Amira

"[R]ecently, Caleb Everett, a linguist at the University of Miami, made a surprising discovery that suggests the assortment of sounds in human languages is not so random after all. When Everett analyzed hundreds of different languages from around the world, as part of a study published today in PLOS ONE, he found that those that originally developed at higher elevations are significantly more likely to include ejective consonants. Moreover, he suggests an explanation that, at least intuitively, makes a lot of sense: The lower air pressure present at higher elevations enables speakers to make these ejective sounds with much less effort. (...)" - Amira

"[H]e found that 87 percent of the languages with ejectives were located in or near high altitude regions (defined as places with elevations 1500 meters or greater), compared to just 43 precent of the languages without the sound. Of all languages located far from regions with high elevation, just 4 percent contained ejectives. And when he sliced the elevation criteria more finely—rather than just high altitude versus. low altitude—he found that the odds of a given language containing ejectives kept increasing as the elevation of its origin point also increased. (...) As a result, over the thousands of years and countless random events that shape the evolution of a language, those that developed at high altitudes became gradually more and more likely to incorporate and retain ejectives. Noticeably absent, however, are ejectives in languages that originate close to the Tibetean and Iranian plateaus, a region known colloquially as the roof of the world." - Amira

"[Brent] Tully, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy (...) has mapped the universe in detail out to a distance of about 100 million light years. To put that in more human terms: Columbus’s maps of the New World described a land 3,000 miles from home, but Tully’s map extends 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles out. No wonder he is often referred to as a cosmic cartographer. By filling in the details, Tully has made it possible to discern the true structure of the universe: clusters of galaxies arranged into enormous filaments, bound together by invisible strands of dark matter, and tremendous lonely voids where galaxies are sparse." - Amira

Retouching : Alexis Persani Photography & conception : Léo Caillard - www.leocaillard.com - Amira

"The newest addition to human anatomy is just 15 microns thick, but its discovery will make eye surgery safer and simpler. Harminder Dua, a professor at the University of Nottingham, recently found a new layer in the human cornea, and he's calling it (can you guess?) Dua's layer. Dua's layer sits at the back of the cornea, which previously had only five known layers. Dua and his colleagues discovered the new body part by injecting air into the corneas of eyes that had been donated for research and using an electron microscope to scan each separated layer. The researchers now believe that a tear in Dua's layer is the cause of corneal hydrops, a disorder that leads to fluid buildup in the cornea. According to Dua, knowledge of the new layer could dramatically improve outcomes for patients undergoing corneal grafts and transplants." - Amira

"Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. (...) Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions." - Amira

Closed access article form the ACS. Figures. - Back to just Joe

"Yevgeny Khaldei loved to document everyday life juxtaposed against images of war: he photographed a sunbathing couple next to a destroyed building, a traffic director next to a sign with German towns written in Russian, etc. However, the above striking image differentiating the killing machines and the nature grace of the reindeer was not ‘natural’." - Amira

"As Marion Shurtleff was on her way out a bookstore in San Clemente, Calif., she remembered that she had meant to buy a few extra Bibles for her Bible study group. Shurtleff, 75, asked an employee if the store had used Bibles and he pointed her in the right direction. There were four or five versions, so she quickly picked two, paid and left. She noticed later on that one of the Bibles had some folded yellow papers inside but thought nothing of them until about two months later when she found herself with some free time and decided to take a look at the papers. What she found floored her." - Amira

"I opened it up and on the inside facing page...I started shaking," Shurtleff told ABCNew.com. "There was my name and my telephone number and I recognized my handwriting." There were three pages of thin yellow paper with a Girl Scout essay written in pencil. Shurtleff wrote it 65 years ago when was 10 years old. (...) Covington is more than 2,000 miles away from San Clemente. (...) She didn't recognize the Bible and saw that it had been printed in 1986, long after she wrote the essay. "The Bible wasn't mine and the Bible was printed in 1986 so it's not that old," she said. "Where the document was from the time I wrote it until 1986, I still have no idea." http://abcnews.go.com/US... - Amira

See also: The Things Found in Books | Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups... - Amira

"Scientists -- and parents -- have long wondered why we don’t remember anything that happened before age 3. As all parents know, no matter how momentous an event is in a toddler’s life, the memory soon drifts away and within months there isn’t even a wisp of it left. Now a new study shows that “infantile amnesia” may be due to the rapid growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for filing new experiences into long-term memory. (...) Frankland suspected that memories actually got filed away into long-term storage, but that the hippocampus lost track of where they’d been stacked during the rapid growth phase that takes place in the first few years of life." - Amira

It seems so obvious now. Thanks. - Vezquex

Claus Narr (d.1515), the court jester, in reply to the Elector of Saxony Johann Friedrich I, who was lamenting that he had 'lost the day': "Tomorrow we will all diligently seek for the day you have lost, and no doubt we shall find it again". - Amira

"Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over the place, dropping hints and having revelations. So it’s no surprise that many authors plan out their works beforehand, in chart or list or scribble form, in order to keep everything straight. After the jump, you’ll find a mini collection of those planning papers, so you can take a peek into the process of some of your favorite authors, from James Salter to J.K. Rowling." - Amira

"Physicists have dreamed up some bizarre ideas over the years, but a decade or so ago they outdid themselves with the concept of Boltzmann brains – fully formed, conscious entities that form spontaneously in outer space. It may seem impossible for a brain to blink into existence, but the laws of physics don't rule it out entirely. All it requires is a vast amount of time. Eventually, a random chunk of matter and energy will happen to come together in the form of a working mind. It's the same logic that says a million monkeys working on a million typewriters will replicate the complete works of Shakespeare, if you leave them long enough. (...) However, if we can demonstrate that the universe has a finite lifespan, that would deny Boltzmann brains the infinite time they need to outnumber us. String theory might be able to help (...)." - Amira

"According to string theory, there may be a large number of universes. All of these universes are believed to come into existence through a process called eternal inflation, in which at least one universe continually expands at an incredible rate, while others form and grow within it like bubbles. This pool of universes has been dubbed the multiverse. Many of these other universes could be chock-full of conscious creatures early in their histories when, like the universe we see today, the past is distinct from the future. That could help make our point of view the standard one. But if these universes eventually become featureless and continue to linger, they will all accrue Boltzmann brains, tipping the balance away from us again. Zukowski and Bousso's latest work suggests this won't happen. Universes are constantly budding off a parent universe in the multiverse, so the parental characteristics can determine what kinds of "baby" universes form within it – and whether those universes will stick around long enough to be filled with Boltzmann brains or decay first. (...). "This is potentially an added experimental success for string theory and eternal inflation," says Daniel Harlow, a physicist at Princeton University. "We need to understand it better – [but] the fact that it potentially explains something is motivation to understand it better." - Amira

"We now know that the founders of the first advanced European civilization were European," said study co-author George Stamatoyannopoulos, a human geneticist at the University of Washington. "They were very similar to Neolithic Europeans and very similar to present day-Cretans," residents of the Mediterranean island of Crete. (...) The Minoan culture emerged on Crete, which is now part of Greece, and flourished from about 2,700 B.C. to 1,420 B.C. Some believe that a massive eruption from the Volcano Thera on the island of Santorini doomed the Bronze Age civilization, while others argue that invading Mycenaeans toppled the once-great power. Nowadays, the Minoans may be most famous for the myth of the minotaur, a half-man, half-bull that was fabled to lived within a labyrinth in Crete." - Amira

See also: Minoan civilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

minoan bull leapers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - ufuk

"This is the culmination of Rick Aschmann's years-long "hobby" of collecting dialects. It's a comprehensive and detailed map of the dialects (and sub-dialects!) of English-speakers in Canada and the United States. (...) Aschmann's site is a veritable font of information on English dialects. There's the Dialect Information Chart which tells you which vowel sounds can be found in what dialect and each dialect's "unique features." Like Mat-Su Valley Alaska, which has the unique feature of being "strongly like North Central" but with some "main Alaska dialect" mixed in. If that doesn't mean anything to you, there's a helpful parenthetical there: "See Sarah Palin." Aschmann bases his map and dialect information on the Atlas of North American English, his own research created the names of some of the dialects and made adjustments to their borders." - Amira

"On December 7, 1938, a BBC radio crew visited Sigmund Freud at his new home at Hampstead, North London. Freud had moved to England only a few months earlier to escape the Nazi annexation of Austria. He was 81 years old and suffering from incurable jaw cancer. Every word was an agony to speak. Less then a year later, when the pain became unbearable, Freud asked his doctor to administer a lethal dose of morphine. The BBC recording is the only known audio recording of Freud." - Amira

In heavily accented English, he says: "I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over." - Amira

"This object was in common use in medieval libraries, even though very few survive today. It’s a bookmark - and a smart one for that matter. As with our own bookmarks, it tells you where you are in the book: the rope was attached to the binding and placed between two pages. The reader subsequently pulled down the marker along the rope to the line where he had stopped reading. Since an open medieval book often presented four text columns, the reader then turned the disk to indicate in which column he had left off. In this case we read “4” in medieval Arabic numerals - the column on the far right. So this tiny piece of parchment marks it all: page, column and line. That’s what I call smart. Source unknown, likely 13th or 14th century." - Amira

Bernadette Roberts: “Through past experience I had become familiar with many different types and levels of silence. // There is a silence within, a silence that descends from without; a silence that stills existence and a silence that engulfs the entire universe. There is a silence of the self and its faculties of will, thought, memory, and emotions. There is a silence in which there is nothing, a silence in which there is something; and finally, there is the silence of no-self (…). // If there was any path on which I could chart my contemplative experiences, it would be this ever-expanding and deepening path of silence.” - Amira

"Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces. (...) Kepler-62e is 60 percent larger than Earth, while Kepler-62f is about 40 percent larger, making both of them “super-Earths.” They are too small for their masses to be measured, but astronomers expect them to be composed of rock and water, without a significant gaseous envelope. As the warmer of the two worlds, Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth, according to computer models. More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean. Otherwise, it might become an ice-covered snowball. “Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions. Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly,” said Harvard astronomer and co-author Dimitar Sasselov." - Amira

WATERWORLDS! - ωαřмaiden ❤Bassetmom❤

See also "The Songs of Distant Earth" - Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction novel which takes place almost entirely on the faraway oceanic planet of Thalassa. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

Thank you, @Amira!! :) - Harold Cabezas

"IBM scientists using a special microscope they invented to move atoms around on a surface. The movie, titled "A Boy and His Atom," consists of nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action and tells the simple story of a boy named Atom who dances and plays with an atom. By drawing viewers in with the film (a technological marvel that will no doubt be passed around far and wide), IBM then uses an engrossing behind-the-scenes clip to tell its larger story—about how the company has worked at the nanoscale for decades to explore the limits of data storage, among other things with real-world applications. (...) Today's electronic devices need roughly 1 million atoms to store a single bit of data. But IBM researchers have shown that only 12 atoms are actually needed to store one bit. The implications for data storage are astonishing—it means that one day, every movie ever made could be stored in a device the size of a fingernail." - Amira

he dalloslar he. bu kafayla olur o is 100 yila. - kunthar

"When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries. (...) One day each year – April 27 in 2013 – people all over the world visit local museums and galleries to look at art slowly. Participants look at five works of art for 10 minutes each and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience. That’s it. Simple by design, the goal is to focus on the art and the art of seeing. In fact, Slow Art Day works best when people look at the art on their own slowly and then meet up to discuss the experience (though some hosts decide to do the discussion right in the gallery)." - Amira

“Better living through data? When a pioneer of data collection and organization turned his analytical tools on himself, he revealed the complexity of automating human judgment and the difficulty of predicting just what is predictable. (...) The question is, what’s the space with all possible models that you can imagine using? A good way to describe that space is to think about computer programs. (...) I’ve discovered that very simple programs can serve as remarkably accurate models for lots of things that happen in nature. In natural science, that gives us a vastly better pool of possible models to use than we had from just math. We then see that these may be good models for how nature works. They tell us something about how nature is so easily able to make all this complicated stuff that would be very hard for us to make if we just imagined that nature worked according to math. Now we realize that there’s a whole different kind of engineering that we can do, and we can look at all of these possible simple programs and use those to create our engineering systems." - Amira

"This is different from the traditional approach. (...) As we accumulate more data, there will certainly be patterns that can be seen, and things that one can readily see that are predictable. You can expect to have a dashboard—with certain constraints—showing how things are likely to evolve for you. You then get to make decisions: Should I do this? Should I do that? But some part of the world is never going to be predictable. It just has this kind of computational irreducibility. We just have to watch it unfold, so to speak. There’s no way we can outrun it. I suspect that, in lots of practical situations, things will become a lot more predictable. (...) I suppose, in human history that has actually had a progression: There’s more technology; there are more layers of automation about what we do.” - Amira

"[Thomas] Jefferson’s language emphasized the requirement of newness, or novelty, and bespoke the necessity of an inventive step. It also implied that products made by nature, which were held to belong to everyone, were not to be removed from common possession. Thus products of nature such as the naturally occurring elements in the periodic table or the creatures of the earth, being neither new in the world nor made by man, were taken to be ineligible for patents. So, tacitly, were laws of nature, natural manifestations, abstract ideas, and thought. (...) Judge Moore did acknowledge that Myriad’s patents “raise substantial moral and ethical issues” about the allowance of property rights in “human DNA—the very thing that makes us humans, and not chimpanzees,” and she allowed that BRCA DNA “might well deserve to be excluded from the patent system.” But she considered such a “dramatic” destruction of property rights properly the province of Congress, not the courts. Against this strict view of patent law stands an expansive version of it, consistent with the Progress Clause, that recognizes the adverse consequences in the clinic and the laboratory of monopoly control over human DNA, a scientifically and medically essential substance for which there is no substitute. The plaintiffs advanced the expansive version of the law, and so did Judge Bryson. He found good reasons in the Mayo ruling to reject Myriad’s patents, noting that they lacked an inventive concept and that they would interfere with future research and innovation." - Amira

"A famous example cited in numerous briefs in the current appeal involved Dr. Jonas Salk's development and invention of the polio oral vaccine in 1952. When his life-saving treatment was announced, he said the people would "own" the vaccine, adding "Could you patent the sun?" -- http://www.cnn.com/2013... // A ruling from the court is expected in June. // See also: Biological patent, Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"atNight project aims to constitute a first step towards the construction of nightscape image, a necessary first contribution to the (re)definition of the nigh-time identity. We have taken the opportunity to explore the potential of city's representation techniques -by means of data visualization and cartography- to generate an interpretative model of nocturnal landscape as a common framework for collective thought. (...) atNight is a research project based on the (re)definition of the term "nightscape"." - Amira

"Considering landscape in a broad sense, the research aims to build bridges between different technical and humanistic disciplines The research explores night urban landscape as a sensitive and cognitive relationship between people and their environment. The project focuses on the aesthetical process of identification of citizenship with their territory to emphasize the role of night in the definition of urban landscape –as the framework for leisure and socialization. We believe that the opportunity to reformulate the basis of nightscape design involves the construction of a valid representation of itself. atNight aims to build interpretative cartographies of nightscape main assets in order to create a new critical model to share, discuss and develop ideas about nightscapes transformation." - Amira

"Murad Osmann and his girlfriend like to travel. And, when they do, they document their journeys in incredible style. (...) The project started during a vacation to Barcelona in 2011. Zakharova became annoyed that Osmann was so occupied with his camera and started pulling him by the hand… but it didn’t stop Osmann from snagging a shot. That shot would spark a project that has now spanned over a year and many different locations. Regarding the look of the images: Osmann snaps the photos with his iPhone or DSLR, adds various effects to them using Camera+, and then uploads them to Instagram. He’s based in Moscow, but it’s his job that has taken Osmann around the world." More: http://mashable.com/2013... - Amira

“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.” - Amira

“What I think is so interesting about this photograph is the way that the girls are responding to the space of the modern art gallery: they are not merely ignoring the art on the walls, but literally looking beyond those walls. It is not a quick glance or sneaky peek, either. This is intense, curious looking that requires them to physically crouch down and brace themselves against the grate in order to get the closest possible view through the vent. The square grid-like vent seems congruous with the canvasses of the modern art gallery, and the children are inspired to look beyond the surface of lines and shapes. (…)" - Amira

"As Clement Greenberg, that stalwart champion of abstract expressionism, once said: “To hold that one kind of art must invariably be superior or inferior to another kind means to judge before experiencing; and the whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand: the impossibility, that is, of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic experience.” (From his Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), pp. 133). So, the girls might not be looking at the abstract art on the gallery walls, but who is to say that their examination of whatever lay beyond that vent is any less of a valid aesthetic experience?” - Amira

That's beautiful. I love it :) - Eivind

Yay! there's still time... - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

"Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles have found a way to create stunningly detailed 3D reconstructing of platinum nanoparticles at an atomic scale. These are being used to study tiny structural irregularities called dislocations." Read the paper here: http://dx.doi.org/10... - Amira

"For clearly the first particles of things // did not all place themselves in due order // by their own planning or intelligence, // nor did they through some agreement assign // the motions each of them should have. Instead, // since there are many of them and they change // in many ways through all the universe, // they are pushed, energized by collisions, // for a limitless length of time, and then, /// having gone through every kind of motion // and combination, they at length fall into // those arrangements which make up and create // this totality of things, which also, // once suitably set in patterned motion, // has been preserved through many lengthy years. // (...)" - Amira

"Since earth // was made by nature. Seeds of things themselves, // jostling freely here and there in various ways // and forced to random, confused collisions, // produced nothing—then finally those ones // suddenly united which could become, // every time, the beginnings of great things. (...) Since the moment earth was first created, // that day sea, land, and rising sun were born, // many particles have been added on // from areas outside. All around them, // seeds which the immense universe has joined // by hurling them about have been attached. // (...) If you grasp these points well and hold to them, // you will see at once that nature is free, // liberated from her proud possessors, // doing all things on her own initiative, /// without divinities playing any part." - Amira

See also: How Epicurus’ ideas survived through Lucretius’ poetry, and led to toleration http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... Lucretius: ‘O unhappy race of men, when they ascribed actions to the gods’ http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... #universe #atoms #higgsboson #ancient #poetry - Amira

"From ancient Egyptian religions to Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat to the latest I Can Haz Cheeseburger meme, felines, literature, and culture have enjoyed a long love affair. But perhaps no other feline has walked through history in quite the fashion that a Mediterranean cat did when it left paw prints across the pages of a 15th century manuscript from Dubrovnik, Croatia." - Amira

"In [Hilary Putnam’s] view, there is no reason to suppose that a complete account of reality can be given using a single set of concepts. That is, it is not possible to reduce all types of explanation to one set of objective concepts. (...) The full scope of reality is simply too complex to be fully described by one method of explanation. The problem with all of this, and one that Putnam has struggled with, is what sort of picture of reality we are left with once we accept these three central arguments: the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy, the truth of semantic externalism and conceptual relativity. (...)" - Amira

"We could—like Putnam before the 1970s—become robust realists and simply accept that values and norms are no less a part of the world than ,elementary particles and mathematical objects. We could—like Putnam until the 1990s—become “internal realists” and, in a vaguely Kantian move define reality in terms of mind-dependent concepts and idealised rational categories. Or we could adopt Putnam’s current position—a more modest realism which argues that there is a mind-independent world out there and that it is compatible with our ordinary human values. Of course Putnam has his reasons for believing what he does now, and they largely derive from his faith in our ability to represent reality correctly. But the strength of his arguments convincing us to be wary of the scientific stance leave us with little left of trust in it." http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog... - Amira