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submitted by potentpotables0203
[link] [131 comments]

This is an infographic of the world's richest superheroes. Is it accurate? No clue. Feel free to argue about in the comments, but please, do it respectfully and don't resort to name calling. Because when it comes to calling names, nobody is better than I am and I will burn you so hard even your second and third cousins will catch fire. Did you know that whenever I move to a new place I have to go to city hall and register my mouth as a deadly weapon? That is factual. "Lies." I am 28-year old Mexican woman currently backpacking through Central America with my BFF, Gabriela. "You really expect us to believe that?" Que? "I said, do you really exp--" Yo no comprendo. Thanks to Icehog, who, while undeniably tasty, is still no hotdog.

submitted by thnkling
[link] [223 comments]

submitted by TheBlackDahliaMetal
[link] [92 comments]

submitted by pottrpupptpals
[link] [24 comments]

submitted by Juankestein
[link] [46 comments]

With many machines well over the $2,000 mark, 3D printers are still mostly sequestered to use by professionals. Monoprice, the cut-rate technology powerhouse, is slicing more than a few hundreds off the price point with a 3D printer that costs $1,200.

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submitted by MonocleCats [link] [21 comments]

submitted by ewmad [link] [210 comments]

Just imagine: a smartphone that projects 3D holograms into thin-air. If you can wait until the end of next year, and if you can believe the claims being made by a well-funded company called Ostendo, then your next handset could be capable of just...

This 1983 Mazda Rx-7 is said to have 10k original miles, and looks great in Misty Blue with blue interior and Panasports. This car seems too good to have been sitting on Craigslist for two weeks. Find it here on Craigslist for $7800. Special thanks to BaT reader M. Keiser for this submission!

submitted by maddyzeemak
[link] [370 comments]

Here's something we can file under "extremely tragic": People don't talk about the Vector W8 nearly as much as they should. And when they do talk about the early 1990s supercar, they don't mention its wacko interior. But they should!

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submitted by Childofdust90 [link] [235 comments]

This is a short video from the new Mario Kart 8 showing off Luigi's evil side. Thanks to a new and improved replay system that allows you to focus on the players of a race that's already been won, you get to see the players up close and personal. In this case, getting to witness Luigi's evil stare at Waluigi as he passes him after blasting him with a green shell. And all along I thought Luigi was just an honest, good-natured plumber. I bet he broke into my apartment and let Bowser clog the toilet with that monster shit! Keep going for the video of Luigi ridin' dirty.

submitted by Daregveda [link] [450 comments]

Found this gem on my phone after I left my phone unattended near my gf.

Every time I read about the synapse, the all-important junction between two neurons, the cartoon above pops into my head. It shows the gist of how a synapse works: An electrical pulse enters the cell on the left and activates those little blue balls, called vesicles, to release their chemical contents, called neurotransmitters. The neurotransmitters spill out into the space between the cells, called the cleft, and activate those blue rectangles, called ion channels. The channels trigger the cell on the right to fire its own electrical pulse, or action potential, and this message travels on to the next cell. It’s pretty neat. Our brains are full of trillions of synapses, each with the capability of converting an electrical signal into a chemical one and back again.

My doodle is conceptually useful for understanding many neuroscience studies. It helped me visualize, for example, how researchers record the messages of brain cells, and how the synapse plays a role in developmental disorders, and how the firing patterns of all of these synapses provide our brains with a sophisticated coding scheme.

The downside of the cartoon synapse is that it gives a false impression. It makes it seem as if the synapse is simple and all figured out, when actually it’s mostly baffling. I was reminded of its complexity by a study published in today’s issue of Science. Researchers in Germany used an array of techniques — including Western blot, mass spectrometry, electron microscopy, and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy — to create a three-dimensional model of a typical synapse in the adult rat brain. You’ll see in the video below that their new model doesn’t look much like my drawing:

To get the most out of the video, click on the white arrows in the lower right hand corner, which will expand it to full screen. The video shows the synaptic bouton, which is the left part of my cartoon. The glowing red “active zone” at the bottom is where the neurotransmitters get dumped into the cleft. Toward the end of the video you can see a close-up of a vesicle releasing its contents and then being recycled by the cell.

The model shows some 300,000 individual proteins, and remember — they’re all hanging out at a single synapse! The image below shows a cross-section of the bouton; each color corresponds to a different kind of protein. The active zone is again the glowing red part at the bottom.

(Click to enlarge)

More often than not, neuroscientists (and therefore, science writers covering neuroscience) tend to focus on a single protein at a time. For instance, I’ve written about that green guy, parvalbumin, because in certain neurons the protein seems to trigger high-frequency brain waves that have been linked to cognition. And that red SNAP-25 has been linked to ADHD, and the yellow VDAC has been proposed as a good target for chemotherapy drugs.

The only way to untangle this complex picture is to focus on its individual components, figuring out one piece at a time. But the next time you read about one of those pieces, recall how it fits into the whole, and be wowed.

submitted by DrFrantic
[link] [510 comments]