The Joyful Addictions of Geeks/Nerds

coolchicksfromhistory:

Justine Johnstone Wagner (1895-1982) appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and was a called the most beautiful blonde on Broadway.  She also appeared in a handful of silent films before retiring from acting to attend Columbia University.  At Columbia she was part of the team to develop the first IV drip. Justine was third author after Samuel Hirshberg and Harold T. Hyman on the paper announcing this development in 1931.  Justine later had a personal laboratory built in her cellar where she researched endocrinology, cancer, and syphilis   

(via thescienceofreality)

ohmysagan:

tastysynapse:

Zen Pencils Comic: 100. CARL SAGAN: Pale blue dot

I read this in his voice.

(via stopallthedamnclocks)

naadaaa:

Richard Feynman by Shelley Gazin, 1985.

(via scinerds)

explore-blog:

Patent drawing for the Fisher Anti-Gravity Pen, a.k.a. the NASA “space pen” that popular legend says the Russians outsmarted with a mere pencil. 

(Source: , via scinerds)

fuckyeahnightmares:

Second Wife of Henry VIII and mother of a future Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn had three years as queen consort before Henry tired of her. Accused (most historians agree falsely) of adultery, incest and witchcraft, she faced an executioner’s sword with her head held…

themedicalapprentice:

In 1503, Leonardo started the painting of Madonna Lisa Maria de Gherardini (born in Florence in 1479 and died at the age of 37.) He worked on the painting for 4 years. The Mona Lisa has been acclaimed as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world.”

With only a history of premature death as a clue, let’s move on to the clinical examination of the beautiful and ever-smiling Mona Lisa. Two important findings are present:

Firstly, a careful inspection of the famous painting reveals a yellow irregular leather-like spot at the inner end of the left upper eyelid. This is currently known as a Xanthelasma, which is a yellowish deposit of cholesterol underneath the skin.

Secondly, there is a soft bumpy well-defined swelling of the dorsum of the right hand beneath the index finger about 3 cm long, which raises the possibility of a subcutaneous lipoma.

An infrared detailed photograph published in 1974 reveals that the yellow skin alteration was an integral part of the painting at the time of its initiation, and not a subsequent addition.

These findings in a 25-30 year old woman, who died at the age of 37, may be indicative of essential hyperlipidemia, a strong risk factor for ischemic heart disease in middle age. A stronger evidence for this would be the observation of a corneal Arcus, but that is not the case with the Mona Lisa. 

In short, the Mona Lisa probably died of a heart attack. 

Although Hyperlipidemia is often primary and familial, it could also occur secondary to other disorders including Hypothyroidism (could explain the absence of eyebrows, although that could have been the result of epilation, a common practice at the time), Diabetes Mellitus and Nephrotic Syndrome.

As far as is known, this portrait of Mona Lisa painted in 1506 is the first evidence that xanthelasma and lipoma were prevalent in the sixteenth century, long before the first description by Addison and Gall in 1851.

[Xanthelasma and Lipoma in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa]

(via thescienceofreality)

vonlipwig:

vonlipwig:

hey, whatever happened to franz ferdinand?

the band, i mean

not the archduke of austria

i know what happened to the archduke of austria

(via knowledgeiscake)

ikenbot:

Mount Nemrut at Dawn

Winter constellations, from Orion to Canis Major (with the bright Sirius) shine in early morning sky above the ancient statues of Nemrut Dağı or Mount Nemrut.

The World Heritage site is located at top of the 2130-meters high mountain in southeastern Turkey, 40km north of Kahta, near Adıyaman. In 62 BC, King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene built on the mountain top a tomb-sanctuary flanked by huge statues (8-9 meters high) of himself, two lions, two eagles and various Greek, Armenian and Persian gods, such as Hercules-Vahagn, Zeus-Aramazd or Oromasdes (associated with the Persian god Ahura Mazda), Tyche, and Apollo-Mithras. The statues have Greek and Persian features.

As noted by the photographer “This is the highest place in the region and you can easily distinguish the odd-shaped peak from great distances, as there is an additional 50 meters of pyramidal tumulus topping. On the morning of September 26, I woke up before the start of morning twilight and climbed the steep path to the monument.

I hurried to beat the approaching dawn and also all the tourists coming to watch the sunrise. It was already getting bright. This picture shows the eastern terrace statues and their separated heads lit by the Moon”. — Tunc Tezel.

(via scinerds)

kidsneedscience:

On December 13, 1920, Albert Abraham Michelson and Francis Pease measured diameter of the star Betelgeuse, the first measurement of the size of any star other than the Sun. Although the relative size of Betelgeuse has been in dispute since then mostly due to its massive size and incredible speed through space, the methods devised by Michaelson and Pease have been used for decades. The name Betelgeuse is derived from the Arabic يد الجوزاء (Yad al-Jauzā’), meaning the Hand of al-Jauzā, al-Jauzā being the constellation known in the west as Orion the Hunter. Betelgeuse is the right shoulder (or armpit) of Orion and the alpha star of the constellation.  The letter B in Betelgeuse, however, was a mistransliteration from Arabic into medieval Latin of the first character Y, which was misread as a B. Betelgeuse arrived in English in 1515 as a direct phonetic transliteration of the Arabic as Ibt al Jauzah, which due to this mispelling was also mistranslated as the Armpit of the Central One. Intermediary forms include Bed Elgueze, Beit Algueze, Betelgeux and Betelgeuze, finally settling on Betelgeuse around the time Michaelson and Pease were measuring the star.

Everything about this star has been misunderstood for centuries, starting with its name in English and continuing to the present day. When Michaelson and Pease attempted to measure its size, interferometry was still a new science and early estimates both missed its size and proximity. Long considered the largest star in the catalog (currently Betelgeuse ranks third largest), Betelgeuse is a massive red super giant millions of times larger than the sun.  As recently as the last ten or fifteen years the size and distance of Betelgeuse have been refined and updated as new and improved methods have been implemented.  

Michaelson, the scientist who first measured Betelgeuse, had a life scripted by Hollywood: his parents fled Poland when he was only two years old and settled in the American West. Michaelson recieved an appointment from no less than President Ulysses S. Grant to attend the fledgling United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland where he began his scientific endeavors in earnest. He is actually more famous for his experiments to measure the speed of light accurately, known as the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which he began while in Annapolis and which he continued to refine for decades as he tried to measure the impact of aether on the speed of light.  He never was able to find evidence of aether, which later became significant and celebrated when Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. He was awarded most major scientific prizes including the Nobel Prize of 1907 and is considered the first American to win that prize. His life was so dramatic and crammed with acheivement that his early life and appointment to USNA managed to penetrate into popular culture when his life was celebrated on an episode of Gunsmoke, in which an unpleasant local teacher attempts to block his advancement.  The episode Look to the Stars was broadcast in March 1962, 31 years after his death on May 9, 1931.  

Although Michaelson and Pease’s first measurement has been in flux since publication, this was not due to flaws in their science or methodology.  As recently as 1991 the Yale University Observatory measured the distance to Betelgeuse at 330 light years.  The Hipparcos Input Catalog measured the distance two years later at 650 light years, almost doubling Yale’s measurement.  In 2008 a team working with Very Large Array Radio Telescopes lead by Graham Harper measured the distance at 643 light years with a margin of error of plus or minus 146 (!!!) light years.  

(via thescienceofreality)

laboratoryequipment:

Researchers Solve Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’

Research by Indiana Univ. paleobotanist David Dilcher and colleagues in Europe sheds new light on what Charles Darwin famously called “an abominable mystery:” the apparently sudden appearance and rapid spread of flowering plants in the fossil record.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers present a scenario in which flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved and colonized various types of aquatic environments over about 45 million years in the early to middle Cretaceous Period.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/12/researchers-solve-darwin%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98abominable-mystery%E2%80%99

(via scinerds)

ikenbot:

Light From Universe’s First Stars Seen

Astronomers have spotted light from the very first stars in the universe, which are almost as old as time itself.

Image: Ultraviolet and visible light emitted by all the stars that ever existed is still coursing through the universe. Astronomers refer to this “fog” of starlight as the extragalactic background light (EBL). Image released Nov. 1, 2012. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the universe cooled enough to let atoms form, which eventually clumped together to create the first stars. Ever since these stars ignited, their light has been filling the universe, creating a pervasive glow throughout space that each successive generation of stars adds to.

Now, astronomers have detected this glow — called the extragalactic background light, or EBL — and have separated out the light from later stars, isolating the contribution from the first stars that ever existed.

“The EBL is the ensemble of photons generated by all the stars and also all the black holes in the universe,” said astrophysicist Marco Ajello of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, who led the research. “The EBL also includes the light of the first massive stars that ever shone. We have a fairly good knowledge of the light emitted by ‘normal’ stars. Thus, by measuring the EBL we are able to constrain the light of the first stars.”

Ajello and his team did not measure the EBL directly, but they detected it by analyzing measurements of distant black holes made by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Fermi studied light from objects called blazars, which are giant black holes that release copious amounts of light while gobbling up large meals of matter.

“We use [blazars] as cosmic lighthouses,” Ajello said. “We observe their dimming due to the EBL ‘fog’. This allows us to quantify how much EBL there is between us and the blazars. As blazars are distributed across the universe, we can measure the EBL at different epochs.”

The study was able to probe light emitted by stars that existed when the universe was just 0.6 billion years old or so — relatively an infant.

Full Article

(via astrotastic)

sciencesoup:

Northern Lights over an Erupting Volcano

In April 2010, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull spewed great ash clouds into the sky and caused enormous disruptions to air travel in Europe. The eruptions are best remembered for this inconvenience, but photographer James Appleton managed to capture the event in a different way. In the weeks before the disturbances, a vulcanologist friend of his alerted him to the unfolding volcanic drama, and Appleton travelled straight to the Icelandic mountain before it was closed off. Risking his life to battle extreme cold, high winds, and seismic activity, Appleton captured a rare but gorgeous scene: the glowing lava from an Eyjafjallajökull fissure with the Northern Lights—Aurora Borealis—overhead. These are two very different light sources, so “the photograph needed parts of the scene selectively blocked for sections of the exposure to balance the contrast,” Appleton recalls. “A Mars bar wrapper came in handy for this!”

(via thescienceofreality)

Sounion’s Majesty at The Temple of Poseidon

Cape Sounion (Modern Greek: Aκρωτήριο Σούνιο, transliterated Akrotírio Soúnio, pronounced [akroˈtirʝo ˈsuɲo]; Ancient Greek: Άκρον Σούνιον, Άkron Soúnion; Latin: Sunium promonturium; Venetian: Capo Colonne - “Cape of Columns”) is a promontory located 69 kilometres (43 mi) SSE of Athens, at the southernmost tip of the Attica peninsula in Greece.

Cape Sounion is noted as the site of ruins of an ancient Greek temple of Poseidon, the god of the sea in classical mythology. The remains are perched on the headland, surrounded on three sides by the sea. The ruins bear the deeply engraved name of English Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788–1824).

The site is a popular day-excursion for tourists from Athens, with sunset over the Aegean Sea, as viewed from the ruins, a sought-after spectacle.

(Source: ikenbot)

atheist-overdose:

Crazy ass shit conservatives believe in… about history.

follow for the best atheist posts on tumblr

ikenbot:

John McCarthy — The Father of Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist.

He invented the term “artificial intelligence” (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing (the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking), and was very influential in the early development of AI.

McCarthy received many accolades and honors, such as the Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.

(via thescienceofreality)