The Late Effects Of Stress: New Insights Into How The Brain Responds To Trauma

Do you any tips about using ms paint?

I think I have few tips

#1Use 500x500 px or bigger canvas size. Any smaller size will make a brush look messy and shit.Here look:

Can you see the difference?? Lineart in 600x600 px is so much smoother

#2

#3

#4 RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON YOU NEED IT

#5

*:・ﾟ✧it’s like manga : *✧・ﾟ

that’s all tbh

i hope this was somewhat helpful 

Artist profile: Gerard Sekoto

‘Art is the spark, the illumination which is socially significant for it brings about understanding’ – Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993)

Gerard Sekoto was born in Botshabelo, Mpumalanga province, in 1913, the year in which the Natives Land Act dispossessed many black South Africans of their ancestral lands. In 1938 Sekoto moved to Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He held his first solo exhibition the following year, and in 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased his work Yellow Houses – A Street in Sophiatown (1939–1940). It was the first painting by a black South African artist to be acquired by a South African art institution, although Sekoto had to pose as a cleaner to see his own painting hanging in the gallery.

Sekoto based this painting, titled Song of the Pick (1946), on a photograph taken in the 1930s of black South African workers labouring under the watchful eye of a white foreman standing behind them. However, in his painting the dynamic has changed. Sekoto has enhanced the grace and power of the labourers, turning them to confront the small and puny figure of the overseer, who appears about to be impaled by their pickaxes.

Sekoto painted this work in the township of Eastwood in Pretoria, shortly before moving to Paris in what became a lifelong exile from South Africa. During the 1980s, postcard-sized reproductions of this iconic painting were widely distributed in South Africa, as both a badge of honour and a source of inspiration in the struggle against apartheid.

Explore a diverse range of art stretching back 100,000 years in our exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation (27 October 2016 – 26 February 2017).

Exhibition sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan

Logistics partner IAG Cargo

Song of the Pick, 1946. Image © Iziko Museums of South Africa, Art Collections, Cape Town. Photo by Carina Beyer.

Song of the Pick was based on this image, taken by photographer Andrew Goldie in the 1930s.

Happy almost birthday, Shakespeare! Or should I say Bard-thday? Recently, in honour of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death (conveniently for celebratory purposes, he was born on April 23 1564 and died on the same day in 1616), I was given the incredible opportunity to have a private audience to go through the University of Glasgow’s copy of the First Folio, page by page. I’ve written a short article for the University Library’s blog, which you can find here, but I wanted to share some other images on my own blog that I didn’t have room for on the official post!

The University of Glasgow’s First Folio (more properly known as Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies) is able to tell so many more stories than those of the plays contained in its pages- of the history of the antiquarian book trade, of the printing practices of the Renaissance, of book ownership and value. Rest assured, you’ll probably be seeing posts from me in the future about all of these things, as well as the typographical ornaments used in the book, which I found fascinating. The University’s Folio is particularly interesting due to the notations by past owners, including one who had apparently seen at least one of the original Chamberlain’s Men “By eyewittnesse”. But my favourite bit of the later additions is the morbid little poem on the reverse of one of the flyleaves: “Pitty it is the fam’d Shakespeare/ Shall ever want his chin or haire.”

Can the brain feel it? The world’s smallest extracellular needle-electrodes

A research team in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering and the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS) at Toyohashi University of Technology developed 5-μm-diameter needle-electrodes on 1 mm × 1 mm block modules. This tiny needle may help solve the mysteries of the brain and facilitate the development of a brain-machine interface. The research results were reported in Scientific Reports on Oct 25, 2016.

(Image caption: Extracellular needle-electrode with a diameter of 5 μm mounted on a connector)

The neuron networks in the human brain are extremely complex. Microfabricated silicon needle-electrode devices were expected to be an innovation that would be able to record and analyze the electrical activities of the microscale neuronal circuits in the brain.

However, smaller needle technologies (e.g., needle diameter < 10 μm) are necessary to reduce damage to brain tissue. In addition to the needle geometry, the device substrate should be minimized not only to reduce the total amount of damage to tissue but also to enhance the accessibility of the electrode in the brain. Thus, these electrode technologies will realize new experimental neurophysiological concepts.

A research team in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering and the EIIRIS at Toyohashi University of Technology developed 5- μm-diameter needle-electrodes on 1 mm × 1 mm block modules.

The individual microneedles are fabricated on the block modules, which are small enough to use in the narrow spaces present in brain tissue; as demonstrated in the recording using mouse cerebrum cortices. In addition, the block module remarkably improves the design variability in the packaging, offering numerous in vivo recording applications.

“We demonstrated the high design variability in the packaging of our electrode device, and in vivo neuronal recordings were performed by simply placing the device on a mouse’s brain. We were very surprised that high quality signals of a single unit were stably recorded over a long period using the 5-μm-diameter needle,” explained the first author, Assistant Professor Hirohito Sawahata, and co-author, researcher Shota Yamagiwa.

The leader of the research team, Associate Professor Takeshi Kawano said: “Our silicon needle technology offers low invasive neuronal recordings and provides novel methodologies for electrophysiology; therefore, it has the potential to enhance experimental neuroscience.” He added, “We expect the development of applications to solve the mysteries of the brain and the development of brain–machine interfaces.”

Oh me! Oh my! Oh, what did you say? That in 1904 Dr. Seuss was born on this day?

Yes that is true and as much as we knew, Turns out he did more than write kids books for you!

Though he may have been a literary tycoon he still found success penning political & industrial cartoons

For instance the bug spray company Flit had him do this poster warning about malaria back in World War Two.

With a vampiric pout and a blood cocktail in hand he introduced us to this Mosquito named Ann.

Though this rhyme may be forced and really contrived, Do check out this blog post from which these lines were derived.

Because on this date, March 2nd, 1904 was born Dr. Seuss, a man we all surely adore!

Happy 113th birthday, Dr. Seuss!

“The Mouse chirpeth… The Duck quaketh… The Wolf howleth” — from the very first picture book for children, published in 1658: http://buff.ly/2l6FaBH

Hearing with your eyes – A Western style of speech perception

Which parts of a person’s face do you look at when you listen them speak? Lip movements affect the perception of voice information from the ears when listening to someone speak, but native Japanese speakers are mostly unaffected by that part of the face. Recent research from Japan has revealed a clear difference in the brain network activation between two groups of people, native English speakers and native Japanese speakers, during face-to-face vocal communication.

It is known that visual speech information, such as lip movement, affects the perception of voice information from the ears when speaking to someone face-to-face. For example, lip movement can help a person to hear better under noisy conditions. On the contrary, dubbed movie content, where the lip movement conflicts with a speaker’s voice, gives a listener the illusion of hearing another sound. This illusion is called the “McGurk effect.”

According to an analysis of previous behavioral studies, native Japanese speakers are not influenced by visual lip movements as much as native English speakers. To examine this phenomenon further, researchers from Kumamoto University measured and analyzed gaze patterns, brain waves, and reaction times for speech identification between two groups of 20 native Japanese speakers and 20 native English speakers.

The difference was clear. When natural speech is paired with lip movement, native English speakers focus their gaze on a speaker’s lips before the emergence of any sound. The gaze of native Japanese speakers, however, is not as fixed. Furthermore, native English speakers were able to understand speech faster by combining the audio and visual cues, whereas native Japanese speakers showed delayed speech understanding when lip motion was in view.

“Native English speakers attempt to narrow down candidates for incoming sounds by using information from the lips which start moving a few hundreds of milliseconds before vocalizations begin. Native Japanese speakers, on the other hand, place their emphasis only on hearing, and visual information seems to require extra processing,” explained Kumamoto University’s Professor Kaoru Sekiyama, who lead the research.

Kumamoto University researchers then teamed up with researchers from Sapporo Medical University and Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) to measure and analyze brain activation patterns using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Their goal was to elucidate differences in brain activity between the two languages.

The functional connectivity in the brain between the area that deals with hearing and the area that deals with visual motion information, the primary auditory and middle temporal areas respectively, was stronger in native English speakers than in native Japanese speakers. This result strongly suggests that auditory and visual information are associated with each other at an early stage of information processing in an English speaker’s brain, whereas the association is made at a later stage in a Japanese speaker’s brain. The functional connectivity between auditory and visual information, and the manner in which the two types of information are processed together was shown to be clearly different between the two different language speakers.

“It has been said that video materials produce better results when studying a foreign language. However, it has also been reported that video materials do not have a very positive effect for native Japanese speakers,” said Professor Sekiyama. “It may be that there are unique ways in which Japanese people process audio information, which are related to what we have shown in our recent research, that are behind this phenomenon.”

These findings were published in the journal “Scientific Reports” on August 11th and October 13th, 2016.

Discovering the daily life during jomon period - 縄文人の生活再現 

Molecule of the Day - DDT

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (C14H9Cl5), more commonly known as DDT, is a colourless, tasteless solid under room conditions. It was used as an insecticide during the 1940s-1970s, and gained notoriety after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which highlighted the health and environmental effects of DDT.

DDT acts by binding to voltage-gated sodium ion channels of neurons (as seen on the left of the diagram below), causing these channels to be permanently open instead of opening only upon the arrival of an action potential. Consequently, there is a continuous influx of Na+ ions into the neuron, which triggers a series of rapid action potentials and hence neuronal impulses. This leads to rapid muscle contractions, spasms, and death.

While this effect does not occur in humans and other non-insects, it is still moderately toxic, and as been shown to be an endocrine disruptor. Therefore, chronic exposure to it can lead to tumour formation, developmental problems, and birth defects. DDT is also considered to be a possible carcinogen.

Due to the hydrophobicity of DDT, it tends to accumulate in the lipids of living organisms rather than in the environment. This results in biomagnification, in which its concentration increases upon going up the food chain, as each organism of a rung of the chain consumes multiple prey. Consequently, the usage of DDT affected the populations of many birds of prey, such as the bald eagle.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published the book Silent Spring, which highlighted the negative effects of the usage of DDT and other pesticides on the environment and biodiversity. This book was revolutionary; it sparked a heated debate on pesticides and contributed to the 1972 US ban on DDT. The world followed suit; most countries around the world now prohibit the use of DDT, except for limited disease vector control purposes, such as for malaria.

DDT is synthesised by the condensation of a molecule of chloral and 2 molecules of chlorobenzene via an electrophilic substitution reaction, producing water as a by-product.