Office by Alex Penny
Gross stuff will be tagged in order of grossness #gross, #gore, and/or #nsfw
![ohyeahdevelopmentalbiology:
psydoctor8:
“MIT researchers turn on a memory”
Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same dangerous chamber, they remembered the unpleasant electric shock and froze, taking on a defensive stance. Researchers had, however, inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into the cells involved in making a memory. They then tested what happened when they turned on a light to activate those cells, without putting the mice in the same chamber. They saw the freezing behavior, as if the mice were reliving the memory.
“This is the most dramatic way to show that high cognitive phenomenon, like memory recall, can be generated, can be artificially generated by poking cells in the brain,” Tonegawa said in an interview.
He said there were about 20,000 neurons, or brain cells, involved in this particular kind of memory. [via]
I’ve seen a couple of these optogenetic experiments. It’s pretty fascinating to be able to manipulate the neural response in vivo.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1m012mDUF1qan221o1_500.jpg)
“MIT researchers turn on a memory”
Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same dangerous chamber, they remembered the unpleasant electric shock and froze, taking on a defensive stance. Researchers had, however, inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into the cells involved in making a memory. They then tested what happened when they turned on a light to activate those cells, without putting the mice in the same chamber. They saw the freezing behavior, as if the mice were reliving the memory.
“This is the most dramatic way to show that high cognitive phenomenon, like memory recall, can be generated, can be artificially generated by poking cells in the brain,” Tonegawa said in an interview.
He said there were about 20,000 neurons, or brain cells, involved in this particular kind of memory. [via]
I’ve seen a couple of these optogenetic experiments. It’s pretty fascinating to be able to manipulate the neural response in vivo.
Shansitherium
When: Late Miocene (~ 11 - 6 Million years ago)
Where: China
What: Shansitherium is a fossil relative of the giraffe. Giraffes are a commonly used example of an easy to see evolutionary transformation, the neck getting longer and longer, and here is some of the evidence used to show that hypothesis. Shansitherium lived in the late Miocene of China, and falls closer to the giraffe line than any other extant clade of artiodactyls. It possesses horns like that of the modern giraffe and okapi, which probably would have been covered with skin in life (these are called ossicones), but over all looks much more like a moose than a giraffe.
Today the Giraffidaehas only two living species, the giraffe (duh) and the okapi, and is only found in sub saharan-Africa. In the Miocene however this group was far more diverse, with Shansitherium just one example of the over a dozen species that roamed all over not just Africa, but Asia and Europe as well. The late Miocene was a time of cooling and drying climates in much of the world, and this is probably what lead to the reduction of species in this clade.
Reconstruction by Willem van der Merwe.
(via scientificillustration)
What did man’s earliest ancestors sound like?
All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ. Palaeontologists can date when our ancestors lost the organ, as the tissue attaches to a skeletal feature called the hyoid bulla, which is absent in humans. “Lucy’s baby”, an Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived 3.3 million years ago, had a hyoid bulla; but by the time Homo heidelbergensis arrived on the scene 600,000 years ago, air sacs were a thing of the past.
To find out how this changed the sounds produced, Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands created artificial vocal tracts from shaped plastic tubes. Air forced down them produced different vowel sounds, and half of the models had an extra chamber to mimic an air sac.
De Boer played the sounds to 22 people and asked them to identify the vowel. If they got it right, they were asked to try again, only this time noise was added to make it harder to identify the sound. If they got it wrong, noise was reduced.
He found that those listening to tubes without air sacs could tolerate much more noise before the vowels became unintelligible.
Observations of soldiers from the first world war corroborate de Boer’s findings. Poison gas enlarged the vestigial air sacs of some soldiers, who are said to have had speech problems that made them hard to comprehend.
I bolded that last paragraph for emphasis. The whole article is very cool, but I found that paragraph particularly fascinating. Click through to hear the recordings used in the study.
Body Bakery: Bread imitating Gore by Kittiwat Unarrom
This brings weird to a whole new level. Thai Fine Art student and artist Kittiwat Unarrom is the son of a baker. All that baking exposure growing up has been a clear influence, but his artistic need to see things a little differently definitely flared up as he created the tacitly named “Body Bakery” – brutally, gruesomely, almost unbelievably realistic looking sculptures of dismembered human body parts sculpted entirely from bread.
With a master in Fine Arts Kittiwat Unarrom creates sculpture in bread. Not just normal sculpture but horror, dark art, gore, something I don’t know if I could actually eat. Located in Ratchaburi, Thailand Kittiwat creates feet, hands, heads, and internal organs among other body parts all entirely edible and for sale at his family’s bakery. He skillfully paints each piece to look terrifying to the observer/customer.
Holy sh-
HOLY F—- I REMEMBER HEARING ABOUT THIS PLACE D8
amazing and terrifying
(Source: metalonmetalblog, via saucyredspy)
If you’re sharing a pizza with another person, there’s no need to cut it into precisely equal slices.Make four cuts at equal angles through an arbitrary point and take alternate slices. You’ll both get the same amount of pizza.
Also: If a pizza has thickness a and radius z, then its volume is pi z z a. (via Futility Closet)
i like this science
What is antimicrobial resistance?
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is resistance of a microorganism to an antimicrobial medicine to which it was previously sensitive. Resistant organisms (they include bacteria, viruses and some parasites) are able to withstand attack by antimicrobial medicines, such as antibiotics, antivirals, and antimalarials, so that standard treatments become ineffective and infections persist and may spread to others. AMR is a consequence of the use, particularly the misuse, of antimicrobial medicines and develops when a microorganism mutates or acquires a resistance gene.
hot bacterial conjugation action
Some incredible high speed photography by Daniel Nimmervoll
the bottom left exploding egg looks like a butt (heh bottom)
(via trippyscience)
(via weareallstarstuff)
The American Ghost Orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii)! A native of swamps in Florida and Cuba, this flower is called the “ghost” orchid because its roots blend into the tree making the flower appear to float in midair.This orchid is a perennial epiphyte, meaning it grows on another plant (usually a tree) but isn’t parasitic. The orchid is only pollinated by the giant sphinx moth and supposedly smells like apples in the morning. The American Ghost Orchid is considered endangered in the wild and is very difficult to grow outside of its natural environment.
(via trippyscience)
