art-of-swords:

Sword Pommel with the Arms of Pierre de Dreux

• Dated: circa 1240–50
• Culture: French
• Medium: Copper, gold, enamel, iron
• Measurements: Horizontal diameter, 2 5/16 in. (6 cm) Vertical diameter, 2 7/16 in. (6.1 cm) Thickness at center, 7/16 in. (1.1 cm) Thickness at base: 1/2 in. (1.2 cm) Weight, 8 oz. (226.8 g) 

This sword pommel is decorated with the arms of Pierre de Dreux, Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond (circa 1190–1250),  who was captured during the Seventh Crusade at the Battle of al-Mansurah in Egypt on February 8, 1250. He was later ransomed and released, but died during his return to France.

Source: © 2000–2013 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

(via frenchhistory)

Neuroscience: ‘Seeing’ the flavor of foods →

neurosciencestuff:

The eyes sometimes have it, beating out the tongue, nose and brain in the emotional and biochemical balloting that determines the taste and allure of food, a scientist said here today. Speaking at the 245^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest…

(Source: portal.acs.org)

justkeepitdark:

cancerously:

shadowkittycosplay:

reservoircat:

coraki:

kyssthis16:

sunny1:

justcallmevincent:

iraffiruse:

Frozach Submitted

Wow.

#jesus christ this has a cure for everything

Really?

That Gatorade one is real talk. 

When my rats had skin mites I’d cover them in cooking oil.  However trying to wash an oily rat was much more of a challenge than washing a dry rat.  One drop of advance between the shoulder blade like on a cat or dog works much more effectively and faster.

These are all great but quick note: DO NOT USE THE DRYER SHEET TRICK FOR CATS. It is cool for dogs, but very bad for cats.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: Toothpaste only works on CHEMICAL burns, since toothpaste is a base that cancels out the acid. If you get a heat burn, toothpaste will dry it out and make it worse. So only put toothpaste on a chemical burn!!!

Okay, these are cool. I know the Gatorade one is because of the whole elctrolyte business. And with the dryer sheet thing: I wouldn’t recommend it. It has been proven to be quite toxic for pets, especially if your pet licks themselves or something.

(via occasionalscribblings)

book-of-flights:

The Antikythera Shipwreck Exhibit

Dated to 60-50 BC, the shipwreck was found off the coast of Antikythera. The ship carried cargo dating from 4th to 1st century BC and was sailing towards Italy carrying among other cargo bronze and marble sculptures, glassware and jewellery, and amonst these the famous “Antikythera Mechanism”. The finds reflect the new phenomenon of art trade, the first in the history of Western civilization.

These marble sculptures have been severely eroded by stone-eating organisms of the sea, and only their parts trapped safely in the mud of the seabed have remained wonderfully intact.

Scarred and deformed, the half-destroyed sculptures seem even more human, nearly demonic. No longer serving as images of idealised beauty, their artistic quality has reached a new dimension, distorted by nature’s interference. Their image haunts you long after you’ve left them behind.

(via humanisticscience)

neuromorphogenesis:

The body: Your curious behaviours and what they reveal

What makes humans so special? The obvious answer is our amazing brains. The body barely gets a mention. 

Yet it should. Our bodies are extraordinary: hairless, upright and with many peculiar features related to intelligence, including an oversized head. And that is just the start. 

 Ever wondered why yawns are contagious, you can’t tickle yourself and we don’t speak from our bottoms?

IT’S your body, and you like to think you’ve got it under control. But underneath the calm exterior lurk unruly instincts and urges that are struggling to escape, putting you at risk of embarrassment or ridicule. These disreputable behaviours – the likes of the fart, hiccup, itch and yawn – are familiar to us all, yet they are also decidedly curious. Although they have been the source of folklore and puzzlement since antiquity, they have largely been overlooked by scientists. After all, where is the scientific grandeur in such ignoble acts? I take a different view. Where others see forbidden areas, I find unexplored territory and new frontiers of research. So I have made a point of studying our curious behaviours. What I have found sheds new light on our body, our mind and our evolution as a social animal.

Yawning

Whatever the purpose of a spontaneous yawn – and this remains hotly contested – the most extraordinary property of human yawning is its contagiousness. When we see someone yawn, our body is hijacked by a primal neurological process that is hard to resist. Imagine a yawning person with mouth stretched wide open, eyes squinting, taking a long inhalation followed by a shorter outward breath. Are you yawning yet?

Yawns are so catching that almost anything associated with them can stimulate more yawns, including seeing, hearing, reading about, or even thinking about yawning. My colleagues and I have found that silent videos of yawning people trigger contagious yawns in about 55 per cent of observers within five minutes, and almost everyone reports being at least tempted to yawn. Surprisingly, given that a gaping mouth is the most conspicuous element of yawning, videos that had the mouth edited out were just as effective at making viewers yawn. In fact, videos showing just a yawning mouth evoked no more yawns than one of a smiling face. That may be because an open mouth is not exclusively associated with yawning and could be doing something else such as singing or yelling. We respond to the overall configuration of the yawning face, including the squinting eyes.

From the evolutionary perspective, spontaneous yawns are ancient – occurring in most vertebrates – whereas contagious ones are relatively modern, being confined to social mammals including chimpanzees andperhaps dogs. In humans, spontaneous yawning develops while we are still in the womb, but the contagious variety does not appear until a child is 4 or 5. This is also roughly when children start being able to attribute mental states to themselves and others, strengthening the idea that contagious yawning is linked with sociality. Although the neurobiology of this curious behaviour is little understood, it is clear that when it occurs we become mindless beasts of the herd. As a yawn propagates through a group, it drives a ripple of physiological and emotional connection, transforming individuals into a superorganism.

Itching

Itching is an exquisite torment that earned a place in Dante’s Inferno, but it has its virtues. The skin is our body’s first line of defence against invasion and we are neurologically primed to maintain its integrity. So, when threatened by insect pests, toxic flora or other irritants, an itch guides us to the problem area and motivates us to scratch, in an attempt to dislodge the invader and quell the discomfort. Only the skin, not internal organs, gets itchy. We also respond to tactile false alarms when we itch in response to skin conditions such as eczema, athlete’s foot and psoriasis and, even more mysteriously, as a result of thyroid disease, diabetes and some neuropathologies. Itching isinhibited by pain, but while vigorous, tissue-damaging scratching can offer blessed relief in the short term, it can produce even more itching, locking us into a self-perpetuating itch-scratch cycle.

Like yawning, itching is contagious. You can “catch” an itch from observing someone scratching, attending a lecture about itching, or viewing slides ofitch-producing pests such as lice. Even reading this may make you itchy. Contagious itching makes evolutionary sense: your neighbour’s pesky flea may jump from its host to you but won’t get far if you are already scratching.

Hiccupping

Hiccupping starts with a sudden inhalation produced by a downward jerk of the diaphragm and contraction of the muscles between the ribs, and ends almost immediately by glottal closing to produce the “hic” sound. Although of unknown purpose, this enigmatic act is one of the most common prenatal behaviours, suggesting a developmental role. Hiccupping starts at around 8 weeks of gestation, peaking between 10 and 13 weeks, then declines through the remainder of life. For an unfortunate few, however, hiccups return with a vengeance in later life in the form of persistent bouts lasting 48 hours or longer. Men are nine times more likely to suffer this than women. The record for chronic hiccupping is held by Iowa farmer Charlie Osborne who hiccupped for over 67 years. Fortunately, hiccups usually stop during sleep.

A “hiccup generator” in the brainstem choreographs the widely distributed neurological and muscular components of a hiccup when it receives certain cues. These causes can range from distension of the stomach and irritation of the oesophagus to various thoracic and nervous disorders. Remedies are even more diverse. In his Symposium, Plato listed breath holding, gargling and sneezing. Other purported cures include eating sugar, drinking water upside down, being frightened and putting your fingers in your ears. During the course of my research I have discovered another. The audio recorder cure simply entails my standing expectantly, microphone in hand, next to the hiccupper. It is particularly effective on children and shows the power of social inhibition over an ancient, instinctive act.

Vomiting

If you ingest a toxic substance, your body uses an effective and violent response to try to eject it: vomiting. However, you are also prone to retch at the mere sight, smell or sound of someone else doing it. Why? I became fascinated by this phenomenon as a child on a particularly nauseating family road trip when my cousin Karen was sick in the car, causing the other passengers to vomit. Decades later I got a chance to investigate contagious (or hysterical) vomiting. I found that girls of middle-school and high-school age are especially prone. Bouts usually occur during a group event that provokes anxiety. They tend to involve reports of vague smells such as vehicle exhaust fumes or sewer gas, or odd tasting or smelling food or drink. Symptoms are likely to be vague and the illness will resolve quickly and have no adverse effects.

Although contagious vomiting seems like a prime example of a bodily malfunction, in evolutionary terms it is adaptive, permitting everybody in a group to benefit vicariously from the reaction of the person who takes the first taste of something toxic. Messy false alarms are a small price to pay for a potentially life-saving gut reaction. Indeed, some Central and South American peoples intentionally induce communal vomiting by drinking the ritual emetic ayahuasca, in their quest for purification and bonding. Cheers!

Tickling

Tickling is exceptional in its philosophical, neurological, psychological and practical significance – impressive credentials for a behaviour that is often relegated to a footnote.

Everything starts with the observation that we cannot tickle ourselves. This is fortunate, otherwise we would go through life in a giant chain reaction of goosiness, confused about whether we touched something or it touched us. The neurological process that inhibits our response to self-touching also computes our discrimination of self and other. Who would have thought that the lowly tickle could offer a solution to the ancient and thorny philosophical problem of personhood?

This amazing insight even has a practical application. If computer scientists could create an algorithm to differentiate touching from being touched, they would increase the fine motor control of robots and be on the way to producing a machine with personhood.

The fact that we cannot tickle ourselves makes tickling inherently social. It is an important means of tactile communication and bonding, and, I would argue, the basis of a baby’s earliest preverbal conversations with carers. Although self-professed tickle-haters abound, my surveys indicate that we usually tickle and are tickled by friends, family and lovers, with the motive of showing affection and getting attention. The capacity for mutual tickling enables the neurologically programmed choreography of tickle battles, physical play and sex play. The laboured breathing this produces is the origin of laughter, with the ancestral “pant-pant” – still produced by chimpanzees when tickled – evolving into the modern human “ha-ha”. I will further suggest that feigned tickle – the basis of the “I’m going to get you” game – is the most ancient joke.

Farting

No investigation of our quirky bodily behaviours would be complete without considering flatulence. This uncouth act has attracted interest from scholars and the general public alike since antiquity. A growing appreciation of the importance of our gut microfauna has brought farting to the attention of gastroenterologists. My interest in the subject is more esoteric: given the rich variety of sounds entailed, I wondered why we speak through our mouth rather than our butt.

This is not as frivolous as it first seems, given that no part of the human body evolved specifically for speech. We speak through the same orifice through which we breathe, eat, drink and vomit, and the vocal cords are two flaps of tissue that act as a seal to keep food and drink out of the airway when we swallow. So why did evolution not take the alternative option of using the abdomen and lower bowel as bellows – some people do have such control – and the anal sphincter as the vibrating seal? Well, a major weakness of this idea is that while the oral vocal tract has the mouth, tongue, teeth and throat to shape sounds, the anus lacks such features. That hasn’t stopped herring using farts to communicate, but the fish are an exception, and even then it causes problems. Flatulent herring attract the attention of hungry killer whales that home in on the sound of their breaking wind. Alas, buttspeak turns out to be a weak contender in the speech evolution sweepstakes.

(Image: La Promessa, 2010, Bronze. Matteo Pugliese) 

(Source: newscientist.com, via scinerds)

serialbirdskinner:

Parts of a Song Bird!

This is some pretty important stuff, which, to be fair, I am still teaching myself, but will be referring to a lot.  My boss will track me down and beat me otherwise.  [He actually gets offended if I don’t know every part he’s ever taught me.]  

Anyways!  I will try to always make a comparison to a human body part, but I’ll forget to once in a while, and hey, this stuff is interesting!

(via scientificillustration)

"The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or “neurons” which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe."

 V.S. Ramachandran (via neuromorphogenesis)

(via scinerds)

Does anyone know any good linguistics/linguistic anthropology blogs?

Or any decent math blogs? (The math tag is dead and I don’t have very much to go on.)

Or any typography blogs?

Or any evolution/ev-psych blogs?

Thanks!

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think →

timecup:

lastontheboat:

slephoto:

yvonneemilie:

divineirony:

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

dude this is so fascinating

I love language and thinking about language and stuff, its so fascinating

VERY cool stuff.

The paper linked in the original article goes into the experiments in a bit more detail: http://psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf . The detailed result of how Kuuk Thaayorre speakers organized pictures from east to west is particularly fascinating.

Word

(via humanisticscience)

neuromorphogenesis:

Programmed Destruction

Results showing the same signaling enzymes can trigger two different processes in the cell sound a warning to biomedical researchers

Stroke, heart attacks and numerous other common disorders result in a massive destruction of cells and tissues called necrosis. It’s a violent event: As each cell dies, its membrane ruptures, releasing substances that trigger inflammation, which in turn can cause more cellular necrosis. A new Weizmann Institute study may help develop targeted therapies for controlling the tissue destruction resulting from inflammation and necrosis.

The study, conducted in the laboratory of Prof. David Wallach of the Biological Chemistry Department, focused on a group of signaling enzymes, including caspase 8, which was discovered by Wallach nearly two decades ago. Earlier studies by scientists in the United States, China and Europe had shown that this group of proteins induces “programmed,” or deliberate, necrosis intended to kill off damaged or infected cells. This revelation had generated the hope that by blocking the induction of necrotic cell death by these proteins, it might be possible to prevent excessive tissue damage in various diseases.

But in the new study, reported in Immunity, Wallach’s team sounds a warning. The researchers have revealed that under conditions favoring inflammation – that is, in the presence of certain bacterial components or other irritants – the same group of signaling enzymes can trigger an entirely different process in certain cells. It can activate a previously unknown cascade of biochemical reactions that causes inflammation more directly, without inducing necrosis, by stimulating the production of hormone-like regulatory proteins called cytokines. The research, mainly based on experiments in transgenic mice lacking caspase 8 in certain immune cells, was spearheaded by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tae-Bong Kang. Team members Seung-Hoon Yang, Dr. Beata Toth and Dr. Andrew Kovalenko made important contributions to the study.

These findings suggest that prior to developing targeted necrosis-controlling therapies, researchers need to learn more about the signals transmitted by caspase 8 and its molecular partners: Since this signaling can lead to several entirely different outcomes, the scientists need to determine when exactly it results directly in necrosis and when it does not. Clarifying this matter is of enormous importance: Tissue necrosis occurs in a variety of disorders affecting billions of people, from the above-mentioned stroke and heart attack to viral infections and alcoholism-related degeneration of the liver.

(via scinerds)