Ben Plowman

I’m glad someone is doing this seminal work in assessing horse intelligence levels.

yungdoctor:

videohall:

Monkey teaches Human how to Crush Leaves

this changed me

Guerrilla Public Service 2011

solikebasically:

I will never not reblog this

Blood concentration from a 29 nanogram dose of a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (equivalent to a 5.2 oz. serving of smoked meat at the European Union maximum legal limit) (credit: Erin Madeen et al./Chemical Research in Toxicology)

Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and two other organizations have developed a method to track polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) carcinogens through the human body as extraordinarily tiny amounts of these potential carcinogens are biologically processed and eliminated.

PAHs, which are the product of the incomplete combustion of carbon, have been a part of everyday human life since cave dwellers first roasted meat on an open fire. More sophisticated forms of exposure now range from smoked cheese to automobile air pollution, cigarettes, public drinking water, and even the notorious indictable ham sandwich.

PAHs are part of the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. PAHs or PAH mixtures have been named as three of the top 10 chemicals of concern by the Agency for Toxic Substances Disease Registry.

The findings were just published by researchers from OSU, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Chemical Research in Toxicology, in work supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)

Studying carcinogens in humans at normal dietary levels

The technology allowing this to happen is a new application of highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometry, allowing for measuring PAH levels in blood down to infinitesimal ratios — comparable to a single drop of water in 4,000 Olympic swimming pools, or to a one-inch increment on a 3-billion mile measuring tape. So microdoses of a compound, even less than one might find in a normal diet or environmental exposure, can be traced as they are processed by humans.

“Knowing how people metabolize PAHs may verify a number of animal and cell studies, as well as provide a better understanding of how PAHs work, identifying their mechanism or mechanisms of action,” said Bill Suk, director of the NIEHS Superfund Research Program.

“We’ve proven that this technology will work, and it’s going to change the way we’re able to study carcinogenic PAHs,” said David Williams, director of the Superfund Research Program at OSU, a professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences and principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute.

“Almost everything we know so far about PAH toxicity is based on giving animals high doses of the compounds and then seeing what happens,” Williams said. “No one before this has ever been able to study these probable carcinogens at normal dietary levels and then see how they move through the body and are changed by various biological processes.”

“Part of what’s so interesting is that we’re able to administer possible carcinogens to people in scientific research and then study the results,” Williams said. “By conventional scientific ethics, that simply would not be allowed. But from a different perspective, we’re not giving these people toxins, we’re giving them dinner. That’s how much PAHs are a part of our everyday lives, and for once we’re able to study these compounds at normal levels of human exposure.”

What a scientist might see as a carcinogen, in other words, is what most of us would see as a nice grilled steak. There are many unexpected forms of PAH exposure. The compounds are found in polluted air, cigarettes, and smoked food, of course, but also in cereal grains, potatoes and at surprisingly high levels in leafy green vegetables.

“It’s clear from our research that PAHs can be toxic, but it’s also clear that there’s more to the equation than just the source of the PAH,” Williams said. “We get most of the more toxic PAHs from our food, rather than inhalation. And some fairly high doses can come from foods like leafy vegetables that we know to be healthy. That’s why we need a better understanding of what’s going on in the human body as these compounds are processed.”

The Williams-led OSU laboratory is recruiting volunteers for a follow-up study that will also employ smoked salmon as a source of a PAH mixture and relate results to an individual’s genetic makeup.

licorice whip

Phoenix: “Entertainment” - 1LIVE Chilly Gonzales Pop Music Masterclass | 1LIVE

darvinasafo:

The #nypd protest of only making necessary arrests illustrates how many UNNECESSARY arrests are usually made

oh gosh, how embarrassing, how did that get up there

gifsboom:

Video: Colorado farmer battles wildfires in tractor.

heroic

algopop:

SHORE demo by Fraunhofer ISS

Emotion recognition software available for Windows or Google Glass, and with a free trial available for download. I’ve blogged this mainly for the press image of the ‘mixed feelings’ group of friends on the sofa. I wonder what is the purpose of the gender recognition feature, and the age-estimation feature? 

justice4mikebrown:

December 9

Chattering detail in cyan celadon. This one does more justice to the color.

rainybramble:

brotherwife:

no one is helping him

reblog if u would help him

digital-femme:

Comic strip by Kris Straub

mapsontheweb:

Six Months of Lightning Strikes, May - October, 2010

nebraska gets all the lightning, the bay gets none of the lightning.

neurosciencestuff:

Researchers Discover Brain Representations of Social Thoughts Accurately Predict Autism Diagnosis

Psychiatric disorders — including autism — are characterized and diagnosed based on a clinical assessment of verbal and physical behavior. However, brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience are poised to provide a powerful advanced new tool.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have created brain-reading techniques to use neural representations of social thoughts to predict autism diagnoses with 97 percent accuracy. This establishes the first biologically based diagnostic tool that measures a person’s thoughts to detect the disorder that affects many children and adults worldwide.

Published in PLoS One, the study combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and machine-learning techniques first developed at Carnegie Mellon that use brain activation patterns to scan and decode the contents of a person’s thoughts of objects or emotions. The previous work also demonstrated that specific thoughts and emotions have a very similar neural signature across normal individuals, suggesting that brain disorders may display detectable alterations in thought activation patterns.

Now, the research team led by CMU’s Marcel Just has successfully used this approach to identify autism by detecting changes in the way certain concepts are represented in the brains of autistic individuals. They call these alterations “thought-markers” because they indicate abnormalities in the brain representations of certain thoughts that are diagnostic of the disorder.

"We found that we could tell whether a person has autism or not by the their brain activation patterns when they think about social concepts. This gives us a whole new perspective to understanding psychiatric illnesses and disorders," said Just, the D. O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and a leading researcher into the neural basis of autism. "We’ve shown not just that the brains of people with autism may be different, or that their activation is different, but that the way social thoughts are formed is different. We have discovered a biological thought-marker for autism."

For the study, Just and his colleagues scanned the brains of 17 adults with high-functioning autism and 17 neurotypical control participants. The participants were asked to think about 16 different social interactions, such as “persuade,” “adore” and “hug.”

The resulting brain images showed that the control participants’ thoughts of social interaction clearly included activation indicating a representation of the “self,” manifested in the brain’s posterior midline regions.

However, the self-related activation was near absent in the autism group. Machine-learning algorithms classified individuals as autistic or non-autistic with 97 percent accuracy based on the fMRI thought-markers.

"When asked to think about persuading, hugging or adoring, the neurotypical participants put themselves into the thoughts; they were part of the interaction. For those with autism, the thought was more like considering a dictionary definition or watching a play — without self-involvement," Just said.

Implications of this research could extend to other psychiatric disorders, such as being suicidal or having obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which certain types of thoughts are altered. By providing a brain-based measure of the altered thoughts to use in conjunction with clinical assessments, this new research could enable clinicians to make quicker and more certain diagnoses and more quickly implement targeted therapies that focus on the alteration.

"This is a potentially extremely valuable method that could not only complement current psychiatric assessment. It could identify psychiatric disorders not just by their symptoms but by the brain systems that are not functioning properly. It may eventually be possible to screen for psychiatric disorders using quantitative biological measures of thought that would test for a range of illnesses or disorders," Just said.

This neuroscience research is on the vanguard of two fronts: it advances the scientific mission of classifying and diagnosing mental disorders based on behavioral and neurobiological measures (rather than conventional symptoms), and it integrates the conception of brain and mind by assessing thoughts in terms of brain function.

kingjaffejoffer:

When documented bigots can’t even defend whats happening, you know there’s some legendary fuckery afoot. 

mapsontheweb:

Predictability of U.S. Weather.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is asking for ideas from the private sector on breakthrough technologies to guide military investment for the next decade and beyond, according to an article by futurist Patrick Tucker Wednesday in Defense One newsletter.

“On Wednesday, Defense Department officials issued a request for information calling on interested parties ‘to identify current and emerging technologies … that could provide significant military advantage to the United States and its partners and allies in the 2030 time frame,’” Tucker said.

It’s part of the Pentagon’s “ambitious plan to develop technology to put the United States decades ahead of rival nations like China and Russia in short period of time.”

The problem: predicting the tech future isn’t as simple as it used to be. “New breakthroughs are copied, innovated against and rendered obsolete as quickly as the Internet spreads to new portions of the globe. … And “inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil posits that, as a result of information technology, the rate of technological advancement will increase by a factor of 5.6 per linear decade.”

The DoD’s Long Range Research and Development Plan request for information admits that “many, if not most, of the technologies that we seek to take advantage of today are no longer only the domain of DoD development pipelines or traditional defense contractors. DoD no longer has exclusive access to the most cutting-edge technology. This RFI actively seeks proposals from the private sector, including those firms and academic institutions outside DoD’s traditional orbit.”

Specifically, DoD is looking for “(1) relatively mature technologies that may be applied in novel or unique ways to field a fundamentally different type of system capability, 2) emerging technologies that can be rapidly matured to offer new military capability or 3) technologies under development for, or being applied in, non-defense applications which can be repurposed to offer a new military capability.”

ratak-monodosico:

Some say Alfred Schnittke’s gravestone illustrates the concept of “The Rest is Noise”. The deceased composer asks for a very loud (fff) silence (rest), prolonged by an extra beat or two (the fermata overhead). (Source)

slow-riot:

Rolling Stone makes the joke of the year

invisiblelad:

trcunning:

twerks4loanpayments:

ladytatyana:

darvinasafo:

Tulsa, Oklahoma near the original Black Wall Street.

Just sad

I guess that meme of DaQuan—the one y’all thought was funny—came true mhmmm 😒

These people

• kicked their daughter out (left her at a homeless shelter)
• found out she had left the shelter to live with a guy
• tracked them down at 9 at night to yell at her
• shot her unarmed boyfriend (killing him)
• shot at her after she ran to hide in the bushes
• shot at the bf’s 13 yr old brother (hitting him in the arm)
• fled the scene 
• were allowed to turn themselves in
• were put on PAID suspension

Such bullshit

Attempted murder (and shooting at minors!)  only gets paid leave. The more one scratches the surface..

Crash Porsche 964 RSR Harry Kleinjan Hellendoorn rally 2013