How Can Isotopes Help In The Hunt For Life, Both On Earth, And On Other Planets? The First Of Our Five

Since I get asked a lot about where to learn more about the human brain and behaviour, I’ve made a masterpost of books, websites, videos and online courses to introduce yourself to that piece of matter that sits between your ears.

Books

The Brain Book  by Rita Carter

The Pyschology Book (a good starter book)  by DK

Thinking, Fast and Slow  by Daniel Kahneman

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking  by Susan Cain

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  by Oliver Sacks

The Brain: The Story of You  by David Eagleman

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science  by Norman Doidge

This Is Your Brain on Music  by Daniel Levitin

The Autistic Brain by Richard Panek and Temple Grandin (highly reccomended)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  by Yuval Noah Harari (not really brain-related, but it is single handedly the best book I have ever read)

Websites

@tobeagenius (shameless self-promotion)

How Stuff Works

Psych2Go

BrainFacts

Neuroscience for Kids (aimed at kids, but it has some good info)

New Scientist

National Geographic

Live Science

Videos & Youtube Channels

Mind Matters series by TedEd

Crash Course Psychology

SciShow Brain

Psych2Go TV

asapSCIENCE

Brain Craft

Its Okay To Be Smart

Online Courses

The Addicted Brain

Visual Perception and The Brain

Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

Pyschology Of Popularity

Harvard Fundamentals Of Neuroscience

SPEAKING OF WASPS I bet everyone with a soul considers caterpillars cute but you know what’s cutest of all????

Yeah these look like “caterpillars” but they’re the larvae of a stingless wasp group, the sawflies; they just happen to live like caterpillars do so they evolved very similarly. Anyway the angle of the last one makes me think someone told it to stop eating that leaf and it just started eating a lot faster while looking them dead in the eye

So, our physics teacher has the strange idea of motivating his students by letting each of us present a physical phenomenal we find interesting to our classmates in a 5-minutes-presentation. And now I need something that is interesting for everyone - even people that usually don't care for physics -, but has interesting facts for someone who's interested in it, too (preferably with an easy experiment). You don't happen to have any ideas, do you?

First of all, your professor is awesome for taking the time to do this. Of the top of my mind, the best one I have is Chladni figures.

Basically take a flat metal plate, fix it at the center and spray some fine sand particles on it.

Using a violin bow, gently excite any edge of the plate to magically witness these beautiful normal mode patterns ( known as Chladni patterns/figures ) forming on the plate.

Also notice that by pinching the plate at different points, the pattern obtained changes.

There is a whole lot of physics that goes behind such a simple phenomenon and I dare say we understand it completely. There are lots of questions on these figures that we have no answer for!

Hope this helps with your presentation. Have a good one!

Gif source video: Steve Mould

Can you clear up the animal/human egyptian stuff some more? I find it interesting!

I’m honestly not sure any explanation will ‘clear it up’ but I’ll give it a go, since the original post has so many reblogged comments that misunderstand things. 

I kinda went into it a bit here in this post, and a little in this one, but I’ll reiterate it here for posterity. 

Egyptian gods appear to have animal heads, but, in truth, the animal headed form is merely to demonstrate the duality of the god - the animal and the human. (I want to point out at this juncture that not every Egyptian god has an animal form. Some are simply human, and others have forms that are anthropomorphised inanimate objects). Duality was important to the Egyptians as they were intrinsically linked to the world around them and often their religious mythology is deeply linked to the natural world. This is why we see themes such as life/death structure/chaos male/female animal/human etc. They equated what they saw in their lives as aspects of the divine. 

One such example is the god Khepri. Khepri is the god of the Morning/Rising sun, and was responsible for pushing the sun across the sky. Khepri is depicted as, in most cases, as simply a Scarab beetle, and sometimes with the body of a man whose entire head is a scarab beetle. The Egyptians took inspiration from the natural world to explain the divine, so they saw the humble dung beetle (that’s what a Scarab beetle is) pushing it’s ball of dung about, and also its babies hatching out from this dung ball seemingly out of nowhere. The ball of dung they equated with the Sun moving across the sky, thus assuming that a divine scarab was pushing the sun in a similar manner. Khepri took on a ‘creator’ aspect as the Egyptians saw the dung beetle seemingly creating life from nothing, though in reality they’re just laying eggs within the dung ball that eventually hatch. But this wasn’t something the Egyptians understood, so they believed that the scarab beetle had the power to create life from nothing, much like their own creation myth of life springing forth from a mound of earth in the waters of chaos. Dung ball = mound that emerged from the waters of chaos. Thus, when naming the god, the Egyptians chose a word xpr (kheper) which means ‘to come into being’ to relate to the creation of life and also the rising of the sun. And how is xpr written? With a Scarab beetle! Everything has it’s place in Ancient Egypt. As for the human body with a scarab beetle head form, well that’s more of a form that in art allows the Egyptians to show the Scarab beetle doing humanoid things in religious scenes. 

For gods like Anubis, who are depicted with the head of their animal form, it’s different. The duality works the same, insomuch as the form you see (Golden Wolf headed human) is just a combination to show that the god has two forms and two kinds of power - the divine human form and the divine animal form. In most cases you would never see the human form as you were only allowed to see a God’s true form after death, so it was prohibited to depict the god as human (though there’s a rare depiction of Anubis in human form at Seti’s temple at Abydos). Basically, the Egyptians believed that images could magically come to life so depicting a god as a mortal human would cause the god to die. No one wants that.* So, the Egyptians combined the Animal and Human in order to show the god legitimately in a scene.

* I am aware that there are gods that only have a human form, but they’ve always got divine markers such as headdresses that mark them as ‘not mortal human’ but a god, therefore they wouldn’t be subject to them to the same rules. Isis and Nepthys for instance have their names in hieroglyphs as headdresses to mark them as different, and Hathor has her cow horns and sun disk.

However, when I say ‘animal form’ I do not mean, and neither did the Egyptians, a walking talking animal that does everything a human does. Anubis’ animal form is not a walking, talking Golden Wolf in human clothing. When I say ‘animal form’ I mean a literal animal. Just a wolf. Nothing else. Every wolf an Egyptian saw they would believe was a form of Anubis visiting the mortal realm. 

Unlike in Greek Mythology, where the gods were essentially human (though looking at Zeus…goddamn Zeus) and everyone knew they lived on Mount Olympus, Egyptian gods had no such thing. The Ancient Egyptians believed that their gods lived on the same plane of existence, but on another level. Kinda like ghosts I guess? There but not really. So they would manifest as something. Khepri was the scarab beetle pushing the dung in a ball and in turn rose the sun. Dogs/Wolves hung about in the necropolis so they saw that as a manifestation of Anubis guarding the dead (even though those dogs were most likely eating the dead…), which also gives way to the epithet of Anubis on his Mound (i.e. Anubis who sits upon a mastaba guarding the tomb). Bastet was the cat hunting mice around the grain stores so that the harvest wouldn’t be ruined. The Egyptians would feed these animals as a form of worship,** and that’s how they ended up with so many cats in the house. 

** I say worship in a very loose sense. The worship of gods like Osiris, Isis, Amun, Mut, Khonsu etc was the prerogative of the Pharaoh and his phyles of priests (set of Priests for each god). Most Egyptians were not allowed into the major temples. In fact, they were not allowed past the first forecourt, and that was at festival time. The Egyptians believed that their Pharaoh was a demi-god and therefore their link between the gods and themselves. Only he was allowed to worship the gods, as it was Pharaoh’s job to maintain what’s known as Ma’at (cosmic order). If Pharaoh didn’t then the world would fall into chaos, which is why they tried to exorcise Akhentaten from the record because he did not maintain ma’at! Of course, Pharaoh couldn’t be in the temples for each god every day, so most of it was devolved to High Priests and their underlings. Regular Egyptians would not have worshipped the main pantheon, but rather the more minor domestic gods, such as Bes and Taweret, at home. Feeding cats would have fed into this more ‘loose’ worship.

But of course there was also the ‘human’ form, which meant that a god could come to you as a person and you wouldn’t even know it. Sekhmet could manifest as the general who leads the troops into battle, Taweret is the midwife who delivers your baby, Sobek is the fisherman responsible for the good haul of fish today etc etc. The depiction of them in one zoomorphic form is purely to demonstrate that they could be both and that human and animal forms were equal parts of their power and character.

I hope this clears some of it up!

Sources:

Silverman, D. (1991) Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt, In J. Baines, L. Lesko, & D. Silverman, Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 7-87

Schoske. S & Wildung. D, (1992) Gott und Götter im Alten Ägypten. Berlin: Von Zabern

Meeks. D & Favard-Meeks. C, (1996) Divine Life of the Egyptian Gods (Hachette (original), 1993 / Cornell University (translation), 1996)

Assmann, J. (2001). The Search for God in Ancient Egypt.(D. Lorton, Trans.) Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

Hornung, E. (1982). Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. (J. Baines. Trans) Ithica & London: Cornell University Press

The Six Pack Turtle ~ Often, when humans discard their garbage, there is little to no consideration where it goes or what it affects.  In the case of this unfortunate turtle, he found a six-pack soda ring that became tightly fixed around his shell.  As the turtle grew, the ring constricted his shell growth as well as internal organ development.  This turtle ultimately died as result of this man-made deformation.  Thank you so much to SkeletonMuseum on Instagram for sharing.

Revising like.

Subjects shown: Advanced dynamics, vibrations and waves, properties of matter, electricity and magnetism. All first year.

Crime scene investigators are about to get a helping hand from our ancient ancestors. The earliest known synthetic pigment, Egyptian blue, is found in some of the paint on ancient statues, coffins, tomb walls, and amulets. Most other pigments long ago faded. Modern scientists, intrigued by its longevity, worked out Egyptian blue’s chemical composition decades ago. Recently it was discovered that it emits near-infrared radiation when exposed to certain kinds of light. Basically: it has rare, invisible luminescence.

And why does that help crime-stoppers? Egyptian blue can be dusted onto complicated surfaces where fingerprints are normally hard to retrieve. The surface is then photographed with a modified camera and a filter sensitive to Egyptian blue’s near-infrared rays. If fingerprints are there, they glow clearly in the resulting image. Science is amazing.

If you’re a white person like me, please take a second to watch this video and learn a little bit about African American death culture.

There’s so much in this video that I didn’t know, but should have. Living in a place like the United States, where there are so many cultures present, everyone should try to educate themselves about the important traditions of other groups.