Sunday, 30 June 2013
Gentleman may be angriest guitar player of all time
Gravity-defying levitating superconductor on a magnetic Möbius strip
Andy from the Royal Institution made a large, suspended Möbius strip out of rare-earth magnets, then cooled down an object until it became a superconductor, and set it levitating and running around the track. The result is amazing, plus Andy's explanation is cogent and fascinating. Plus, gravity-defying levitation!
3d printed casts for a better future
Jake Evill is hoping that someday 3D printed casts will replace the bulky, stinky plaster casts we are all familiar with
A patient would have the bones x-rayed and the outside of the limb 3D-scanned. Computer software would then determine the optimum bespoke shape, with denser support focussed around the fracture itself.
London retail innovation, 1900
The smallest shop in London - a shoe salesman with a 1.2 square meter shoe store, 1900.
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Extreme ironing, an adventure sport for people who like laundry
I know it sounds silly, but some people take it very seriously, training for competitions by lifting irons like dumbbells and bench-pressing ironing boards. Not only do you have to have the stamina and athleticism to reach extreme conditions, but when you get there, you have to iron with finesse–it's a performance art, like dancing or gymnastics. Can you focus on a tiny crease in a shirt sleeve while balancing on one leg on a tree branch jutting out over a cliff? Didn't think so.
The guy who runs Extreme Ironing Japan has promised to let me witness a session next time I'm there, so I'll let you guys know when that happens.
Extreme multi-purpose tarp -- great for casual Fridays
Finland's Varusteleka sells a multipurpose "Jerven Fjellduken" tarpaulin that you're meant to wear, sleep under, and sleep in. It makes you look like a well-camouflaged Nordic Nazgul.
Jerven bag, those are almost words of power among hunters, outdoorsmen and soldiers the world over. Jerven has been making the Fjellduken since 1982, besides the obvious hunting trips and hikes the Fjellduken has seen action in Afghanistan in the hands of Norwegian and Danish special forces.
You won't find any hi-fi bullshit in your Jerven bag, the technical bits start and end at the zippers, that's it. All of Jervens products are made and developed by the very same people who use them. The unique design and materials make the Jerven bag an incredibly versatile and high performing piece of equipment. This is not your standard modern trinket, which relies on never ending lists of one after another more trivial properties and features to impress people, this is simple perfection at its best!
Extreme space age hairdos of yesteryear
Presumably this old Pathe reel showing women getting huge armatures with planetoids on them inserted into their hair by men wielding combs with sparklers on them and strange electric shock devices is some sort of elaborate piss-take. Though maybe I'm wrong and there was a time when the women of Wokingham, Berkshire, really did wear their hair that way.
Death and the Mainframe: How data analysis can help document human rights atrocities
Between 1980 and 2000, a complicated war raged in Peru, pitting the country’s government against at least two political guerrilla organizations, and forcing average people to band together into armed self-defence committees. The aftermath was a mess of death and confusion, where nobody knew exactly how many people had been murdered, how many had simply vanished, or who was to blame.
“The numbers had floated around between 20,000 and 30,000 people killed and disappeared,” says Daniel Manrique-Vallier. “But nobody knew what the composition was. Non-governmental organizations were estimating that 90% of the deaths were the responsibility of state agents.”
Manrique-Vallier, a post-doc in the Duke University department of statistical science, was part of a team that researched the deaths for Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Their results were completely different from those early estimates. Published in 2003, the final report presented evidence for nearly 70,000 deaths, 30% of which could be attributed to the Peruvian government.
How do you find 40,000 extra dead bodies? How do you even start to determine which groups killed which people at a time when everybody with a gun seemed to be shooting civilians? The answers lie in statistics, data analysis, and an ongoing effort to use math to cut through the fog of war.
Tapir penis: Almost as horrifying as echidna penis
In this not-exactly-safe-for-work video, two tapirs (a jungle-dwelling mammal, related to the rhinoceros) go at it with verve, while a nice family watches and makes what I assume to be amusing commentary.
Meet Japan's talking robot astronaut, Kirobo
Talking robots in space have a bad track record – just watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. So good luck to his fellow astronauts on the International Space Station
Cross sectional photos of ammunition
Sabine Pearlman made cross sectional photographs of 900 specimens of ammunition inside a World War II bunker in Switzerland. "The cross-sections reveal a hidden complexity and beautify of form, which stands in vast contrast to the destructive purpose of the object." AMMO(via PetaPixel)
Mark Jenkins solo show in Paris
One of my favorite prankster artists Mark Jenkins has a new solo show running at Paris's Galerie Patricia Dorfmann. You can see some of the provocative, witty, and moving works at: "The Studio" by Mark Jenkins
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Strange, wonderful, deep-sea creatures ... with googly eyes
Please enjoy this very serious, scientific Tumblr that posts exactly what it promises — pictures of the strange and fantastic creatures that live deep in the ocean ... with googly eyes photoshopped onto their bodies.
The specimen above is an animal known as the pigbutt worm. Yes, seriously. With the googly eyes in place, you can't quite get a full understanding of how weird looking this animal is, so please be sure to check out the "before" photo, as well.
The site is maintained by a deep sea ecologist (he's anonymous, but I've verified that this is true). So you can trust the information provided here. For instance, when readers ask how the heck a pigbutt worm counts as a worm:
The pigbutt worm, Chaetopterus pugaporcinus, is a very weird looking worm, for sure. All Annelid worms are segmented, and the pigbutt is no exception. If you look at an ordinary earthworm, you can see those segments, but in Chaetopterus pugaporcinus, the middle segments are super inflated compared to the rest of its body. The rear segments are visible in the area that looks like the anus on a mammal’s buttocks (although others have noted that this section of the pigbutt worm looks more like a disembodied vulva than a floating buttock).
Why are robust women outliving delicate men?
In general, women outlive men. This is not a new idea. But what you might not know is that the effect can't be explained by some simple hand-waving about risk-taking men, or war, or the allure of the Marlboro Man. In fact, the tendency for men to die at a higher frequency than women happens at every age group — even in utero. Fetal males die more often than fetal females. So what makes the men-folk so delicate? NPR's Robert Krulwich investigates.
The 19th century just lost its last living man.
Jiroemon Kimura, of Kyotango, Japan, was born in April 1897, lived right through the 20th century and died last Wednesday. He was 116. According to Guinness World Records (which searches for these things), he was the last surviving male born in the 1800s. All the other boys from that century, as best we know, are dead.
The ladies, however, are still ticking. Misao Okawa of Osaka is now officially the oldest person on the planet. She was born in 1898. There are four others — two in Britain, one in the USA, and another in Japan — all 19th century-born, all female, all still alive.
Once again, the ladies have outlasted the gentlemen. Not that that's a big surprise.
Women, on average, seem to take a little longer to die. But here's what I didn't know: Women, it turns out, don't just win in the end. It seems that women consistently outlive men in every age cohort. Fetal boys die more often than fetal girls. Baby boys die more often than baby girls. Little boys die more often than little girls. Teenage boys, 20-something boys, 30-something boys — in every age group, the rate of death for guys is higher than for women. The difference widens when we hit our 50s and 60s. Men gallop ahead, then the dying differential narrows, but death keeps favoring males right to the end.
After that, everybody's dead.
So Death, it turns out, is not an equal opportunity avenger. It seems to consistently favor males. Why? What is it about maleness that brings Death knocking?
The Fetal Difference
First off, whatever we males are doing wrong, nature seems to know about it. Because when human babies are conceived, says a 2002 study, "the ratio of males to females ... has been estimated to be from 107 to 170 males per 100 females." The storks, it seems, drop extra boy babies into wombs, almost as if they know what's coming. But even with a boost at conception, male fetuses don't make it out of the uterus as often as female fetuses. The death differential, says the study, "has been estimated to be from 111 to 160 males per hundred females." So miscarriages are mostly male.
The Baby Difference
Then come birthdays. More boy babies get born than girl babies. This is true all over the world. In America, it's 105 males for every 100 females. But as soon as they're out, the boys start to go. Male babies born prematurely die more often than females. Birth weight is not as strong a predictor as gender. You can be born impossibly small, and if you're a girl you are still slightly more likely to make it through.
The Adolescent Difference
The male disadvantage spikes during the teens and early 20s. This is the time when young men fight, go to war, dare and don't wear motorcycle helmets. Their deaths here are increasingly accidental, suicidal, homicidal or war related. "If deaths from violence are excluded," says a study from the Society of Actuaries, the spike in the early 20s disappears completely, though the female advantage remains. Not too long ago, young women got pregnant and many died having babies during their 20s, but in the modern era, childbirth mortality is down; male derring-do less so.
The Middle Years Difference
Here the gender difference narrows and holds steady, but if you look across the years, men are more likely to die from injuries, and (at least in the USA) from suicide, respiratory cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and coronary heart disease. Leading female diseases — breast cancer and cervical cancer — do damage, but not as much as the male diseases.
The Oldies Difference
Somewhere in our 50s, the men begin to accelerate their dying, and that difference peaks in our 60s and early 70s, and then narrows. In the last lap, among the oldest of the oldies — people 110 and over — women are lopsidedly the survivors. In America, 9 out of 10 of the "supercentenarians" are female. Jiroemon Kimura, the farmer/mailman who died last week in Japan — was a double exception; he was not only super-old, he was a super-old male. That's very rare.
But Why The Difference?
Which brings us back to the deeper question (again, we're talking not about you in particular; we are making a statistical argument based on averages): Is there something about being male that, all by itself, shortens a lifespan? And if so, is it correctible or built in? The most famous paper on this subject "Why Men Die Younger," comes from an actuary (naturally) working in Seattle, Barbara Blatt Kalben. In 2002, she wrote that being a guy is definitely more dangerous, but she has a bevy of reasons why that might be, and she doesn't choose a winner.
Blame Testosterone?
There are obvious behavioral differences between men and women, she writes. Some of them might be cultural. Men are more violent, which puts them in harm's way more often. They consistently consume more tobacco, alcohol and drugs, which makes them sicker (then deader) later on. The explanations for this difference could be chromosomal or hormonal (more testosterone) and therefore hard to change; or they could be learned.
Blame Size?
Other explanations seem hard-wired and not fixable. Men, she notes, are generally bigger, which reflects a general rule in biology, seen in most species, which says (quoting from a study) "that larger (size) individuals (within a species) tend on average to have shorter lives." This has proved true for animals in the wild, showing up in worms, fish, insects, mammals and, of course, our group, the primates. The bigger among us (again, on average) die earlier. (I've noticed this among dogs, but birds, she says, are a notable exception — Big Bird, if he existed, would likely last longer than your average garden robin.)
But now comes the explanation that made me wince.
Blame Male Weakness
Barbara Kalben mentions it, quoting E.V. Allen of the Mayo Clinic, who in 1934 wrote an essay that said "mere maleness" is a predictor of greater mortality. Something about being male "influences unfavorably the resistance ... to disease at all ages." He called it "male weakness."
A bunch of years ago on ABC News, in a series I did with Ted Koppel called Brave New World, I touched on the theme of time with two friends of mine, John Lennell and John Flansburgh, better known as They Might Be Giants. They made a music video to illustrate our hourlong essay, which included this refrain: "You're older than you were before, and now you're even older ..." lines that make me smile to this day. Both the Johns and the three musicians they hired (all named Dan) and I (I introduce the song) are older than we were before ... and, as sometimes happens, now we're even older. Notice, there are no women in the video. If we'd included any, chances are they'd have gone on and on and on and, in a gender-embarrassing way, outlasted us.
The 19th century just lost its last living man.
Jiroemon Kimura, of Kyotango, Japan, was born in April 1897, lived right through the 20th century and died last Wednesday. He was 116. According to Guinness World Records (which searches for these things), he was the last surviving male born in the 1800s. All the other boys from that century, as best we know, are dead.
The ladies, however, are still ticking. Misao Okawa of Osaka is now officially the oldest person on the planet. She was born in 1898. There are four others — two in Britain, one in the USA, and another in Japan — all 19th century-born, all female, all still alive.
Once again, the ladies have outlasted the gentlemen. Not that that's a big surprise.
After that, everybody's dead.
So Death, it turns out, is not an equal opportunity avenger. It seems to consistently favor males. Why? What is it about maleness that brings Death knocking?
The Fetal Difference
First off, whatever we males are doing wrong, nature seems to know about it. Because when human babies are conceived, says a 2002 study, "the ratio of males to females ... has been estimated to be from 107 to 170 males per 100 females." The storks, it seems, drop extra boy babies into wombs, almost as if they know what's coming. But even with a boost at conception, male fetuses don't make it out of the uterus as often as female fetuses. The death differential, says the study, "has been estimated to be from 111 to 160 males per hundred females." So miscarriages are mostly male.
The Baby Difference
Then come birthdays. More boy babies get born than girl babies. This is true all over the world. In America, it's 105 males for every 100 females. But as soon as they're out, the boys start to go. Male babies born prematurely die more often than females. Birth weight is not as strong a predictor as gender. You can be born impossibly small, and if you're a girl you are still slightly more likely to make it through.
The Adolescent Difference
The male disadvantage spikes during the teens and early 20s. This is the time when young men fight, go to war, dare and don't wear motorcycle helmets. Their deaths here are increasingly accidental, suicidal, homicidal or war related. "If deaths from violence are excluded," says a study from the Society of Actuaries, the spike in the early 20s disappears completely, though the female advantage remains. Not too long ago, young women got pregnant and many died having babies during their 20s, but in the modern era, childbirth mortality is down; male derring-do less so.
The Middle Years Difference
Here the gender difference narrows and holds steady, but if you look across the years, men are more likely to die from injuries, and (at least in the USA) from suicide, respiratory cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and coronary heart disease. Leading female diseases — breast cancer and cervical cancer — do damage, but not as much as the male diseases.
The Oldies Difference
Somewhere in our 50s, the men begin to accelerate their dying, and that difference peaks in our 60s and early 70s, and then narrows. In the last lap, among the oldest of the oldies — people 110 and over — women are lopsidedly the survivors. In America, 9 out of 10 of the "supercentenarians" are female. Jiroemon Kimura, the farmer/mailman who died last week in Japan — was a double exception; he was not only super-old, he was a super-old male. That's very rare.
Which brings us back to the deeper question (again, we're talking not about you in particular; we are making a statistical argument based on averages): Is there something about being male that, all by itself, shortens a lifespan? And if so, is it correctible or built in? The most famous paper on this subject "Why Men Die Younger," comes from an actuary (naturally) working in Seattle, Barbara Blatt Kalben. In 2002, she wrote that being a guy is definitely more dangerous, but she has a bevy of reasons why that might be, and she doesn't choose a winner.
Blame Testosterone?
There are obvious behavioral differences between men and women, she writes. Some of them might be cultural. Men are more violent, which puts them in harm's way more often. They consistently consume more tobacco, alcohol and drugs, which makes them sicker (then deader) later on. The explanations for this difference could be chromosomal or hormonal (more testosterone) and therefore hard to change; or they could be learned.
Blame Size?
Other explanations seem hard-wired and not fixable. Men, she notes, are generally bigger, which reflects a general rule in biology, seen in most species, which says (quoting from a study) "that larger (size) individuals (within a species) tend on average to have shorter lives." This has proved true for animals in the wild, showing up in worms, fish, insects, mammals and, of course, our group, the primates. The bigger among us (again, on average) die earlier. (I've noticed this among dogs, but birds, she says, are a notable exception — Big Bird, if he existed, would likely last longer than your average garden robin.)
But now comes the explanation that made me wince.
Blame Male Weakness
Barbara Kalben mentions it, quoting E.V. Allen of the Mayo Clinic, who in 1934 wrote an essay that said "mere maleness" is a predictor of greater mortality. Something about being male "influences unfavorably the resistance ... to disease at all ages." He called it "male weakness."
So, for many reasons, because of our hormones, our chromosomes, our lifestyle, the stresses of being a guy, we become (or are born) more fragile. This is not exactly my image of maleness, which runs more to Achilles or to Muhammad Ali, but the data suggests that in the long run, when it comes to just surviving, it's the ladies who pack steel."The factors which are usually set down in explanation of the greater mortality in males are overwork, alcoholism, venery [I looked it up, it means lots of sex and also hunting] tobaccoism, exposure to the elements, industrial hazards, and irregular habits of eating and sleeping. ...
"For each explanation of the lack of inherent vitality of the male there are objections, but these do not influence the fact; the male is, by comparison with the female, a weakling at all periods of life from conception to death. Venery, alcoholism, exposure, overwork, and various other factors may influence the susceptibility to disease and the greater mortality of the adult male, but they are only straws placed on the greater burden of his sex-linked weakness.
"There seems to be no doubt that, speaking comparatively, the price of maleness is weakness."
What a dead fish can teach you about neuroscience and statistics
The methodology is straightforward. You take your subject and slide them into an fMRI machine, a humongous sleek, white ring, like a donut designed by Apple. Then you show the subject images of people engaging in social activities — shopping, talking, eating dinner. You flash 48 different photos in front of your subject's eyes, and ask them to figure out what emotions the people in the photos were probably feeling. All in all, it's a pretty basic neuroscience/psychology experiment. With one catch. The "subject" is a mature Atlantic salmon.
And it is dead.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful tool that allows us to capture incredible amounts of information about what happens in our brains. It's relatively new — neuroscientists began using fMRI in the early 1990s — and it produces colorful images that help bring numbers to life for the general public.
All of those things are strengths for fMRI. Unfortunately, they're also all weaknesses. New tools vastly expand our understanding of the human body ... but they also mean that we have to develop new standards so that different studies using the same tool can actually be compared to one another. Images of the human brain help make science more understandable ... but they can also be incredibly misleading when the public doesn't have a good idea of what the pictures show. Amassing vast quantities of information is great ... but it also makes it easy to end up with false positives — coincidences of chance that look like something a lot more important.
Enter the dead salmon.
In 2009, a team led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett and psychologist Abigail Baird ran an fMRI experiment using the salmon as their subject. Not only did they really put a dead (and frozen) fish into an fMRI machine, later analysis of their data actually produced evidence of brain activity — as if the dead fish were thinking. It wasn't, of course. But Bennett's and Baird's research — which recently won a 2012 IgNobel Award — was meant to show how easily scientists can mislead themselves and why well-done statistics are vital.
I got to speak with Bennett and Baird last week. In the interview, they talked about the study, how fMRI really works, and what scientists have to do to make sure they can trust their own results.
Maggie Koerth-Baker: Let's start with the basics. As a layperson, I see fMRI images in the news all the time, but I'm not really certain that I could tell you how fMRI works or what it's actually measuring. Can you explain?
Craig Bennett: We're not directly measuring activity in the brain. You'd need electrodes implanted in the brain itself for that. We're actually measuring the amount of magnetic disruption in the brain. We use a trick of how brain and body work. Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have different magnetic properties.
Abigail Baird: If a brain region is doing a lot of work it's probobably going to be bringing in a lot of oxygen through increased blood flow. The premise is that if an area is working harder it will need more nutrients and oxygen and that will be delivered through the blood.
Using blood flow as measure of brain activity is reliable, but it's a very slow response. True brain activity happens when cells are communicating using neurotransmitters and electricity. Real, actual brain activity is measured with electrodes in the brain or someting like EEG that records electrical activity. The problem with doing that is that when you use EEG, you don't know exactly where the signal is coming from or what the signal means. fMRI presupposes that brain activity relies on oxygen but there's a 4-6 second delay because that's how long it takes for the call for more blood to go out. It's a slow response and in a way it's a sloppy response. We're assuming that there are more leftovers here in spot A then spot B, so there must be brain activity here and not there.
CB: The best description I've heard is that it's like coming up on thhe scene of a car accident and being able to tell what happened based on the skid marks. We have to try to interpret by the changes what was going on when the activity happened. It's a proxy.
MKB: So when we see those images with areas of the brain popping out in bright colors, that's not necessarily telling us that one part of the brain is active and the rest isn't.
AB: I'm so tired about hearing about "the brain lighting up". It makes it sound like you see lights in the head or something. That's not how the brain works. It suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what fMRI results mean. Those beautiful colorful maps ... they're probability maps. They show the likelihood of activity happening in a given area, not proof of activity. According to our analysis, there's a higher likelihood of this region using more blood because we found more deoxygenated blood in this area. It's also correlational. Here's a time frame and the changes we'd expect, so we see which bits of brain correlate with that.
CB: We've had methods to look inside the brain of a living human for decades, and we've gotten quality science out of that method. What does fMRI add? The big thing is spatial location, you can say where in the brain activity is happening to a much greater degree. It's really mostly about that. But what that buys you is the ability to produce really pretty maps of the brain. You get a greyscale image with the colored spots that indicate what's significant. But that's not showing brain activity, it's showing a statistic. I drew a line in the sand and said these dots are the ones that crossed the line. It makes for drammatic and pretty presentation of data. If you have a page of jargon people will believe it at a certain level. But if you put a picture of the brain with active voxels [a three-dimensional pixel] people will believe it even more because a picture of the brain is next to it. We have a powerful tool and ability to create dramatic persuasive figures. And we can use it in improper ways.
MKB: So how do we know that the data we get from fMRIs is useful, at all? If it's just correlational, and doesn't really show you where activity is happening?
CB: This is why we have to do tightly controlled experiments. To do it right, you'll take two conditions, almost exactly matched except for one critical thing. Some of the studies I really like are visual studies. I could show you the same stimulus, say a flashing circle of light, but I'd change the position of it. Whether it's inn the top third or the bottom third of your field of vision. Just by changing the position and comparing each position to each other you can see which parts of the brain are sensitive to each spot. That's a narrow study and a really good control.
AB: More than a couple papers have been sesationalistic. There have been comparisons of Republican and Democratic brains. That's ridiculous and it's a misuse of fMRI. It's not a specific enough question.
MKB: Can you explain what you mean by a specific question here?
AB: In an fMRI study you have to stimulate the brain in some way. So what are you showing the brain in order to make distinction between Republicans and Democrats? Say it's pictures of people on welfare, and Democrats showed more activation in one area and Republicans in another. It doesn't actually tell you anything about Democrats and Republicans. Those results might tell you something about compassion. Or how we process compassion. But to say there are fundamental differences as a whole group between two groups of people, when there's so much variation within the group, it's just silly. I could get the same result ... find big differences ... with two groups of Democrats.
Remember, the brain doesn't just light up and those images are showing statistics, not all activity. If you see the same thing in several different studies, you can trust it more. But you should be suspect of one study of a handful of people, especially if the question wasn't specific enough and the researchers just went fishing to see what would happen. Also, what you're seeing is an average of the group, not each individual. You could have a group of 40 people and 39 out of the 40 show activity in one area, but that area might still get dropped from the final images because everybody didn't have it. So you need to consider the individuals, not just the group.
MKB: Let's get back to that dead salmon you worked with. If fMRI is measuring changes in blood flow — or changes in oxygenation which indicate a change in blood flow — why would you see any signal at all in the brain of a dead salmon?
CB: In almost any experiment, but especially with MRI and fMRI, it's a noisy measure. There's all kinds of noise that gets entered into the signal. It'll pick up your own heart beating. We once had a lightbulb going bad in the scanner suite and it was introducing specific singal in our data set. You have to get enough data ... run the experiment enough times ... to separate signal from noise.
We're looking for variation in the magnetic field. With the salmon, fat will do that. Fatty tissue has a magnetic signal, but some areas of fatty tissue are more dense, and some less, so you'll see a differential. The salmon's brain was more fatty and that created more inherent variability. But it was just noise. It wasn't due to any actual activity but just happened to match our study design. Now, that's unlikely. But it just happened to happen. It's possible to find a false positive like that.
AB: We also saw activity outside the body of the salmon. The magnet itself has noise. It will always have noise. And if the threshold is low enough you're going to get that noise pattern matching up with your hypothesis.
MKB: So, basically, the salmon is about statistics, right? Why do statistics matter so much? I think most people imagine scientists just taking down data and reporting what they observe. But it's more complicated than that.
AB: In most behavioral sciences and natural science, there's a certain cutoff level where we consider the things we've found significant or not. The gold standard is .01, less than a 1% chance that you're seeing something just by accident. Or a 99% chance that it's an actual difference. But, still, 1 out of 100 times you'd get that exact same result just by chance. We're also interested in data at the .5 level. Anything up to 10% we tend to call that a trend — something might be happening. That has held throughout history of psychology and neuroscience and it's pretty good. But we'd never had any tools that produced the magnitude of data that fMRI has. Instead of making comparisons between two groups of 40 people, you're making comparisons between 100,000 points in the brain and that .01 no longer says as much because you have so much more information to work with.
CB: Here's my analogy, if I give you a dart and say, "Try to hit the bullseye", you have some chance of hitting it. Your chance is not 0. But, depending on skill, you might hit more or less often. So you try the throw with one dart and hit on first throw, that's impressive. That's like finding a result. But if you only hit it once out of 100 tries, it's less impressive. In fMRI it's like having 60,000 darts you can throw. Some will hit the bullseye by chance and we need to try to correct for that. We tend to set a threshold and say anything over is legitimate and anything under is not. But what our team found is that in a surey of literature, between 25-40% of published papers were using an improper correction. You have a lot more chances of finding significance so you need to be more conservative of saying what is a legit result.
AB: So if you have a really specific hypothesis you can stick to the traditional numbers. But if you don't know what you're looking for and you just want to see "what lights up", then you're getting lots more chances to see things that could be just random. That's when you need to be more strict about what you consider real. And people aren't always as careful about that as they could be.
MKB: So you're saying that, right now, there's a pretty good chance that a lot of the research papers that use fMRI are showing results that are every bit as wrong as the results you got while studying a dead salmon?
CB: Up to 40% of papers published in 2008 didn't do proper correction, so are there incorrect results in literature? Absolutely. Even if we correct perfectly you'll probably have 5% incorrect. There will always be false positives. But as a field we need to do as good a job as possible to release the best results we can. What we're saying is that it's not good for you, your study, or the field as a whole to not correct hard enough.
Penis iceberg
If there was any doubt about the terrible threat that global warming poses to humanity, then it can now be dismissed – as this shocking photograph proves that climate change is turning icebergs into giant penises.
Experts now believe** that it is only a matter of time before an armada of penis-shaped chunks begin to break off the Antarctic ice floes, and then roam the oceans wreaking havoc and luring sailors to their doom.
* We were sceptical of this name. Andy Rouse? A Rouse?Arouse?But he is real , it turns out, and takes very many nice pictures, most of which aren’t penis-related in any way.
** No they don’t.
Imploding iceberg in Antarctica
I love this video of an iceberg collapsing in on itself in Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica. (Word of warning, the people filming this loved the experience even more than I loved watching it, so much so that you may want to turn your speakers down.)
There are two kinds of icebergs, tabular and non-tabular. The tabular ones are what they sound like, big flat sheets of ice. Non-tabular are different—irregular shapes that become even more irregular as bits and pieces of them melt. Judging by the arched shape this iceberg had taken on, it probably falls into the non-tabular category. Implosion happens when melting weakens key structural support within that shape and bits of the iceberg begin to crash in on itself, accelerating the breakup. Both tabular and non-tabular icebergs and catastrophically fail like this, though.
Another fun iceberg fact: There are six size categories we sort icebergs by. Four of them have pretty predictable names: "Small", "Medium", "Large", and "Very Large". But below "small" are two size categories with a little more whimsy.
Icebergs with a hight of less than 3.3 feet and a length less than 16 feet are called "Growlers".
If the height shorter than 16 feet and the length shorter than 49 feet, then the iceberg is called, adorably, "a Bergy Bit". Yes, that is a technical term.
Anton LaVey plays his keyboard
In this terrific video, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey talks about how his interests in the arcane, magic, and showmanship were inspired by the mentalists at old time carnival midways. He also recalls his experiences as a professional calliope player in the 1940s-1960s and plays a few delightful tunes. (Thanks, Jenny Hart!)
Thumbs and Ammo, a tumblog of greatness
Star Wars, now with more positive reinforcement.
thumbsandammo.blogspot.com: Guns in promotional posters or stills from popular movies are replaced with thumbs.
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.” – Joseph Conrad
For millennia, the open waters have beckoned to us, calling adventurous souls to their liberation—and, in many cases, to their doom. Traces of these explorers, heroes, and merchants can still be found in our oceans; divers among us can explore their sunken vessels, which have been essentially frozen in time.
The United Nations estimates that there are over three million shipwrecks on the ocean floors. Lost, destroyed, or deliberately sunk, these wrecks are of interest to divers, underwater archaeologists, and treasure hunters alike.
Known only as the “Russian Wreck”, the mysterious sunken ship was discovered in 1988 beneath eighty feet (24m) of water. Some say that this ship was the “Khanka,” a fishing trawler believed to have sunk in the area. But the presence of electronic equipment—including a communications mast, more than two hundred batteries, and directional-finding antennae—suggests that the ship was most likely used for surveillance or communications. The spy-ship rumours have their roots in the fact that the Soviets preferred to use commercial vessels such as fishing trawlers to gather covert intelligence in the 1950s, and many believe they had a surveillance facility nearby in Yemen’s Ras Karm Military Airbase in 1971.
Mads Mikkelsen on Hannibal: 'He is not a person, he is the Devil'
Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen tells Jane Mulkerrins why he is bringing serial
killer Hannibal Lecter to life
His name has become synonymous with dining on human liver, served with fava
beans and a nice chianti. Now Dr Hannibal Lecter, perhaps the most sinister of
all fictional serial killers, has a new face.
In Hannibal, the first television adaptation of the
legend of Lecter, the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen takes on the mantle of the
cannibalistic psychiatrist previously played by Brian Cox in Manhunter in
1986, and made most famous by Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning performance in
The Silence of the Lambs, in 1991. Hopkins later reprised the role, in
Hannibal a decade later and Red Dragon in 2002.
But Mikkelsen, whom many will recognise as the Bond baddy Le Chiffre from the 2006 remake of Casino
Royale, has a coolness that qualifies him perfectly for the
role, and is unfazed by his forerunners. “Both of those performances were
iconic, and I am not trying to emulate them. Anthony played Hannibal to
perfection,” says the 48 year-old, who won a Palme d’Or last year for his role
as a teacher falsely accused of sexually abusing a child in Thomas Vinterberg’s The
Hunt. “Luckily, we are starting in a different situation: my
Hannibal is not yet captured, I am still out on the loose, I am a practising
psychiatrist, and for that reason, I have to behave a little differently than
Anthony did.”
Mikkelsen eschews the flamboyant liver-eating “ff-ff-ff-ff” gestures of
Hopkins’s portrayal for a quite different take on the character, very
controlled, dapper and charming.
In fact, Bryan Fuller, the creator and writer of the American-made show which
begins on Sky Living next week, has taken for inspiration just two pages from
Harris’s 1986 novel Red Dragon – in which the book’s protagonist, FBI
Special Agent Will Graham, describes how his professional dealings with Lecter
led to the FBI man having a nervous breakdown and being institutionalised. From
this starting point Fuller has constructed a world in which Hannibal and Will
have a far closer relationship, that of psychiatrist and patient
Gillian Anderson returning to TV to play Hannibal Lecter's therapist
We don't see a lot of Gillian Anderson lately, but when she's coming back to genre television, that's pretty noteworthy! After a ten-year absence from American television, the former X-Files star is set to play a recurring role as Hannibal Lecter's therapist as Hannibal Lecter's therapist on NBC's upcoming Hannibal series. I like this news. I like it bunches. And not just because Anderson will get to wear better blazers onscreen.
12 million Americans believe lizard people run the USA
From Public Policy Polling: "Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
The mysteries of rabies
One day, towards the end of summer, I walked into my living room and found my cats playing "Secret CIA Prison" with a bat. He was alive, but just barely. He lay on my floor twitching, his wings torn to Swiss cheese. The cats looked up at me as if to say, "We do good work, yes?" I locked them in the bedroom and called the vet. Fortunately, the cats were all up on their shots. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell the vet how the bat had gotten into the house, nor how long he'd been there.
"You should maybe call your doctor," she said.
On average, 55,000 people worldwide die from rabies every year, but only two or three of those cases happen in the United States, thanks to widespread vaccination of domestic animals and availability of post-bite treatment for humans. Today, when Americans die of rabies, it's usually because they didn't realize they'd been bitten until it was too late—which is to say, when they first noticed symptoms.
See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don't even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease.
It's a mystery that makes doctors understandably nervous. Just a week before I found my bat, some friends of mine in St. Paul had woken up to find a bat in their bedroom. Being asleep is one of those times when tiny bat teeth could bite you without you being aware of it. My friends had to get post-exposure prophylaxis, a treatment designed to neutralize any rabies virus in your system before it has a chance to reach your brain and develop into a full-blown infection.
"You think about flu, that's a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it's passed. But rabies incubation is very long," said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. "It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system."
That means five doses of vaccine, over the course of 28 days, according the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. If there's also an obvious bite, doctors will clean the wound and apply rabies antibody serum to the site. The antibodies are basically the key part of a lock-and-key system that tells your immune system to destroy anything the key fits. The idea is that antibodies will help destroy most of the virus at the site of entry, while the vaccine will train your body to knock out any strays it finds elsewhere. The CDC also recommends a shot of antibodies, separate from the vaccine, even if there is no obvious bite.
This one-two punch is almost 100% effective, provided you get it in time. How fast is "in time"? Nobody really knows. The CDC says that, as long as a bite victim isn't yet symptomatic, they should get the prophylaxis. Dr. Fu said that the window of opportunity can vary in length, depending on how close the bite is to the person's central nervous system. Without post-exposure prophylaxis, rabies is fatal. By the time symptoms--fever, confusion, partial paralysis, difficulty swallowing--appear, it's too late. There's not much doctors can do after that, because they aren't even sure what the virus is doing to you.
"We don't know how rabies kills people. There are some unproven hypotheses, but that's it," Dr. Fu said. "One idea is that, once the infection reaches the neurons in the brain, it blocks the transmission of messages from the brain to the rest of the body. If that's the case, it could explain many of the phenomenon we see in humans and animals, such as end-stage paralysis. That could even be why humans die, because of paralysis of muscles in the heart and lungs."
Given the lack of information and the risk of death, it's not surprising that even a situation like mine, where a bite was extremely unlikely, ended with a referral to a nearby hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis. But, after several conversations between the emergency room doctor and the Minnesota state rabies hotline, I ended up not getting it. Turns out, sneak-attack bites don't really happen to wide-awake, sober, cognitively normal adults in the middle of the day. The chance that I or my husband were actually bitten by the bat before the cats set upon it was so small that, on the advice of medical professionals, we decided that it wasn't worth the pain, potential side-effects, or cost of treatment.
That's right. I am my own death panel.
But on the off-chance that I do come down with symptoms—there've been cases of rabies incubating for up to a year—is there really no hope? Well, sort of. Maybe. Ish. Researchers have been experimenting with a treatment that they think could save the lives of people with full-blown rabies. Called the Milwaukee Protocol, it involves putting the patient into a coma and also giving them antiviral medication. The idea is that the human immune system—with some help from antivirals—can fight off a rabies infection, while the coma limits damage to the brain that seems to be a common cause of rabies death. In 2004, a teenage girl who received this treatment became the first person—ever—to survive symptomatic rabies without having received the vaccine either before being bitten, or before symptoms appeared.
The problem: We still don't know whether the Milwaukee Protocol actually works. It's been tried—and failed—at least 13 times since 2004, according to a 2009 paper published in the journal Current Infectious Disease Reports. There are two reported successes, but in one of those the patient received the vaccine before her she became symptomatic. The other success is very recent and there aren't many details available yet.
So why did the first girl survive? Again, nobody knows. It's possible that either she had a particularly hardcore immune system, or the variant of the virus she contracted was particularly weak, or both. When she was diagnosed, she had rabies antibodies in her cerebral spinal fluid—something that would indicate the presence of rabies in her brain—but doctors weren't able to isolate any actual virus—suggesting that her body was already on its way to winning the fight before the Milwaukee Protocol was used.
Unfortunately, any effort to really conquer rabies may be hampered by the fact that the vaccine works so well, Dr. Fu said.
Treatments haven't been successful because we don't know what it's doing in the brain," he said. "We need more research but, usually, once you have a good vaccine the funding for the research goes away."
Here is some important news I must share with you.
Late last night I began hearing reports of strange icy objects in a part of east London (UK) commonly referred to as Victoria Park. It was too dark to investigate and the park was locked until this morning. At dawn I set out to investigate, having only just returned to my office, this is the first email I write. What I discovered was so strange and unusual the first step was to upload the documentation to my website and contact you as a matter of urgency.
Within what appeared to be a rather contained area of roughly 200 acres coinciding remarkably with the boundary of Victoria Park, I found and recorded more than 300 occurrences of what I refer to as “ice balls”. These are roughly spherical objects ranging from ~30cm to more than ~150cm diameter. For now, until more information becomes available to me, I must surmise these “ice balls” are similar in origin to hail. Perhaps this exaggerated scale is the latest phenomenon associated to our rapidly changing climate.
I enclose a few images here, with the remaining 300 online at a special new website: http://iceballs.greyisgood.eu
Odd and inappropriate Valentine's cards of yesteryear
Here's a small sampling of artist Mitch O'Connell's fabulous Valentine's card collection gallery. (These are real cards, not something Mitch made up.)
Subject matter includes anger issues, from punching, stabbing, shooting your loved one to running them over with your car. "A woman's place is in the home" themes with pots 'n pans, brooms and dust pans expressing how your heart beats for them. "Find the hidden penis" is a M.O'C Blog Valentine favorite with suggestively placed rulers, logs, bananas, balloons, rocket ships, and hot dogs showing how you really, REALLY feel!...uh oh!!1
The weird, black, spidery things of Mars
What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There's nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It's a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it's transformed my idea of what it's like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I've thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain.
"If you were there," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, "you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air." The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your spaceboots.
Awesomely weird tales of sex-ghosts
This interview with "author, photographer, and ossuary expert" Paul Koudounaris is a trove of weird stories about the things people get up to with their local mummies, haunted skulls, and other "miracle-performing" remains:
They’re not all like that. One of the more outlandish stories is about a guy who got to be called “pene grande,” which means “big dick.” He was a mummy famed in life for having a big penis. People would go down to the Palermo Catacombs and treat him as the patron saint of big cocks. Finally a newlywed woman came to see him because she was married to a guy who was not well-endowed. She took a cloth and rubbed it on the mummy’s dick, and then rubbed it on her husband’s dick. The next time she had sex with her husband, his penis seemed larger and fuller and she was about to orgasm except that at that moment she looked up and saw it was actually the ghost on top of her. Everyone thought she was crazy, but then it happened again the next time she had sex. They had to set up an exorcism for this ghost.
...They had a blacksmith make a tight-fitting sheath made of metal, and once the husband got erect the ghost came out and got caught in the codpiece. They threw holy water at him.
...That expelled the ghost from the guy’s body. So forever he had a small penis, but he was free of the ghost. As for the ghost, he gained a great following among older ladies, and eventually so many were coming to see him that they had to lock the mummy in a back room, which is where he remains to this day.
...There is an old and very weird story about a ghost of a guy who had lived in the monastery there — apparently the "devil got into him" and he masturbated and had a heart attack at the moment of ejaculation. That's why, they claim, he has that look on his face. Anyway, people said his ghost would visit boys who masturbated and scare them into stopping. One boy didn't really believe this, though, and dared the ghost to appear while he was masturbating. When the ghost showed up, he apparently grabbed the boy by the cock and squeezed him so hard that the boy passed out, and while he wasn't exactly castrated, he was rendered sterile for life.
...There’s a really bizarre story from the 20th century, about a guy who had severe diarrhea and chronic flatulence. He stole a skull and started saying prayers to St. Roch and St. Sebastian, the patron saints of plague and suffering, and also shitting on the skull daily. He had a theory that by crapping on the skull he could switch intestines with the body the skull had been attached to. The ghost kept warning him, quit shitting on my skull. But he kept at it and he succeeded in transferring his intestinal problems to the ghost. The problem was that the ghost had died of testicular cancer, and in return he gave that to the guy. That’s how he died. One of the dangers of necromancy is you don’t really know who’s on the other side or what they’re going to give you in return.
Ghosts of WWII: Sergey Larenkov's Photoshopped historic photos blend past with present
Russian photographer (and Photo shopper) Serge Larenkov merges WWII-era photos with contemporary shots of identical locations in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Leningrad, and other European cities, to haunting effect. Many entries filled with images in sets organized by city at his live journal.
Man's attempt to videotape ghosts proves something more shocking
Uh Oh!!!
A Tasmanian fellow set up a video camera in his kitchen to capture images of what he believed to be paranormal activity. When he later reviewed the video, he saw his common law wife making out with (drumroll) his 16-year-old son. The young man revealed that they had sex several times. From The Mercury:
The woman had been under the mistaken impression the age of consent was 16 and was ashamed and embarrassed at her conduct and was working on reconciling with her former partner.
"She accepts this is not a relationship which can or will continue," he told the court. Justice David Porter remanded the woman in custody and will sentence her on Monday.
A Tasmanian fellow set up a video camera in his kitchen to capture images of what he believed to be paranormal activity. When he later reviewed the video, he saw his common law wife making out with (drumroll) his 16-year-old son. The young man revealed that they had sex several times. From The Mercury:
The woman had been under the mistaken impression the age of consent was 16 and was ashamed and embarrassed at her conduct and was working on reconciling with her former partner.
"She accepts this is not a relationship which can or will continue," he told the court. Justice David Porter remanded the woman in custody and will sentence her on Monday.
Egyptian statue filmed inexplicably rotating...Uh Oh!!!
Super-natural effects are always caught with the worst cameras. It is very clear this statue is moving, inside its locked case, but why? Is it a simple effect of local vibration? Why hasn't it moved before?
Campbell Price, the curator of the Manchester Museum's Egypt section, said that the statue, which has been in the museum's collection since 1933, has recently started to slowly turn in a perfect arc while in its glass enclosure.
"I noticed one day that it had turned around," Price said, according to the Daily Mail. "I thought it was strange because it is in a case and I am the only one who has a key. I put it back, but then the next day it had moved again."
Telepathic connection
Gemma, a Fjord horse, had been missing for more than a day when her distraught owner got in touch with Joan Ranquet, a pet psychic. After looking at a picture of Gemma, Joan claims she was able to telepathically connect with the four-year-old, who had a history of escaping. Joan said that she sensed that the horse was in a small enclosed place, where there was a sound of rushing water."I just got some pictures and words and feelings – I got a sense of where she was," Joan told Kiro TV. "It's the process of telepathy, which is something that we all do. But I got good at it."
"I didn't hear a lot of words. It was more just a sense of those pictures and the sounds."
The manager of Saddle Rock Stables in Washington, USA, where Gemma was kept, said she immediately knew where to look and led rescue workers to a steep ravine, where the horse was found stuck on a narrow ledge.
Hauled to safety
Her owner, Nikki Ellen, hiked down and spent night with Gemma after rescue workers decided it was safer to wait till the following morning to get her out.
It then took 65 rescue workers from eight organisations, led by the Washington State Animal Response Team, around 12 hours to haul the 800-pound horse to safety, using a harness they made out of fire hoses.
Incredibly, 30 hours after falling down the ravine, Gemma was back on safe ground, and relatively unscathed from the ordeal.
"I have no idea how she survived, let alone didn't break a couple legs," said Nikki.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)