Bits, bites and blurbs from Michael Cervieri.
Most of my Tumbling is at the Future Journalism Project.
On Twitter I'm bMunch.
On G+ I'm here.
In 1848, a freak accident sent a 3-foot metal rod through the skull of railway worker named Phineas Gage, piercing his frontal lobe. Gage famously survived, but underwent dramatic personality changes after the accident.
Now, scientists reconstruct the most famous case study in the history of modern neuroscience in order to understand what happened to Gage through his connectome.
Michael: probably the only case I remember from my college neuroscience course.
Wasp!
Via New Scientist:
Pitch black, with massive, sickle-shaped jaws, the beast has been named Megalara garuda. Garuda refers to the part-human, part-eagle mythical symbol of Indonesia. Nothing is known of the wasp’s behaviour, but discoverers Lynn Kimsey of the University of California, Davis, and Michael Ohl of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany, speculate that the jaws may be used for grasping females during copulation.
Part inspiring, part horrifying.
Creating the World’s Ugliest Music
Via TED:
Scott Rickard set out to do what no musician has ever tried — to make the world’s ugliest piece of music. At TEDxMIA, he discusses the math and science behind creating a piece of music devoid of any pattern.
And via Slashdot:
He used mathematics of Évariste Galois (who was born 200 years ago) to create pattern-free sonar pings which he mapped to notes on a piano, and then played them using the non-rhythm of a Golomb Ruler.
Fashion in a Can
Via New Scientist:
Particle engineer Paul Luckham and fashion designer Manel Torres from Imperial College London combined cotton fibres, polymers and a solvent to form a liquid that becomes a fabric when sprayed. The material can be built up in layers to create a garment of your desired thickness and can also be washed and worn again like conventional fabrics.
I like the use case for spray-on bandages with drugs added to help the healing process.
A China Green Ocean
Via BoingBoing:
Beachgoers in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, were met with a fuzzy, green blanket of ocean last week, as the water there exploded with algae.
You’ve heard before about dead zones. These are patches of coastal ocean where river runoff full of fertilizer chemicals have produced massive algae blooms. As the algae die, their decomposition reduces the oxygen level of the water to the point that many fish and other aquatic life can no longer live there.
Science is bumming me out today:
- First I’m psyched cause I learn the universe’s largest water supply is 8 billion light years away, hovers around a black hole and contains 120 trillion times the water found on Earth. This is very cool.
- Then reality hits when I learn that researchers in Hong Kong have demonstrated that time travel is impossible so we’ll never get to go swimming in this intergalactic ocean. this is a buzz kill.
Image: This artist’s concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Gas and dust likely form a torus around the central black hole, with clouds of charged gas above and below. X-rays emerge from the very central region, while thermal infrared radiation is emitted by dust throughout most of the torus. While this figure shows the quasar’s torus approximately edge-on, the torus around APM 08279+5255 is likely positioned face-on from our point of view. (Source: NASA/ESA)
Scientists in the U.S. are developing a laser gun that could kill millions of mosquitoes in minutes.
The laser, which has been dubbed a “weapon of mosquito destruction” fires at mosquitoes once it detects the audio frequency created by the beating of its wings.
The laser beam then destroys the mosquito, burning it on the spot.
Developed by some of the astrophysicists involved in what was known as the “Star Wars” anti-missile programs during the Cold War, the project is meant to prevent the spread of malaria. — CNN
