the-science-llama:

kqedscience:

A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in Tornado Alley

“Wind Map” is a stunning interactive data visualization that presents wind patterns across the continental U.S. in real time. Picture above is what it looked like last night at 10:59 CDT, in the aftermath of yesterday’s devastating Oklahoma tornado.”

Read more here from io9.

See the wind map website here

(via thescienceblog)

spaceplasma:

Black-body radiation

When astronomers refer to the temperature of a star, they are talking about the temperature of the gases in the photosphere, and they express those temperatures on the Kelvin temperature scale.  On this scale, zero degrees Kelvin (written 0 K) is absolute zero (2273.2°C or 2459.7°F), the temperature at which an object contains no thermal energy that can be extracted. Water freezes at 273 K and boils at 373 K (at sea-level atmospheric pressure). The Kelvin temperature scale is useful in astronomy because it is based on absolute zero and consequently is related directly to the motion of the particles in an object.

Now you can understand why a hot object glows, or to put it another way, why a hot object emits photons, bundles of electromagnetic energy. The hotter an object is, the more motion there is among its particles. The agitated particles, including electrons, collide with each other, and when electrons accelerate—change their motion—part of the energy is carried away as electromagnetic radiation. The radiation emitted by a heated object is called black-body radiation, a name translated from a German term that refers to the way a perfectly opaque object would behave. A perfectly opaque object would be both a perfectly efficient absorber and a perfectly efficient emitter of radiation. At room temperature, such a perfect absorber and emitter would look black, but at higher temperatures it would glow at wavelengths visible to a human eye. That explains why in astronomy and physics contexts you will see the term black-body referring to objects that glow brightly.

Black-body radiation is quite common. In fact, it is responsible for the light emitted by an incandescent light bulb. Electricity flowing through the filament of the bulb heats it to high temperature, and it glows. You can also recognize the light emitted by hot lava as black-body radiation. Many objects in the sky, including the sun and other stars, primarily emit black-body radiation because they are mostly opaque.

Credit: Michael A. Seeds, Dana E. Backman

Gif credit: caucasianmale

(via sifu-kisu)

juliepasini:

Thyroid Hormone Synthesis
Autodesk 3Ds Max, Mudbox, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator

© Julianne Pasini 2012

(via fuckyeahmedicalstuff)

drewsica:

Firstly, Paint is so inferior to OneNote, but idk how to get imaged from OneNote… Anyways…

Yesterday: carbohydrate metabolism

Today: citric acid cycle, electron transport/oxidative phosphorylation, beta oxidation, and ketone bodies

Tomorrow: fatty acid biosynthesis, amino acid synthesis and degradation, and nucleic acids

LET’S DO THIS.

(okay, so maybe I slept in today and am feeling a bit more energetic than expected for almost 1AM)

(via thescienceblog)

jtotheizzoe:

Why does music make us feel happy or sad? Or angry or romantic? How can simple sound waves cause so much emotion?

First things first, this is the best t-shirt I’ve worn in any episode.

I went from my comfy chair to the streets of Austin to investigate whether it might be written into neural evolution. Modern neuroscience says our brains may be wired to pick certain emotions out of music because they remind us of how people move!

Humans are the only species we know that creates and communicate using music, but it’s still unclear how or why we do that, brain-wise. Is it just a lucky side effect of evolution, like Steven Pinker says? Or is it a deeper part of our evolutionary history, as people like Mark Changizi and Daniel Levitin argue?

Some brand new evolutionary psychology research says that we may read emotion in music because it relates to how we sense emotion in people’s movements. We’ll take a trip from Austin to Dartmouth to Cambodia to hear why music makes us feel so many feels. The connections between movement and music go far beyond dance moves!

Mike over at Idea Channel has a different opinion, that our emotional reactions to music are purely learned and cultural. Head on over and check it out. Do you agree?

For more reading on this awesome topic, check out these references.

spaceplasma:

Father of the internet, Vint Cerf, on creating the interplanetary internet

Over 15 years ago, Vint Cerf, “one of the fathers of the Internet,” and some of his pals at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory started an absurdly ambitious project. They wanted to create a computer network in space, one that would let nodes located anywhere from the International Space Station to the surface of Mars communicate seamlessly across hundreds of thousands of miles. They call it the Interplanetary Internet—or InterPlaNet, if you will—and according to a new Wired interview, Cerf is getting closer to fulfilling his decades old ambition of networking the celestial bodies.

There’s only one problem: Vint Cerf works for Google now. Back in the 1990s when he got involved in this interplanetary Internet idea, Cerf was working hard to preserve the founding principles of the web and joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1999. It’s fairly safe to say that there was a non-profit spin on these gigs, despite the fact that the Internet has become a profit-making machine. No wonder Google was interested in hiring the guy who practically invented the damn thing.

The specifics of Cerf’s role at Google are unclear. When he was hired in 2005, the Associated Press reported that Google hired the sextagenarian “to float more ideas and develop new products, adding another weapon to the online search engine leader’s rapidly growing arsenal of intellect.” The report adds, “Cerf’s official title will be ‘chief Internet evangelist,’ but he is determined to be more than a figurehead or detached visionary.”

But isn’t it a little unsettling that a project as huge as an interplanetary Internet is being masterminded by an employee of Google—which dominates the web to an incomparable degree—even if he is just a figurehead? The technology’s already being tested, and it’s no longer a hypothetical idea. It makes you wonder how much access to this new network Google will have. Maybe there’s even a Google Galactic Fiber business plan floating around Mountain View, probably underneath a pile of discarded Google Glass prototypes. 

It might feel unsettling, but there a couple of reasons to believe that everything is going to be okay. Google is not going to take over the galaxy any time soon. For one, Cerf works for Google, but he’s not exactly an evangelist, at least for Google’s products. He’s publicly condemned the company’s viewpoint on certain issues in the past, and just last year declared that Google’s grasp on the search market isn’t really as firm as people might think.

The other encouraging thing about the future of the interplanetary Internet is how the space industry is making a successful transition from being a public works project to being a private enterprise. With companies like SpaceX making deliveries to the ISS more cheaply than governments could, it’s apparent that we’re on the cusp of a potentially huge new industry, and the billions of dollars worth of funding that companies like Google can provide will come in handy soon. While some may get anxious about a massive corporation like Google or Virgin expanding into space, it’s actually much to the public’s advantage to have a guy like Vint Cerf dictating the basic rules.

Cerf has spent pretty much his entire life building and preserving a free and open Internet. It’s unclear if Google is even interested in space, and even if they were bullish about playing a key role, past experience suggests that Cerf won’t have any problem telling them when they’re wrong.

 

(via thescienceblog)

mucholderthen:

From Salameandering:

Lungs are what enabled the ancestors of all tetrapods to climb out of the Devonian soup some 400 million years ago …  Since they utilize the vast surface area of alveoli for gas exchange, rather than the relatively limited amount of surface area provided by a creature’s skin …

• An average human adult’s skin has a surface area of roughly 16-21 square feet
• whereas the surface area of the alveoli inside that same human is about 100 square yards!

Amphibians are neither large, nor particularly active, … amphibians of the order Anura (ie: frogs) evolved four mechanisms for breathing:

1. through gills
2. via lungs
3. through their very permeable skin
4. through sensitive skin inside the mouth.

Lungless salamanders (2/3 of all salamander diversity) took things one step further and got rid of the primitive lungs all together, to rely solely on cutaneous gas exchange.

Read more at Salameandering Into Cutaneous Respiration.

(via scientificillustration)

neuromorphogenesis:

Psychiatry divided as mental health ‘bible’ denounced

The world’s biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry’s “bible” – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”. This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5.

On 29 April, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), advocated a major shift away from categorising diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia according to a person’s symptoms. Instead, Insel wants mental disorders to be diagnosed more objectively using genetics, brain scans that show abnormal patterns of activity and cognitive testing.

This would mean abandoning the manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that has been the mainstay of psychiatric research for 60 years.

The DSM has been embroiled in controversy for a number of years. Critics have said that it has outlasted its usefulness, has turned complaints that are not truly illnesses into medical conditions, and has been unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies looking for new markets for their drugs.

There have also been complaints that widened definitions of several disorder have led to over-diagnosis of conditions such as bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Now, Insel has said in a blog post published by the NIMH that he wants a complete shift to diagnoses based on science not symptoms.

“Unlike our definitions of ischaemic heart disease, lymphoma or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure,” Insel says. “In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain, or the quality of fever.”

Insel says that elsewhere in medicine this type of symptom-based diagnosis been abandoned over the past half-century as scientists have learned that symptoms alone seldom indicate the best choice of treatment.

To accelerate the shift to biologically based diagnosis, Insel favours an approach embodied by a programme launched 18 months ago at the NIMH called the Research Domain Criteria project.

The approach is based on the idea that mental disorders are biological problems involving brain circuits that dictate specific patterns of cognition, emotion and behaviour. Concentrating on treating these problems, rather than symptoms is hoped to provide a better outlook for patients.

“We cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the gold standard,” says Insel. “That is why NIMH will be reorienting its research away from DSMcategories,” says Insel.

Insel is aware that what he is suggesting will take time – probably at least a decade, but sees it as the first step towards delivering the “precision medicine” that he says has transformed cancer diagnosis and treatment.

“It’s potentially game-changing, but needs to be based on underlying science that is reliable,” says Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. “It’s for the future, rather than for now, but anything that improves understanding of the etiology and genetics of disease is going to be better [than symptom-based diagnosis].”

Michael Owen of the University of Cardiff, who was on the psychosis working group for DSM-5, agrees. “Research needs to break out of the straitjacket of current diagnosis categories,” he says. But like Wessely, he says it is too early to throw away the existing categories.

“These are incredibly complicated disorders,” says Owen. “To understand the neuroscience in sufficient depth and detail to build a diagnosis process will take a long time, but in the meantime, clinicians still have to do their work.”

David Clark of the University of Oxford says he’s delighted that NIMH is funding science-based diagnosis across current disease categories. “However, patient benefit is probably some way off, and will need to be proved,” he says.

The controversy is likely to erupt more publically in the coming month when the American Psychiatric Association holds its annual meeting in San Francisco, where DSM-5 will be officially launched, and in June in London when the Institute of Psychiatry holds a two-day meeting on the DSM.

(via thescienceblog)

Five “sudden symptoms” of stroke: Recognizing these could save a life - even a young life

Stroke is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States. Each year an estimated 795,000 people in this country experience a stroke.* That’s approximately the equivalent of every man, woman and child living in Anaheim and Long Beach combined. But did you know that stroke is also the No. 1 cause of adult disability?

Even more surprising, stroke is no longer a disease only of the elderly. Nearly 20 percent of strokes occur in people younger than age 55, and over the past decade, the average age at stroke occurrence has dropped from 71 to 69.

“The good news,” says Patrick D. Lyden, MD, chair of Neurology and director of the Stroke Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, “is that quickly recognizing the signs of stroke and seeking immediate medical care from stroke specialists can minimize the effects of the disease or even save a life. And just as important as knowing the symptoms is the knowledge that regardless of an individual’s age, those symptoms need to be treated as the emergency that they are.”

• Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg on one side of the body.

• Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding.

• Sudden trouble seeing on one side.

• Sudden, severe difficulty walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination.

• Sudden, severe headache with no known cause.

It is important to emphasize the words “sudden” and “severe” and the number “one.” Any of these symptoms can occur in a mild, fleeting way and not be worrisome, but if any one of them comes on suddenly and is quite severe, it could signal the onset of a stroke, which increasingly is described as a “brain attack,” because like a heart attack, a stroke requires immediate action to improve the odds against disability and death.

Time is brain

The National Stroke Association estimates that two-thirds of stroke survivors have some disability.

“Clot-busting” drugs make it possible in some cases to stop a stroke in progress and even reverse damage. But the crucial element is time. If given within three hours of onset, the drugs improve outcomes by about 30 percent.

Not every hospital or stroke center has the facilities, staff or resources to provide complete care for every stroke patient, but many hospitals and health authorities are collaborating to establish regional stroke-treatment networks to be sure that even the most complex cases are rapidly transferred to a center with the needed level of care.

(Image: National Stroke Association)

(via thescienceblog)

reina-de-tazas:

Finally done!

Based off a chart that I created for my own reference a while ago; I’ve shared this with a number of folks who found it helpful, so I decided to turn it into a kind of infographic.

The more I read about the thyroid, the more amazed I am at how critically it is tied to our overall quality of life, and almost every aspect of our health. I’ve experienced this personally - aside from the standard low energy/cold hands/hairloss elements of hypothyroid, I also found that switching to a natural thyroid medication with both T3 and T4 substantially improved my PCOS symptoms - it brought my Testosterone down by almost 25%, back into a normal range. It also completely corrected muscle pain in my quads, which I had before thought was a bit of tendonitis that wouldn’t heal.

Man I could go on about thyroid for forever but I’d better stop….:)

(via scientificillustration)