A group of researchers have trained pigeons to identify malignant breast tissue in exchange for pigeon pellets. Here’s the real, not made up study.
This doesn’t mean hospitals will start employing pigeons. But it does suggest that studying pigeons could help us teach doctors how to process medical images. From the study:
Pigeons (Columba livia)—which share many visual system properties with humans—can serve as promising surrogate observers of medical images, a capability not previously documented.
… The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception, and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.
Image credit: Levenson et. al.
failed my lab; got 150% yield on a reaction and apparently writing “god works in mysterious ways” as the conclusion to my lab report doesn’t fly in a university setting
Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc….but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.
David Foster Wallace, Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (via mindfuckmath)
-epsilon is negative. epsilon has always been negative. no matter how you struggle, epsilon will stay negative.
-you must write +C at the end of every communication with the entity feeding upon your work. you change your last name to +C, vainly praying that this will appease their ferocious appetite. It does not. +C
-dy/dx is a fraction. dy/dx isn’t a fraction. you can never know when it is. you can never know when it isn’t. it is always there. laughing. it owns a cat. a black cat. she sleeps in a box. plotting.
-there are parts everywhere. dismembered functions lying prone on cold white pages. you are told to integrate by them. everything only gets worse. more parts appear. then more. and more.
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson
you WILL take more than one STEM class. every single semester. so will every single other STEM major. no one will feel bad if you think you have a hard course load because you’re in more than one STEM class. it’s just not happening.
that being said - here is the god’s honest truth, coming from someone who’s overloaded in courses 4 out of 5 semesters (because they wouldn’t let me do so my first):
1) everything you think you can’t do, you can, and then some
2) everything you think is the hardest thing you’ve experienced, you will overcome, and then face even harder challenges, which you will also overcome
3) if you love what you’re doing - really, truly, love what you’re doing - you’ll be ecstatic that your entire schedule consists of just that. taking only STEM classes is awesome when that’s what you want to devote the rest of your life to
basically what I’m getting at with this is -
If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right.
THIS IS REBLOG RELEVANT FOR ONLY TODAY IN THE WHOLE OF HUMAN HISTORY AND ITS FUTURE
Vantablack is a substance made of carbon nanotubules, and is the blackest substance ever created. It absorbs approximately 99.965% of visible light that hits it. When a photon strikes the material, instead of bouncing off of it (like most other surfaces), it becomes trapped in the nanotubules, continually deflecting from tube to tube before eventually becoming heat.
(Source)
"To awaken my spirit through hard work and dedicate my life to knowledge... What do you seek?"
229 posts