Bogwitch

Near Death, Explained (...?)

Neo Whoa

22 April 2012 • science medicine

Found this on a documentary, I think it’s totally amazing. I’m a nerd like that.

One of the pigments that originally adorned China’s ancient Terracotta Warriors, Chinese Purple, may have some surprising implications for future science.

28:10 to 36:14 - the art of Chinese Purple

36:15 to 45:15 - the science of Chinese Purple

It’s incredible to think that this material that’s been around for more than 2000 years, that was initially discovered and, in fact, created by Chinese chemists, and has been on this Terracotta Army for 2000 years, it’s incredible to think that we’ve revisited this material as something that’s a fundamental advance in our understanding, in out twenty-first century knowledge of physics, and that’s just mind-blowing.
- Suchitra Sebastian

6 April 2012 • China art science color history PBS

infinity-imagined:

Subatomic Particle Tracks

High Res

That looks positively Gallifreyan.

31 March 2012 • reblog: infinity-imagined • Doctor Who science sci-fi

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

—

Isaac Asimov (via karolinaanastaciya)

Yes

(via livinginghostcolours)

20 March 2012 • reblog: karolinaanastaciya • art science

infinity-imagined:

A map of the connections in a human brain.

(Source: humanconnectomeproject.org)

17 March 2012 • reblog: infinity-imagined • science art

exbestfriend:

inothernews:

Okay, this is fucking awesome. From the New York Times:

Living plants have been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, a team of Russian scientists reports. The fruit was stored by an arctic ground squirrel in its burrow on the tundra of northeastern Siberia and lay permanently frozen until excavated by scientists a few years ago.

This would be the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue. The present record is held by a date palm grown from a seed some 2,000 years old that was recovered from the ancient fortress of Masada in Israel.

Seeds and certain cells can last a long term under the right conditions, but many claims of extreme longevity have failed on closer examination, and biologists are likely to greet this claim, too, with reserve until it can be independently confirmed. Tales of wheat grown from seeds in the tombs of the pharaohs have long been discredited. Lupines were germinated from seeds in a 10,000-year-old lemming burrow found by a gold miner in the Yukon. But the seeds, later dated by the radiocarbon method, turned out to be modern contaminants.

Despite this unpromising background, the new claim is supported by a firm radiocarbon date. A similar avenue of inquiry into the deep past, the field of ancient DNA, was at first discredited after claims of retrieving dinosaur DNA proved erroneous, but with improved methods has produced spectacular results like the reconstitution of the Neanderthal genome.

The new report is by a team led by Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino, near Moscow, and appears in Tuesday’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

“This is an amazing breakthrough,” said Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program at Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada. “I have no doubt in my mind that this is a legitimate claim.” It was Dr. Zazula who showed that the apparently ancient lupine seeds found by the Yukon gold miner were in fact modern.

Sounds like the Jurassic Park Plants Attack!!! movie is about to get greenlighted.

Dear Science,
Please don’t stop doing this crazy shit until I get to own a pet triceratops. And can you cross breed it so it is Labrador size?

NO RAPTORS

You guys, a thirty-thousand-year-old plant. This is the stuff I get out of bed in the mornings hoping for.

21 February 2012 • reblog: inothernews • archaeology plants science paleobotany

We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

—

Marilynne Robinson (via ayjay)

Yes yes yes yes yes.

18 February 2012 • reblog: ayjay • science Christianity Marilynne Robinson

The great mystery of memory is how it endures. The typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. How, then, do our memories persist? It’s as if our remembered past can outlast the brain itself.

But wait: the mystery gets even more mysterious. A neuronal memory cannot simply be strong: it must also be specific. While each neuron has only a single nucleus, it has a teeming mass of dendritic branches. These twigs wander off in every direction, connecting to other neurons at dendritic synapses (imagine two trees whose branches touch in a dense forest). It is at these tiny crossings that our memories are made: not in the trunk of the neuronal tree, but in its sprawling canopy.

This means that every memory – represented as an altered connection between cells – cannot simply endure. It must endure in an incredibly precise way, so that the wiring diagram remains intact even as the mind gets remade, those proteins continually recycled.

—

The Persistence Of Memory | Wired Science | Wired.com (via ayjay)

Astounding.

2 February 2012 • reblog: ayjay • memory science

Incredible!