Im Putting Together A Couple Of Scottish Folk Mixes Bc That’s What I Do And Im Honestly Curious If

71 vintage photos captured daily life of Yokohama in the late 1900s.

Around 6 million years ago, the African and Eurasian plates moved together, cutting the Mediterranean Sea off from the Atlantic. Without an influx of water from the Atlantic, evaporation began removing more water from the Mediterranean than rivers could replace. The sea dried out almost completely over the course of a couple thousand years.

About 5.3 million years ago, the Straits of Gibraltar reopened, creating a massive flood into the Mediterranean known as the Zanclean Flood. Water rushed down the straits and into the Mediterranean at speeds as high as 40 m/s (90 mph). At its peak, the Zanclean Flood is estimated to have reached rates 1000 times greater than the volumetric flow rate of the Amazon River. 

A similar breach flood occurred in the Black Sea within the past 10,000 years when the Bosporus became unblocked. That flood likely had a devastating impact on Neolithic societies in the area and may be the inspiration for the floods described in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible. (Image credit: BBC, source)

The Blood Of Dragons Could Destroy Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing problems of our times. Traditional antimicrobial drugs aren’t working the way they used to, and the rise

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing problems of our times. Traditional antimicrobial drugs aren’t working the way they used to, and the rise of “superbugs” could bring about the post-antibiotic age, where easily treatable infections suddenly become life-threatening incurable illnesses.

There have been a slew of new discoveries recently that have revealed brand new ways to turn the tide, but the latest revelation at the hands of a team from George Mason University is a particularly unusual sounding one. As it turns out, we could use the blood of dragons to annihilate superbugs.

No, this isn’t an analogy or a plot line from Game of Thrones. The devil-toothed Komodo dragon – the devious beast from Indonesia – has a particular suite of chemical compounds in its blood that’s pure anathema to a wide range of bacteria.

They’re known as CAMPs – cationic antimicrobial peptides – and although plenty of living creatures (including humans) have versions of these, Komodo dragons have 48, with 47 of them being powerfully antimicrobial. The team managed to cleverly isolate these CAMPs in a laboratory by using electrically-charged hydrogels – strange, aerated substances – to suck them out of the dragons’ blood samples.

Synthesizing their own versions of eight of these CAMPs, they put them up against two strains of lab-grown “superbugs,” MRSA and Pseudomona aeruginosa, to see if they had any effect. Remarkably, all eight were able to kill the latter, whereas seven of them destroyed all trace of both, doing something that plenty of conventional antibiotic drugs couldn’t.

Writing in the Journal of Proteome Research, the researchers write that these powerful CAMPs explain why Komodo dragons are able to contain such a dense, biodiverse population of incredibly dangerous bacteria in their mouths. Although it’s not clear where all these bacteria originally came from, the chemical compounds in their blood ensures that they’ll never be properly infected.

In fact, it was this ability to co-exist with such lethal bacteria that piqued the interest of the researchers in the first place.

“Komodo dragon serum has been demonstrated to have in vitro antibacterial properties,” they note. “The role that CAMPs play in the innate immunity of the Komodo dragon is potentially very informative, and the newly identified Komodo dragon CAMPs may lend themselves to the development of new antimicrobial therapeutics.”

It’ll be awhile before these CAMPs are tested in human trials, but the idea that we’re effectively using dragon’s blood, or plasma, to fight against resurgent diseases is genuinely quite thrilling. Alongside Hulk-like drugs that physically rip bacteria apart, there’s a chance that, with the help of these legendary lizards, we may win this war yet.

He really put himself into the character.

I am not a native Japanese speaker but the first word that comes to mind is 懐かしい (natsukashii), which is that warm fuzzy feeling you have when you think upon a fond memory or experience. Or that feeling you are having when you say, "sure brings back memories." Depending on context it gets translated to nostalgic, or longing, or dear, but by themselves they all feel somewhat inadequate.

For Chinese mandarin, I can think of 骗我的感情 (pian wo de gan qing) (there should be tone markers, but I don't know how to put them in, sorry!), which is literally "trick/bluff my feelings", which I am now finding quite to explain! Hmm... it's that disappointment you feel when someone sets your expectations up for something and then fails to deliver. I suppose like feeling cheated.

Hope that helps and good luck!

bobbies

YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE AND I NEED YOUR HELP PLEASE I BEG YOU

hi. sorry about that catchy title, but you have something i need. you speak a language, maybe even multiple languages. you use emotions words everyday. i’m sure you know that languages have their own emotion words that are very hard to translate to other languages, for example, the word ‘anxiety’ doesn’t really exist in Polish, it is always a challenge to translate it in such way to convey its true meaning. Polish people don’t really feel anxiety, because they don’t have the word for it. i need your help with something: tell me an emotion word that is unique to your language or hard to translate. i’ll ask you a few questions and maybe i’ll write an essay about it using the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). it’s a linguistic theory, whatever. please help a linguist out. i need an A. i promise i won’t get an F on your precious word. 

i am interested in emotion words from every language except for Polish and English.

you can reply under this post, you can message me privately, i can give you my e-mail, whatever works for you. it would really help me if you reblogged this post, but no pressure

help education.. pretty please?

Frogs and toads in Scotland

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.”

The Hippocratic Oath is one of the most famous pieces of medical writing, and it includes some of the basic ethical guidelines for medical practitioners. It is also constantly evolving. The images above come from a version of the oath that we found in the 1634 edition of Peter Lowe’s surgical text. If you compare it to this example of a modern version, you’ll notice some similarities and some differences. Both of them emphasize respecting the work of prior physicians and protecting the patient’s privacy. On the other hand, the modern oath doesn’t begin with an invocation to the gods, and it makes no mention of refusing to assist in abortions or any type of treatment that involves cutting. These changes illustrate how the practice of medicine, and what we expect of medical practitioners, changes over time.

New students at the Washington University School of Medicine are given the chance to devise their own student oath that is similar to the Hippocratic Oath. Take a look at the 2016 class oath here.

12 Amazing Facts About Elephants

In honor of World Elephant Day, we present you with 12 little known facts about one of our favorite creatures…in GIFs, of course.

1. Elephants know every member of their herd and are able to recognize up to 30 companions by sight or smell. 

2. They can remember and distinguish particular cues that signal danger and can recall locations long after their last visit.

3. An elephant’s memory is not limited to its herd, nor is it limited to its species. In one instance, two circus elephants that performed together rejoiced when crossing paths 23 years later. Elephants have also recognized humans that they once bonded with after decades apart. 4. 

4. The elephant boasts the largest brain of any land mammal as well as an impressive encephalization quotient (the size of the animal’s brain relative to its body size). The elephant’s EQ is nearly as high as a chimpanzee’s.

5. The elephant brain is remarkably similar to the human brain, with as many neurons and synapses, as well as a highly developed hippocampus and cerebral cortex.

6. Elephants are one of the few non-human animals to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

7. Elephants are creative problem solvers. 

8. Don’t try to outsmart an elephant! They have an understanding of basic arithmetic and can even keep track of relative quantities.

9. Elephants communicate using everything from body signals to infrared rumbles that can be heard from kilometers away. Their understanding of syntax suggests that they have their own language and grammar. 

10. Elephants can recognize 12 distinct tones of music and recreate melodies.

11. Elephants are the only non-human animals to mourn their dead, performing burial rituals and returning to visit graves. 

12. Elephants are one of the few species who can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Given what we now know about elephants, and what they continue to teach us about animal intelligence, it is more important than ever to make sure that these magnificent creatures do not vanish.

Check out some more fun elephant facts here and be sure to watch the TED-Ed Lesson Why elephants never forget - Alex Gendler

Animation by the ever-talented Avi Ofer

“Brainprint” Biometric ID Hits 100% Accuracy

Psychologists and engineers at Binghamton University in New York say they’ve hit a milestone in the quest to use the unassailable inner workings of the mind as a form of biometric identification. They came up with an electroencephalograph system that proved 100 percent accurate at identifying individuals by the way their brains responded to a series of images. But EEG as a practical means of authentication is still far off.

Many earlier attempts had come close to 100 percent accuracy but couldn’t completely close the gap. “It’s a big deal going from 97 to 100 percent because we imagine the applications for this technology being for high-security situations,” says Sarah Laszlo, the assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton who led the research with electrical engineering professor Zhanpeng Jin.

Perhaps as important as perfect accuracy is that this new form of ID can do something fingerprints and retinal scans have a hard time achieving: It can be “canceled.”

Fingerprint authentication can be reset if the associated data is stolen, because that data can be stored as a mathematically transformed version of itself, points out Clarkson University biometrics expert Stephanie Schuckers. However, that trick doesn’t work if it’s the fingerprint (or the finger) itself that’s stolen. And the theft part, at least, is easier than ever. In 2014 hackers claimed to have cloned German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen’s fingerprints just by taking a high-­definition photo of her hands at a public event.

Several early attempts at EEG-based identification sought the equivalent of a fingerprint in the electrical activity of a brain at rest. But this new brain biometric, which its inventors call CEREBRE, dodges the cancelability problem because it’s based on the brain’s responses to a sequence of particular types of images. To keep that ID from being permanently hijacked, those images can be changed or re-sorted to essentially make a new biometric passkey, should the original one somehow be hacked.

CEREBRE, which Laszlo, Jin, and colleagues described in IEEE Transactions in Information Forensics and Security, involves presenting a person wearing an EEG system with images that fall into several cate­gories: foods people feel strongly about, celebrities who also evoke emotions, simple sine waves of different frequencies, and uncommon words. The words and images are usually black and white, but occasionally one is presented in color because that produces its own kind of response.

Each image causes a recognizable change in voltage at the scalp called an event-related potential, or ERP. The different categories of images involve somewhat different combinations of parts of your brain, and they were already known to produce slight differences in the shapes of ERPs in different people. Laszlo’s hypothesis was that using all of them—several more than any other system—would create enough different ERPs to accurately distinguish one person from another.

The EEG responses were fed to software called a classifier. After testing several schemes, including a variety of neural networks and other machine-learning tricks, the engineers found that what actually worked best was a system based on simple cross correlation.

In the experiments, each of the 50 test subjects saw a sequence of 500 images, each flashed for 1 second. “We collected 500, knowing it was overkill,” Laszlo says. Once the researchers crunched the data they found that just 27 images would have been enough to hit the 100 percent mark.

The experiments were done with a high-quality research-grade EEG, which used 30 electrodes attached to the skull with conductive goop. However, the data showed that the system needs only three electrodes for 100 percent identification, and Laszlo says her group is working on simplifying the setup. They’re testing consumer EEG gear from Emotiv and NeuroSky, and they’ve even tried to replicate the work with electrodes embedded in a Google Glass, though the results weren’t spectacular, she says.

For EEG to really be taken seriously as a biometric ID, brain interfaces will need to be pretty commonplace, says Schuckers. That might yet happen. “As we go more and more into wearables as a standard part of our lives, [EEGs] might be more suitable,” she says.

But like any security system, even an EEG biometric will attract hackers. How can you hack something that depends on your thought patterns? One way, explains Laszlo, is to train a hacker’s brain to mimic the right responses. That would involve flashing light into a hacker’s eye at precise times while the person is observing the images. These flashes are known to alter the shape of the ERP.