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Rare condition leaves man unable to feel pain

2015-02-25T06:10:00.002-05:00

Living a lifetime without the ability to feel pain is actually more of an inconvenience that it sounds.

The inability to feel any pain at all might sound like a highly desirable trait, but for 33-year-old Steve Pete who has spent his whole life with the condition, not being able to tell when you have sustained an injury can prove to be highly dangerous.

Whereas a pain response will normally indicate to a person that something is wrong, when no pain can ever be felt it becomes surprisingly easy to sustain nasty cuts and broken bones.

"One time in the playground at school I was on the swing set going back and forth," he said. "I jumped off the swing, landed incorrectly and my bones shattered in my right arm."

"I didn’t feel it but there was bone sticking out, which was a pretty good indication I’d injured myself."

Pete and his brother Chris, who also suffers from the same condition, have sustained so many injuries over the years that their bodies spend most of the time trying to heal up.

"It’s difficult when you don’t feel pain because you’re always going through this underlying feeling of your body trying to heal itself so you’re lacking energy, you don’t feel in the best of moods," he said.

The condition, which affects only a small handful of people, currently has no known cure.

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Dave Fothergill- I've fallen and i can't get up

2014-10-24T00:54:00.000-04:00

I've fallen, and I can't get up! from Dave Fothergill vfx on Vimeo.

Seung-Hwan Oh Fuses Art With Microbiology In Bacteria Manipulated Photographs

2014-10-08T22:26:00.002-04:00

Seung-Hwan Oh Fuses Art With Microbiology In Bacteria Manipulated Photographs

Beautiful/Decay by Stephanie Chan

Using homegrown bacteria, photographer Seung-Hwan Oh warps and manipulates his photographs, surrendering his art to a higher ecological order. Oh, who also goes by the name Tonio Oh, explains that his intention is to “explore the impermanence of matter as well as the material limitations of photography.” It brings the artist’s studio into the laboratory, marvelously blending the organic and the artificial.

Oh’s website describes the process:

“As the microbes consume light-sensitive chemical over the course of months or years, the silver halides destabilize, obfuscating the legibility of foreground, background, and scale.”

It’s an interesting approach to photography that takes a normally still medium and adds a dimension of something active, live, and dynamic. When you view Oh’s photographs, the question is no longer the significance of what is depicted; instead, what catches your eye is the tension between what is shown and what is already lost. Though art is naturally created to be consumed, in this case, the art itself is the act of consumption, the parts of the photographs that have been literally eaten away by a relentless force of nature. The result, in Oh’s word, can be witnessed as something that is “entangled creation and destruction that inevitably is ephemeral”.

The post Seung-Hwan Oh Fuses Art With Microbiology In Bacteria Manipulated Photographsappeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.

Sabato Visconti’s Glitch Art

2014-10-08T22:25:00.000-04:00

Sabato Visconti’s Glitch Art

by Stephanie Chan

Sabato Visconti is a photographer, visual artist, and digital puppeteer. He fine-tunes his art on an atomic level by using a number of techniques that manipulate code and scramble pixels into what is often surprising results. “Glitch art,” as the aesthetic is called, uses a palette of static, snow, and other shadowy artifacts to create art that is, despite its hi-tech nature, exceedingly organic.

The intense colors and bio-rhythmic patterns that emerge from Visconti’s glitched-out photographs are raw and still retain an emotional connection to their subjects. Some are more abstract, emerging like clouds of texture that seem by turns woven and crumpled and, when it gets particularly noisy, crunchy. Though it might be counterintuitive, it makes sense that glitch art is organic; after all, artifacts in old-school photographs and film footage have always occurred spontaneously. Now, artists are harnessing that force of microcosmic nature and using it creatively.

“You’re trying to find this really fine balance where something doesn’t break fully, but breaks just to the point that you can see it breaking,” Visconti explains. The tension between form and disintegration is palpable in his work; at times, it’s like staring into a digital void or a watching a snapshot of an identity crisis. He takes it one step further in a collection called, “Vertigo by Alfred Glitchcock,” which takes stills and remixes them into evocative visual mayhem.

Do androids dream of electric sheep? If they do, then this is what they see when they close their eyes.

-Beautiful Decay

Jack the ripper mystery no longer?

2014-09-12T05:42:00.004-04:00

Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of 19th century London. Image Credit: John Atkinson Grimshaw (1880)

Author Russell Edwards believes he has determined the identity of the infamous 19th century killer.

It's one of the best known and enduring murder mysteries the world has ever known, yet more than 120 years after Jack the Ripper's killing spree through the streets of London there has never been a definitive answer as to who he really was.

Now author and "armchair detective" Russell Edwards believes that he has finally unmasked the killer and that his real identity was Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish immigrant.

Edwards has based his conclusions on a blood-stained shawl that he purchased back in 2007 and that he claims holds criticial DNA evidence that proves Kosminski was the infamous killer.

"I've got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case," he said. "I've spent 14 years working on it, and we have definitively solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was."

The shawl belonged to Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack's victims, and contains the DNA of both her and Kosminski who was already one of six prime suspects in the case.

"When we discovered the truth it was the most amazing feeling of my entire life," said Edwards.
Source: Yahoo! News

Solar storm may cause power grid failures this week

2014-09-12T05:38:00.003-04:00

A particularly intense solar storm could cause communications and power grid disruptions this week.

While solar storms hit us on a regular basis, this one, which has been classed as "extreme" by forecasters, has the potential to be particularly disruptive. It was produced by a large magnetic explosion originating from a volatile region of sunspot activity that just happened to be pointing directly at us at the time.

The resulting storm is traveling towards us at a speed of around 2.5 million mph and could arrive as early as this evening but is more likely to hit some time tomorrow.

Despite all the predictions of doom and gloom however astronomers have been keen to emphasize that the effects will probably be minimal and that it will pose no harm to humans.

One of the more positive effects of the storm in fact may be a particularly impressive view of the northern lights which may be visible much further south than they can normally be seen from.

"We're not scared of this one," said space weather prediction expert Tom Berger.

Source: CBS News

Old photos brought to life

2014-09-11T01:53:00.004-04:00

Art director and designer Kevin Weir decided to have a little fun with images found in The Library of Congress' online archives by turning them into animated gifs that look like they're straight out of a sci-fi movie or gothic literature.

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Direct brain to brain communication between human subjects

2014-09-11T01:49:00.000-04:00

First direct brain-to-brain communication between human subjects

EEG and TMS signals enable first successful brain-to-brain transmission

September 10, 2014

Emitter and receiver subjects with non-invasive devices supporting, respectively, a brain-computer interface (BCI), based on EEG changes, driven by motor imagery (left) and a computer-brain interface (CBI) based on the reception of phosphenes elicited by neuro-navigated TMS (right) (credit: Carles Grau et al./PLoS ONE)

An international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have demonstrated the first direct remote brain-to-brain communication between two humans located 5,000 miles away from each other and communicating via the Internet, as reported in a paper recently published in PLOS ONE (open access).

In India, researchers encoded two words (“hola” and “ciao”) as binary strings and presented them as a series of cues on a computer monitor. They recorded the subject’s EEG signals as the subject was instructed to think about moving his feet (binary 0) or hands (binary 1). They then sent the recorded series of binary values in an email message to researchers in France, 5,000 miles away.

MRI image showing location of TMS phosphene generator (credit: Carles Grau et al./PLoS ONE)

There, the binary strings were converted into a series of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses applied to a hotspot location in the right visual occipital cortex that either produced a phosphene (perceived flash of light) or not.

“We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways,” explains coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

A team of researchers from Starlab Barcelona, Spain and Axilum Robotics, Strasbourg, France conducted the experiment. A second similar experiment was conducted between individuals in Spain and France.

“We believe these experiments represent an important first step in exploring the feasibility of complementing or bypassing traditional language-based or other motor/PNS mediated means in interpersonal communication,” the researchers say in the paper.

“Although certainly limited in nature (e.g., the bit rates achieved in our experiments were modest even by current BCI (brain-computer interface) standards, mostly due to the dynamics of the precise CBI (computer-brain interface) implementation, these initial results suggest new research directions, including the non-invasive direct transmission of emotions and feelings or the possibility of sense synthesis in humans — that is, the direct interface of arbitrary sensors with the human brain using brain stimulation, as previously demonstrated in animals with invasive methods.

Brain-to-brain (B2B) communication system overview. On the left, the BCI subsystem is shown schematically, including electrodes over the motor cortex and the EEG amplifier/transmitter wireless box in the cap. Motor imagery of the feet codes the bit value 0, of the hands codes bit value 1. On the right, the CBI system is illustrated, highlighting the role of coil orientation for encoding the two bit values. Communication between the BCI and CBI components is mediated by the Internet. (Credit: Carles Grau et al./PLoS ONE)

“The proposed technology could be extended to support a bi-directional dialogue between two or more mind/brains (namely, by the integration of EEG and TMS systems in each subject). In addition, we speculate that future research could explore the use of closed mind-loops in which information associated to voluntary activity from a brain area or network is captured and, after adequate external processing, used to control other brain elements in the same subject. This approach could lead to conscious synthetically mediated modulation of phenomena best detected subjectively by the subject, including emotions, pain and psychotic, depressive or obsessive-compulsive thoughts.

“Finally, we anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely. The widespread use of human brain-to-brain technologically mediated communication will create novel possibilities for human interrelation with broad social implications that will require new ethical and legislative responses.”

This work was partly supported by the EU FP7 FET Open HIVE project, the Starlab Kolmogorov project, and the Neurology Department of the Hospital de Bellvitge.

UPDATE 9/10/2014:

There are other possible methods for achieving brain-to-brain communications on the receiver end, such as radio-frequency energy (the “microwave auditory effect) and ultrasound, which is covered on KurzweilAI in these articles.

This is the most relevant article: as KurzweilAI reported last year, U.S. and South Korea researchers have conducted an experiment using EEG for the sender and transcranial sonication of focused ultrasound (FUS) to modulate the neural activity of specific brain regions in the receiver’s brain (a rat in this case).

The researchers note the possibility that “potential linking/sharing of neural processing information between individual identities can be conceptually applied to a feedback loop of the neural signal, enabling ‘autologous BBI’”— that is, the information would be fed back to the originating person.

“The findings suggest “intriguing new possibilities for computer-assisted volitional control/communication of brain states between individuals,” the researchers hint. “The BBI [brain-to-brain] method may be used to augment this mutual coupling of the brains, and may have a positive impact on human social behavior” — or negative, if misused.

These methods could be useful as a tool for one-way or two-way (or multiple-way) communication with quadriplegics, or possibly even with a person with locked-in syndrome.

Abstract of PLOS ONE paper

Human sensory and motor systems provide the natural means for the exchange of information between individuals, and, hence, the basis for human civilization. The recent development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) has provided an important element for the creation of brain-to-brain communication systems, and precise brain stimulation techniques are now available for the realization of non-invasive computer-brain interfaces (CBI). These technologies, BCI and CBI, can be combined to realize the vision of non-invasive, computer-mediated brain-to-brain (B2B) communication between subjects (hyperinteraction). Here we demonstrate the conscious transmission of information between human brains through the intact scalp and without intervention of motor or peripheral sensory systems. Pseudo-random binary streams encoding words were transmitted between the minds of emitter and receiver subjects separated by great distances, representing the realization of the first human brain-to-brain interface. In a series of experiments, we established internet-mediated B2B communication by combining a BCI based on voluntary motor imagery-controlled electroencephalographic (EEG) changes with a CBI inducing the conscious perception of phosphenes (light flashes) through neuronavigated, robotized transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), with special care taken to block sensory (tactile, visual or auditory) cues. Our results provide a critical proof-of-principle demonstration for the development of conscious B2B communication technologies. More fully developed, related implementations will open new research venues in cognitive, social and clinical neuroscience and the scientific study of consciousness. We envision that hyperinteraction technologies will eventually have a profound impact on the social structure of our civilization and raise important ethical issues.

-Kurzweil

Creative weapons from the past

2014-09-05T05:50:00.001-04:00

Back in the day technology was nothing like it is today. People had to get creative with their weapons and the things they created were extremely brutal.

"Stellar" currency plans to untie all currencies

2014-09-05T05:39:00.004-04:00

Getty

Rodrigo Batista is the CEO of Mercado Bitcoin, the first Brazilian bitcoin exchange and one of the largest digital currency operations in Latin America. Today, Mercado lets you swap Brazilian real for both bitcoin and litecoin, another currency that exists only on the internet, but Batista will soon expand the scope of his operation. By the end of August, he says, his site will embrace a brand new digital currency project called Stellar.

Unveiled last week by a not-for-profit foundation bootstrapped by one of the most important developers in the world of digital currency, Jed McCaleb, and one of the hottest startups in the rapidly evolving realm of online payments, Stripe, this new project aims to bring digital currencies to a much wider audience and provide a much smoother way of moving all sorts of money over the internet. Stellar is many things, but it’s best to think of it as an effort to create a worldwide network that lets anyone send any currency and have it arrive as any other currency. You can send bitcoin and have them arrive as dollars. You can pay someone in euros, and he can receive them as litecoin. You can transmit yen and turn them into dogecoin or Brazilian real.

That’s why Batista is so quickly moving his Mercado exchange to this new technology. Stellar can help take digital currency beyond rather insular projects like bitcoin and litecoin, melding it with fiat currencies and extending its advantages to the average internet consumer. “It gives you something that’s missing in other projects,” Batista says of Stellar. “It’s very, very powerful.” The hope is that other companies and organizations will also embrace the technology, creating that common network that can transport all currencies—a true internet for money.

“We are living in a world of closed, un-interoperable networks,” says Patrick Collision, one of Stripe’s co-founders, referring to the many credit card networks that now move money across the net. “Whether it’s bitcoin or Stellar or some other technology, it’s really important—and, I hope inevitable—that something comes along and unifies them.”

This “internet for money” is still a long way from becoming a working reality—if it happens at all. But those behind Stellar are already deeply experienced in the realm of online money, and the project has received an unusually large amount of attention in the five days since its launch. Stellar is open source software anyone can use for free, and within an hour of its unveiling, one currency exchange had already adopted the technology. Independent developers have since submitted changes to the open source software. And over 110,000 individuals have signed up for Stellar accounts, which would allow them to use the technology.

Certainly, there are reasons to be skeptical. Jeb McCaleb, the primary developer of Stellar, tried this same basic idea in the past, with a project called Ripple, and this project is still struggling to find a wide audience amidst an uncertain regulatory environment. But according to McCaleb, Collison, and others, Stellar is an attempt to correct some issues that have hampered Ripple—not to mention the problems that have burdened so many other digital currency projects, including bitcoin.

From Ripple to Stellar

In 2010, Jed McCaleb founded Mt. Gox, which would eventually become the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. Then, after just a few months, he sold most of the operation to another entrepreneur, well before it descended bankruptcy, beset by regulatory problems and multiple attacks from online hackers. As Mt Gox floundered, McCaleb set about rethinking the idea of digital currency, and the result was Ripple.

Jed McCaleb. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Bitcoin is driven by a network of computers that spans the globe. These machines provide a way of storing the digital currency, but they also let you readily sending it from place to the place. One of the chief advantages of bitcoin is that you can move the currency across borders without forking over steep fees to someone like Western Union, but it can also be used to pay for goods and services, both online and in stores (via smartphones). With Ripple, McCaleb aimed to extend this setup to all currencies, including dollars, yen, euros—anything.

In order to do this, the Ripple project also created a new digital currency, called XRP. Basically, the Ripple network needed XRP to facilitate trades on the network. If you wanted to trade bitcoin for dollars, for instance, the network first found someone who would trade your bitcoin for XRP. Then it would find someone else who would trade your XRP for dollars.

But this caused a problem: many assumed McCaleb and the other founders of project were just trying to get rich off the new currency—which, if successful, would continue to rise in value—and eventually, McCaleb fell out with the company he created to build the technology, Ripple Labs. But with Stellar, McCaleb and his new colleagues have essentially rebooted the Ripple project—”Stellar is a fork of Ripple, so the code is practically identical,” says Ripple Labs—and they’ve rebooted it in a way that, they hope, will make it more appealing to the larger digital currency community as well as the ordinary businesses and the general public.

Digital Currency for the People

Like Ripple, Stellar aims to create a network for moving any currency across the globe, and it creates a new digital currency for facilitating trades, also called stellar. But unlike Ripple, Stellar is run by a not-for-profit foundation—an organization ostensibly outside the control of any one company—and the organization is giving away a vast majority of the currency generated by the system.

Ripple has said that it plans to give away 50 percent of XRPs to the user community. With Stellar, however, 95 percent will be given away. That leaves 5 percent set aside to fund the foundation, with about half of that going to foundation staffers such as McCaleb over a four-year vesting period. “We adopted this model because we don’t think internet infrastructure should be owned by any small group of people,” McCaleb says.

What’s more, Stellar is designed to move money at much higher speeds than bitcoin, and unlike the bitcoin system—which will eventually stop making more of the digital currency—the Stellar network will continue to generate more stellars until the end of time. Because it’s an “inflationary currency,” the founders of the project believe, people will be encouraged to actually spend it, rather than just hand on to it, as so often happens with bitcoin. “The motivation was, in part, to have people focus a bit less on digital currency as something to hoard or a store of value,” Collison says.

Brothers Patrick (left) and John Collison, co-founders of Stripe. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

This change in the bitcoin model will likely have little effect—at least in the short term. After all, the number of bitcoins won’t stop expanding for another 125 years. People hoard the currency for other reasons. But Stellar’s overall approach could still encourage more people to actually use the currency. Rodrigo Batista particularly likes that the project doles out more currency to individuals if they learn to send and receive stellars. This, he says, will help people treat it more like a currency, rather than simply using it as an investment tool, rather than merely hoping that the value will go up.

In this and other ways, he says, Stellar can bring digital currency to a much wider audience. The bitcoin system doles out currency to people who help drive its worldwide network with rather complex hardware rigs, but Stellar gives its currency to people who merely show an interest. “If want to help people in Philippines sent money back and forth to their families,” says Joyce Kim, a venture capitalist and longtime friend of McCaleb’s who is overseeing the new Stellar Development Foundation, “we have to give them the opportunity to participate without ante-ing up a large amount of money first.”

The rub, says Tim Swanson, a market researcher and author who closely follows the progress of digital currencies, is that system may not be as fair as it seems. It may have trouble identifying scam artists who collect large amounts of currency by pretending to be multiple people. “Identity fraud is a hard nut to crack,” he says.

The Banks and the Law

But the bigger aim here is to create a universal way of moving all money—not just stellars—and this effort faces other hurdles. The project must also convince organizations to setup the digital currency “gateways” that will drive the Stellar network. Gateways are Stellar’s analogue to banks, except no one needs a license to run one.

“You can hold a balance with a gateway, which is any network participant you trust to accept a deposit in exchange for credit on the network,” according to Stellar’sintroductory post. You could store your dollars in one gateway, for example, and these could be used to pay someone in euros. The gateway would first convert your dollars to stellar and then send them to another gateway that can convert the stellar into euros.

This is what Batista has vowed to set up by the end of August—a gateway—and according to Collison, five organizations have already built their own gateways. But in order for the project to truly flourish, says Swanson, it will also need the participation of mainstream banks and credit card companies—that’s where people keep their money—and such organizations may been reluctant to participate in an area that’s still clouded by regulatory uncertainty. “What most bitcoin-related projects run into is establishing relationships in the banking and financial industry, and complying with laws, currency-licensing requirements,” he says.

That’s why Ripple—Stellar’s predecessor—is focused not bringing on its technology to consumers but to financial operations. “We think people will interact with Ripple via the financial instruments they already use,” says Ripple Labs director of communications Monica Long.

The Stripe offices in San Francisco. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

That said, it helps that Stellar is backed by Stripe, a company that’s already providing a way for all sorts of online businesses to accept credit card payments. Through Stripe, Stellar has a direct avenue to the next wave of online merchants. Indeed, Collison—another old friend of Jed McCaleb—sees Stripe as a way of significantly expanding the company’s business. “We obviously have a very strong interest in the underlying network that moves the money being as robust and as effective as possible,” he says. “If we have a better underlying transport layer for moving money, that makes our marker that much larger, and that’s why we’re so interested.”

But he’s also quick to point out that Stellar is not controlled by Stripe. The company has provided the initial funding for the Stellar Development Foundation, but the aim is turn the organization into an independent non-profit run by a board of directors that spans the industry. “We just helped it get started,” he says. Ultimately, this will decide the fate of Stellar. For the project to work, it must find a way of playing nicely with regulators, but it must also be something that’s open to anyone, that can be readily used by anyone, that doesn’t give one organization an advantage over another. In short, it must be like the internet. “Major infrastructure for the world like this,” says Kim, “shouldn’t be owned by a company.”

Additional reporting by Robert McMillan, Wired

Samsung introduces mobile quad-HD VR device

2014-09-04T05:46:00.001-04:00

Samsung introduced today Gear VR Innovator Edition, billed as “the first widely available mobile VR headset.”

It uses Oculus VR technology combined with Samsung’s 5.7 inch Quad HD (aka “ultra HD and 4K) 2560 x 1440 pixel Galaxy Note 4 mobile phone — “an early-access, beta-version of the device for developers and enthusiasts rather than a final consumer product,” according to the Oculus VR blog.

Here’s how Samsung describes it:

With the Gear VR Innovator Edition, users can sit in the best seat of a theater, can be on-stage of a performance with full 360 3D video, and can enjoy gaming like it’s never been seen before – inside the stunning worlds where imagination becomes reality. Samsung’s industry leading Super AMOLED display technology and cutting-edge Oculus-driven technologies fuse to create an experience that surprises and delights – all on a mobile device. … Users will be able to enjoy a wide range of film, gaming, 360 degree video, and educational/experiential content.

Samsung says a microSD is included in the box, with a collection of 360-degree videos and 3D movie trailers from major studios pre-loaded, including samples of Hollywood and documentary IMAX films, “exclusive access to Tony Stark’s Lab inside the all new Avengers Tower,” a Cirque du Soleil performance, and Dreamworks animations.

Gear VR has a 96˚ field of view, accelerator, and gyrometer.

Samsung says Gear VR will be available in frost white through the Samsung online channel and some carriers this year.

CNET has a first look here.

TERRARIUM TRASH!

2014-09-03T01:07:00.000-04:00

Terrariums (micro-environments under glass) were invented by accident in the 19th century. But there's nothing accidental about these awesome variations! Many of these are DIY projects that can be completed in a weekend: check the image links for instructions.

thefernandmossery.com

macgyverisms.wonderhowto.com

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macgyverisms.wonderhowto.com

makingmyhouseahome.wordpress.com

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etsy.com

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faroutflora.wordpress.com

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minigardener.wordpress.com

slugandsquirrel.blogspot.com

38.

thehousethatlarsbuilt.com

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blamoscience.tumblr.com

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trendhunter.com

The Music Tree Rings Produce

2014-06-29T00:16:00.002-04:00

We all know that the Lorax speaks for the trees, but what do they sound like when they speak for
themselves?

Rings on a tree can give information about the age of the tree, as well as indicate environmental conditions such as rain levels, disease, and even forest fire. Light colored rings indicate quick growth, while darker rings indicate times when the tree did not grow as quickly. Slices of trees are not uniform, and they all tell a story about the tree’s history.

Bartholomäus Traubeck created equipment that would translate tree rings into music by playing them on a turntable. Rather than use a needle like a record, sensors gather information about the wood’s color and texture and use an algorithm that translates variations into piano notes. The breadth of variation between individual trees results in a individualized tune. The album, appropriately titled “Years,” features spruce, ash, oak, maple, alder, walnut, and beech trees. It is available to download now, though it will be available to purchase on vinyl in August. The end product of these arbor “records” is haunting and beautiful and you need to check it out.

Carine Paynaud

2014-06-24T23:45:00.004-04:00

French sculptor Carine Peynaud is inspired and influenced by the human condition and the hidden beauty that lies beneath. This series, titled “Figure d’écorché” shows her using the human body as a canvas for her anatomical drawings. Source

The Ouija board possesses 3 people who are taken to the hospital afterwards.

2014-06-24T23:08:00.004-04:00

Alexandra Huerta, her brother Sergio and their cousin Fernando Cuevas had been playing around with a Ouija Board in the Mexican village of San Juan Tlacotenco when all three of them started to exhibit strange behavior. Within minutes of beginning the session, Alexandra was said to have fallen in to a deep trance-like state before growling maniacally like a dog and thrashing around uncontrollably. Sergio and Fernando soon began to experience strange symptoms of their own including vivid hallucinations, blindness and deafness. A local Catholic priest was called in to perform an exorcism but he allegedly refused to do so because none of them were regular churchgoers. Paramedics who eventually attended the scene found themselves having to forcibly restrain Alexandra for her own safety before taking all three of them to hospital. A combination of painkillers and anti-stress medication was said to have been effective at treating their symptoms. "The medical rescue of these three young people was very complicated," said public safety director Victor Demeza. "It appeared as if they were in a trance-like state, apparently after playing with the Ouija board. They spoke of feeling numbness, double vision, blindness, deafness, hallucinations, muscle spasm and difficulty swallowing. source

New Space Telescope in the works!

2014-06-23T00:32:00.003-04:00

Known as ATLAST ( Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope ), the telescope will be so large that it will be necessary to ferry its components in to space where astronauts will construct it in orbit at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth - four times further away than the Moon. The telescope's primary mission will be to seek out signs of life on other worlds by looking for certain biosignatures (such as oxygen, methane etc. ) in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. "This telescope could see Earth-like planets around stars up to 30 light years away," said astrophysics professor Martin Barstow. "There are tens of thousands of stars within that distance and we estimate that at least a few thousand of those will be similar to the sun. Our guess is that we could find around 60 such planets." The ambitious project will however require backing on a global scale. "NASA will have to take the lead as it is the biggest space agency, but it is already in discussion with the European Space Agency," said Prof Barstow. "We are looking at a launch date around 2030 because that is how long these projects take." Source

End of the world epidemic revealed!

2014-06-23T00:28:00.003-04:00

A team of experts investigating the Funerary Complex of Harwa and Akhimenru in what was once the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes came upon the remains of a number of people who had been covered in lime, a substance that was commonly used as a disinfectant during ancient times. The find also lead them to the discovery of three kilns where the lime would have been made and the remnants of a huge bonfire which also contained signs of human remains. These discoveries are believed to date back to what is known as the "Plague of Cyprian", a third century epidemic which brought about widespread death across the Roman Empire with more than 5,000 succumbing to the disease every day in Rome alone at its height. Saint Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage during the plague, described it as an event so devastating that he believed the world was about to come to an end. It would go on to take more than two decades for the epidemic to finally cease.

Source

How to Survive a Nuclear Explosion

2014-01-22T01:58:00.001-05:00

Run! A mathematical model of nuclear fallout suggests that sheltering in place (the first option above) is not always the best survival strategy. If you can reach higher quality shelter in less than 30 minutes (the second option), you should go for it. And if you’ve got nothing, you definitely need to seek shelter immediately (third option).

It begins with a flash brighter than the sun. Trees, fences, and people immediately catch fire. The only reason you survive is because you run inside and dive into the cast-iron tub just as the shock wave arrives. You stumble to your lopsided front door and look out on the burning ruin of your neighborhood. The deadly radioactive fallout is on its way. Should you stay in your wobbling house or run across town to the public library to shelter in its basement? A new mathematical model may have the answer.
The model is the brainchild of Michael Dillon, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He started exploring the topic about 5 years ago after the U.S. government called for more research on nuclear shelters. Curious about his work, his family asked him what they should do if they saw a mushroom cloud. “I realized that I really didn’t have a great answer,” he says. The official U.S. government advice is to “take shelter in the nearest and most protective building.” For most people, that would be the basement of their home. But, Dillon says, “out in California there just are not that many basements,” offering little protection from fallout. For those people, the official recommendations suggest “early transit” to find better shelter, ideally one with thick layers of concrete over your head and plenty of food and water. But if you spend too much time outside in the fallout, you’re toast.

During the Cold War, scientists modeled almost every imaginable consequence of a nuclear explosion. But Dillon found a gap in the sheltering strategies for people far enough from ground zero to survive the initial blast but close enough to face deadly fallout. He focused on a single low-yield nuclear detonation like those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world’s nuclear arsenal has grown far more powerful—today’s warheads can inflict thousands of times more damage—but security experts believe that low-yield bombs are the kind most likely to be used by terrorists.

The hard part was figuring out what variables matter for fallout survival. The rest was calculus. The longer you stay outside, the higher your radiation dose, but the environmental radiation intensity also decreases over time. So your total dose is a function of when you step outside, your distance from the detonation, how long you run before you reach better shelter, and how much shielding you get from the local environment while you’re out there. Dillon simplified the calculation by assuming that you are totally exposed while running to safer shelter; he also ignored complexities such as limited shelter capacities. In the end, the math boiled down to a single critical number: the ratio of the time you spend hunkering down in your first shelter to the time you spend moving to the high-quality shelter. Then Dillon worked out what would happen with a variety of shelter options and transit times.

The results surprised him. For low-yield nuclear detonations, you can do far better than just sheltering in place, but you’ll need a watch and good knowledge of your surroundings. If your current shelter is poor and higher quality shelter is less than 5 minutes away, the model suggests that you should run there as soon as you can. If you have poor shelter but higher quality shelter is available farther away, you should get to that high-quality shelter no later than 30 minutes after detonation. Depending on the size of the city, if everyone follows this advice, it could save between 10,000 and 100,000 lives, Dillon reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Not everyone is convinced, however. “I disagree with the conclusions,” says Lawrence Wein, an operations research scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “He fails to account for several important issues that are vitally important for policy recommendations.” Anyone heading out into the apocalyptic wasteland will have no idea how long the transit time will really be. Because of this uncertainty, he says, the official U.S. government recommendation is “to shelter for at least 12 hours” after the blast. Wein also worries about “the collective behavior problem.” In the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, a few thousand people were told to evacuate and nearly 200,000 people took to the streets. “The model is assuming that you have each person on puppet strings and can dictate their actions. This is simply not going to be the case in the aftermath.”

But that criticism misses the point, says C. Norman Coleman, a public health researcher at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “As someone working with government and state and local planners, we find models extraordinarily useful to help us develop concepts of operations,” he says, noting that this is his personal view and not an official U.S. government response. For example, knowing how long the window of opportunity is for people to reach better shelter can help rank evacuation plans. At the very least, Coleman says, Dillon’s model reveals what is “possible to do and what is not likely to be useful.

Source

Reactable as Artist Instrument: On Mobile, Live, and Tangible

2012-11-16T00:22:00.007-05:00

Reactable as Artist Instrument: On Mobile, Live, and Tangible:

Milivingroom.com presenta Carles López-Reactable from Milivingroom on Vimeo.
Can the Reactable be artistically meaningful, as well as technologically impressive? New performances, and new releases – interactive “label” releases for your iPad/iPhone and updated hardware for those of you wanting to try the whole experience yourself – might just answer that question.
Listen to designers of futuristic musical devices talk about what they hope to create, and a common theme recurs again and again. They want to make musical instruments – something you’d practice, something for which there would be virtuosos and performances that would knock your socks off.
It’s tough to make a direct comparison. Many electronic performances are part instrumental, part compositional – that is, some gestures occur directly on the level of a sound, whereas others “conduct” larger-scale musical transformations. But perhaps the most important ingredient is time.
The Reactable, a tangible interface first developed by Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger, and Marcos Alonso, has now had the benefit of time. And as a result, we’re seeing an evolution of music, not just technology. That is, I’ve watched the performance by Carles López above more than once because I like his musical ideas. I could watch it with my eyes closed, and, oddly, see some of the gestures he’s making – there’s some idea connected to the gestures. “Carles” (in Catalan) López is a kind of “resident Reactable savant,” as described to me by Reactable’s other Carlos, Carlos Morales. You can see him in action at bove courtesy Milivingroom.com. You lose something not being live in the room with him – I greatly enjoyed that chance in London recently – but it’s still fun to watch, even behind your computer.
The experience of using the Reactable is largely defined by content. So, on the “conducting”/compositional side of the coin, Reactable is doing their first artist release, with Oliver Huntemann. See the video below – we head into techno territory, in contrast to the López video at top.

Here, the work is within reach of anyone with an iPad, in the form of an “artist edition” release. It’s a bit like having an interactive album release. You can approach it from several angles. You can simply listen to his music – the lean-back (or dance) traditional listening experience. You can also watch it as it’s being played. Or, you can take the helm yourself, remixing the content.
It’s all a bit like the 21st-century equivalent of a piano roll for a player piano — only, in this century, made more interactive.
http://www.reactable.com/products/artist/

The artist release is 1,79 € for iOS only; the full app costs 8,99 € and runs on both Android and iOS. Reactable tells us more apps are coming. (The fact that they opted not to support Android here to me is yet more bad news for that suffering ecosystem. But having tested – and even played live with – Reactable on Android, I can say it runs nicely enough on my Galaxy Tab as well as my iPad. So don’t be afraid to try it if you do have a newish Android device.)

Mobile is much cheaper, but there’s nothing like using the actual, physical hardware. Moving those blocks around can make you feel like rockstar DJ and kid all at the same time. Of course, it doesn’t come cheap – this is an integrated digital and physical system with projection and camera sensing, not something that lends itself to easy mass production. But the Reactable creators have done some impressive iteration, making each new version a little better and a little cheaper. That brings the price down to 6.100 € in the latest version – just under US$8000 at the current exchange rate. You can find the tangible interface hardware from Reactable – or just awe at those photos. (Seriously, while I can’t argue it’ll be the most practical few thousand dollars/Euros you ever spend, I can say it’s a lot of fun. I can appreciate it from afar. iOS and Android are the way to get it for us mere mortals.)
http://www.reactable.com/products/live/order/

Scanning Device Enables Computers To Read And Play Sheet Music In Real-Time

2012-11-16T00:22:00.005-05:00

Scanning Device Enables Computers To Read And Play Sheet Music In Real-Time:
Reading sheet music can be a bit of a drag. All those staves and notes and stuff—much better to have technology do the heavy lifting for you, so you can free up your time to watch videos of cats getting blowdried and babies doing kung-fu.
Researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University, headed up by Professor Tetsuaki Baba, have created a device that reads and plays sheet music in real-time. It’s called the Gocen and it works by scanning the staves, then the notes and their position so it can determine which are the high notes and which the low. It can also read what instrument is meant to be used and change the computer to play the correct one accordingly.
While you can compose music using just a computer and not have any need to scan it, the researchers see this as a composition support system, allowing people to write out the musical notations by hand so a computer can read it and play it—and it’ll make it easier for children and lazy adults to learn musical notation too.
[via DigiInfo.tv]
@stewart23rd

Danny Quirk Self Dissections Print Release

2012-11-16T00:22:00.003-05:00

Danny Quirk Self Dissections Print Release:
Ashley, Christina, and Candice are available for $30

at the Street Anatomy store.

Candice by Danny Quirk 11×14″ digital print

Christina by Danny Quirk 11×14″ digital print

Ashley by Danny Quirk 11×14″ digital print

We’re excited to release Ashley, Christina, and Candice prints from Danny Quirk’s Self Dissection series on the Street Anatomy store! Originally available at the OBJECTIFY THIS exhibition back in September 2012, Danny’s prints were an instant favorite among the gallery audience.
Using dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, this gorgeous series of surreal portraitures expose underlying anatomy by means of self dissection.

11 x 13.75″ with 1 1/2″ white border
Digital print on fine art paper
Limited edition of 20 prints, signed and numbered
Exclusive to Street Anatomy

Ashley, Christina, and Candice are available for $30 at the Street Anatomy store.
Feel free to contact Vanessa at vanessa [a] streetanatomy.com with any questions! For other shipping inquires, please see our store’s FAQ section.

Nicholas Baxter’s Apostasy

2012-11-16T00:22:00.001-05:00

Nicholas Baxter’s Apostasy:

“Almighty” Oil on Panel 12″ x 12″

“Anointing” Oil on Panel 24″ x 24″

“Hand Of God” Oil on Panel 24″ x 24″

“Communion” Oil on Panel 12″ x 12″

These are just 4 out of the 10 oil paintings in Nicholas Baxter’s incredible Apostasy series. Apostasy means renunciation of a religion by a person and this series explores science and medicine as the new religion.
Nicholas boldly states in his artist statement to this series,

“These images represent an inquiry into the medicalization of modern society. In our time, the specialized knowledge of an elite group has been canonized and made gospel, resulting in the learned helplessness of an increasingly ill populace. Surgeons and scientists alike have become the new priests of a material-industrial age, in which living organisms seem to be regarded as no more than an assemblage of mechanical parts…
…Science is the new religion, Big Pharma is the church, the doctors are priests, pills our Holy Communion, and sickness is our only hope of salvation when diseases are dollar signs that fortify the edifice.
So this is my apostasy, my leap for sovereignty from the dungeon of a castle made of glass and steel sterility. A journey back towards wholeness in The Garden that made me. A breach of faith in hopes that I may rejoin the wild world and be healed in its immeasurable and immutable wisdom.”

View more of Nicholas’ photorealistic oil paintings at nbaxter.com.

If the style of Nicholas’ paintings strike your fancy, also check out the work of Danny Quirk, one of the very popular artist’s in our current OBJECTIFY THIS exhibition (Sept 7–29, 2012).

Deepest picture of space ever taken

2012-09-26T05:14:00.002-04:00

Revealing the Universe: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have created the deepest multi-color^* image of the Universe ever taken: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, a mind-blowing glimpse into the vast stretches of our cosmos.

Check. This. Out.

Yegads. [Click to cosmosenate, or grab the bigger 2400 x 2100 pixel version.]

This image is the combined total of over 2000 separate images, and the total exposure is a whopping two million seconds, or 23 days! It’s based on the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field, with new observations added in since the originals were done. It shows over 5500 galaxies – nearly everything you see in the picture is a galaxy, an island universe of billions of stars. Only a handful of individual stars in the foreground of our own galaxy can be seen.

Here’s some detail from the image:

The variety of galaxies is amazing. Some look like relatively normal spirals and ellipticals, but you can see some that are clearly distorted due to interactions – collisions on a galactic scale! – and others that look like galaxy fragments. These may very well be baby galaxies caught in the act of forming, growing. The most distant objects here are over 13 billion light years away, and we see them when they were only 500 million years old.

In case your head is not asplodey from all this, I’ll note that the faintest objects in this picture are at 31st magnitude: the faintest star you can see with your naked eye is ten billion times brighter.

So, yeah.

I’ll note that the purpose of this and the other deep field images is to look as far away and as far back in time as we can to see what the Universe was like when it was young. The wealth of data and scientific knowledge here cannot be overstated.

But I suspect, in the long run, the importance of this and the other pictures will be their impact on the public consciousness. We humans, our planet, our Sun, our galaxy, are so small as to be impossible to describe on this sort of scale, and that’s a good perspective to have.

But never forget: we figured this out. Our curiosity led us to build bigger and better telescopes, to design computers and mathematics to analyze the images from those devices, and to better understand the Universe we live in.

And it all started with simply looking up. Always look up, every chance you get. There’s a whole Universe out there waiting to be explored.

Metronomy—My Heart Rate Rapid

2012-09-24T23:09:00.001-04:00

Metronomy—My Heart Rate Rapid:
Metronomy – My Heart Rate Rapid (Unofficial Music Video) from Claustr&Phobia on Vimeo.

The lovely AnatomyUK turned me on to Metronomy not too long ago, which I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. I recently discovered this unofficial music directed and edited by Claustr & Phobia (Veronic H. & Flavie J.) that features them manipulating a calf heart in many astonishing ways.

[spotted by Halbrey Veronic]

Eat Your Heart Out Anatomical Cocktails

2012-09-24T23:08:00.001-04:00

Eat Your Heart Out Anatomical Cocktails:

Urine’ cocktail in sample bottle, offered warm

Charred Remains made from vodka and Jack Daniels with a crispy meat garnish

Stomach Contents contains the perfect teenage diet of chocolate pieces and skittles, the drink garnished with empty pill casings. A shot of absinthe on the top will be reflective of the green hue of stomach bile.

Stool Sample being a creamy drink with cocoa, strawberry syrup & fudge pieces used to give the medically correct consistency of a sample.

Sanitizer cocktail is designed to cleanse your palette.

Fat comes with a solid fatty layer on top made from melted white chocolate

Are you up for the challenge of trying out these disgustingly delicious cocktails at this years Eat Your Heart Out cake shop at St. Bart’s Pathology Museum hapenning October 26–28, 2012 in London? EYHO is put on by the lovely Miss Cakehead and the cocktails are being created by James Dance of Loading, a Falmouth based internet café and games arcade.
Commenting on the collaboration with Miss Cakehead James says:

“For Eat Your Heart Out the real challenge was to try and make some drink that worked with the anatomical nature of the event, focusing on bodily fluids being too limiting. Instead I took a crime scene body outline as inspiration and tried to cover every area of the body. Of course cocktails such as the ‘Stool Sample’ and ‘Urine’ were so obvious I could not resist including them. As with the cakes each drink will be disgusting to look they will all taste amazing, horror being in peoples minds and the connections they make.”

I really wish I could be in London to attend EYHO. Anyone in or near London, go to this! It sounds like it’s going to be quite a fun and unique experience.

To find out more about the event please visit:
www.evilcakes.wordpress.com

www.facebook.com/misscakehead