This confused the shit out of 3rd grade Ben, who made the mistake of choosing the Cougar for his animal report. How is a cougar, a puma, and a mountain lion all the same animal? And wtf is a catamount?
Looks like the stress -> sickness pathway is more direct than we thought.
Here's a surprise: there are lymphatic vessels going into the brain. That's reported in this paper in Nature. (Here's a pretty breathless press release from the University of Virginia, where the work was done). I'm no immunologist, but the work (done mostly in mice, and extended to human samples) looks pretty solid to me.
We were just having a discussion around this site about the immune system and the brain, and this discovery is going to set off a lot of research on that topic. Here's how the authors finish off the paper:
The presence of a functional and classical lymphatic system in the central nervous system suggests that current dogmas regarding brain tolerance and the immune privilege of the brain should be revisited. Malfunction of the meningeal lymphatic vessels could be a root cause of a variety of neurological disorders in which altered immunity is a fundamental player such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and some forms of primary lymphoedema that are associated with neurological disorders.
That seems like a bit of a leap, but not a crazy one. The state of this part of the lymphatic system in various diseases is now officially a big topic, I'd say. The authors already seem to have both demonstrated its existence and some real differences between it and the more well-known lymphatic vessels, and there will surely be more to come. Who knew?
These are always good, but this one made me laugh out loud.
There is a dark, mysterious, and dangerous power of Necromancy in the Python language; used only at great peril: the __del__ method. Consider this class:
>>> del a >>> undead_hoard [<__main__.Living object at 0x020C01D0>]
The object got resurrected by __del__. No problem, it can be removed from the list:
>>> del undead_hoard[0] >>> undead_hoard [<__main__.Living object at 0x020C01D0>]
Hmm, maybe reset the list?
>>> undead_hoard = [] >>> undead_hoard [<__main__.Living object at 0x020C01D0>]
Lesson one of Python Necromancy: __del__ may be called many times on the same object; a safe __del__ must be re-entrant. In this case, the resurrection was the fault of the __del__ method itself, but that is not always the case.
haha, perhaps it's because I'm too deep in this world, but I find the idea kinda fascinating. I have often wondered if part of the reason stress affects health so much is just via mechanisms like this where your breathing is altered. For example, anxiety -> hyperventilation -> confusion/weakness/sleep disturbances. (source: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003071.htm).
Still pretty weird to put a dongle into your underwear in an elevator, though.
A buddy growing up tried to domesticate a baby raccoon. This is the opposite of what happened to him. It just hissed constantly, peed on everything, and then tore everything to shreds. Even the dogs would not get near that thing.
I also laughed way too hard at this. Put a man between a rock and a hard place, and he will have no choice but to brace himself between them and then relieve himself on the floor.
I have seen one of these knife sharpening trucks before. Apparently the economics are: knifes used by real chefs are absurdly expensive, so 1) it's expensive to replace them and 2) you don't want to mess them up sharpening them yourself. So you take them to a pro. HOWEVER, you need them every day so you can't just drop them off one day and pick them up the next.
The solution is the knife truck. He comes to your place, sharpens your knives in an hour, gives em back. Sharp knives, real cheap, real fast, by a professional. Check out bensharpens.knives for details!
my neighbourhood has never had an ice cream truck. in the summer, we have the knife sharpening truck. it slowly circles the block and rings its ominous bell. i have never seen someone interact with it. it may be that only those marked by death can see it
alex??? this is truly frightening ??
i never really thought about it much until today but you’re right this is honestly a messed up thing for me to be accustomed to
Crows are pretty smart and also known to have some rough understanding of giving/receiving gifts. This crow watched a class full of hoomans completely in love with their plastic sticks and so he showed up like it was some kind of swap meet.
He's thinking to himself, "I am gonna get so many corns for this bad boy."
haha, I have fallen for this same trap. And then boycat helped me out by breaking into the cupboard, biting through the side of the package, and eating a bunch of it.
It may be more like catnip than catnip itself.
i bought some salmon jerky. it is, as the package states, “jerky-like.”
but really it is big and chewy fish food. as in, it tastes like fish food smells. If this appeals to you, hmu for some free salmon jerky.
Gotta watch the video. Singing MRI image is more entertaining than expected.
Beckman Institute | New Super-Fast MRI Technique: Singing ‘If I Only Had a Brain’
Scientists at the University of Illinois Beckman’s Biomedical Imaging Center (BIC) have developed a real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique capable of showing dynamic images of vocal movement at 100 frames per second — the fastest MRI speed in the world, according to the scientists.
“Typically, MRI is able to acquire maybe 10 frames per second or so, but we are able to scan 100 frames per second, without sacrificing the quality of the images,” said Brad Sutton, technical director of the BIC and associate professor in bioengineering at Illinois.
“The technique excels at high spatial and temporal resolution of speech—it’s both very detailed and very fast. Often you can have only one of these in MR imaging,” said Sutton. “We have designed a specialized acquisition method that gathers the necessary data for both space and time in two parts and then combines them to achieve high-quality, high-spatial resolution, and high-speed imaging.”
To combine the dynamic imaging with the audio, the researchers use a noise-cancelling fiber-optic microphone to pull out the voice, and then align the audio track with the imaging.
Powerful new tool for voice studies
The dynamic imaging is especially useful in studying how rapidly the tongue is moving, along with around 100 different muscles in the head and neck used during speech and singing. It turns out that to capture these articulation movements requires 100 frames per second, according to Aaron Johnson, affiliate faculty member in the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group at the Beckman Institute and assistant professor in speech and hearing science at Illinois.
He is also the singer in the video above, which demonstrates the technique. After 10 years of working as a professional singer in Chicago choruses, Johnson’s passion for vocal performance progressed into research to understand the voice and its neuromuscular system, with a particular interest in the aging voice.
“The neuromuscular system and larynx change and atrophy as we age, and this contributes to a lot of the deficits that we associate with the older voice, such as a weak, strained, or breathy voice,” Johnson said. “I’m interested in understanding how these changes occur, and if interventions, like vocal training, can reverse these effects. In order to do this, I need to look at how the muscles of the larynx move in real time.”
With a recent K23 Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Johnson is investigating whether group singing training with older adults in residential retirement communities will improve the structure of the larynx, giving the adults stronger, more powerful voices. This research relies on pre- and post-data of laryngeal movement collected with the MRI technique.
Abstract of High-resolution dynamic speech imaging with joint low-rank and sparsity constraints
Purpose: To enable dynamic speech imaging with high spatiotemporal resolution and full-vocal-tract spatial coverage, leveraging recent advances in sparse sampling.
Methods: An imaging method is developed to enable high-speed dynamic speech imaging exploiting low-rank and sparsity of the dynamic images of articulatory motion during speech. The proposed method includes: (a) a novel data acquisition strategy that collects spiral navigators with high temporal frame rate and (b) an image reconstruction method that derives temporal subspaces from navigators and reconstructs high-resolution images from sparsely sampled data with joint low-rank and sparsity constraints.
Results: The proposed method has been systematically evaluated and validated through several dynamic speech experiments. A nominal imaging speed of 102 frames per second (fps) was achieved for a single-slice imaging protocol with a spatial resolution of 2.2 × 2.2 × 6.5 mm3. An eight-slice imaging protocol covering the entire vocal tract achieved a nominal imaging speed of 12.8 fps with the identical spatial resolution. The effectiveness of the proposed method and its practical utility was also demonstrated in a phonetic investigation.
It's fun to remember that Mr. Clean and Brawny Man are intentionally appealing to the Donna Clare's of the world. Are there other examples? Green Giant, maybe if mom's a little freaky?
