eastwood, if the title character ever took his helmet off. And if you look closely, you'll see some intentional humor, too. -via Boing Boing
Sometime around 2,600 years ago, a man in England died when his head was cut off. In 2008, he was exhumed during an excavation by the York Archeological Trust, or at least his head was; the rest of his body was not found. Inside the skull, scientists found his surprisingly well-preserved brain, while other tissues were completely gone. The Heslington Brain had shrunk to a fraction of its original size, but was otherwise intact.
For the past decade, scientists have sought to understand how and why the Heslington brain could have survived. In the study, the researchers note that, apart from this brain, no other brain from the Iron Age has been found preserved without deliberate human intervention.
That’s because the human brain breaks down rapidly after death. When a person dies a process called autolysis kickstarts, which causes tissues and organs to break down. The brain is 80 percent water and one of the first organs to go down. Within five to 10 years, the brain tissue is typically totally degraded, research suggests.
The writer of the article uses the word "survived" a bit differently from most folks. The brain is not alive, just extant, and in fairly good condition. Now scientists have figured out why. It has to do with the behavior of proteins. But did these proteins "behave" before or after the beheading? Read about the latest research on the Heslington Brain at Inverse. -via Digg
