Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact

Tibetan Burial Practice

Image Source: FishOil at English Wikipedia. Body being prepared, Sichuan. Wikipedia.

The “Sky Burial” practice is the most common way to dispose of the dead in Tibet. Tibet is a region with little trees, which in return means fewer cremation practices. Due to temperature, the Tibetan plateau is frozen making burials difficult. With these challenges, the Tibetan people found a solution. Bearded vultures are naturally allowed to eat the decomposing human remains. These birds are considered sacred for Tibetans, and not to be harmed.

Image Source: FishOil at English Wikipedia. File:Vulture - Sky burial.jpg. Wikipedia.

Upon death, he/she gets covered in white cloth. The family keeps the remains in the home and perform prayers. On a lucky day, family members will take the dead to a place of disposition. A monk/specialist will sharpen a knife while saying a prayer. The monk/specialist will cut the flesh, and pulverize the bones to mix with flour for the bearded vultures to consume. Tibetans consider it a sign of good luck when vultures consume the entire body. Tibetans believe that breaking the bones will release the soul. Tibetans also believe that vultures carry these pieces of bone to the sky where the journey heaven begins. No remains left on the ground means the soul arrived safely to heaven. Chants are said over lingering remains as they get cremated.

Image Source: BabelStone. Vultures feeding on the rock used to expose bodies at a sky burial outside Lhasa, Tibet, during the first lunar month, March 1985. Photographs of the sky burial taken with permission of the participants, on condition that no photographs were taken before the vultures were called to eat the bodies of the three deceased persons. Photo scanned from a print. Wikipedia.

Politics. During the 1960s and 1970s, the communist officials outlawed the practice of sky burial. The sky burial practice reinstated in the 1980s.

Another form of Tibetan burial is Tree Burial. This is a burial practice for children. It is usually practiced in Nyingchi, southeast of Tibet. To avoid other children from seeing the corpse, the deceased child is placed in a wooden case. The crate with the body inside is hung on a tree in a remote forest.

Forensic anthropologists must learn of cultural ceremonies associated with death, not only for reference but also as recognition of ethics and values concerning anthropology.

Researchers are trying to understand why ancient Roman concrete is exceptionally durable.

Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Romans built piers, breakwaters, and other structures out of concrete—and some of those structures still stand today. Now, researchers are trying to understand the chemical and geological processes that work together to give that ancient concrete such durability. Using microscopy, x-ray diffraction, and spectroscopic techniques, they’ve developed a map of the crystalline microstructures within the concrete. According to their research, a slow infusion of seawater into concrete made with a type of volcanic ash found near Rome gradually creates crystals of a material called aluminous tobermorite, which actually strengthens the concrete as it ages.

Marie Jackson, a geology and geophysics research professor and one of the authors of a report on the work, says that understanding Roman concrete could give modern materials scientists ideas for how to strengthen modern structures, and could even lead to new materials, such as concretes that soak up and trap nuclear waste.

Photo by THINK Global School/flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Figure 1. Bun (Lepus townsendii) approaching ideal bun form (ei. a perfect fluffy orb) over the course of 5.2 hours. Ambient temperature -6°C to -15°C.

MIT Brings Riri Williams to Life in Spring Admissions Video

From the MIT Admissions blog:

Chris asked to meet with me last fall, in late September. We sat down in an office in MIT Admissions. “For the spring admissions video,” he said, “I basically want to make a two-minute trailer for the new Iron Man with Riri Williams.” This sentence, and the conversation that we had afterward, was what would eventually turn into the video you all saw posted on Tuesday… [+]

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[BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS]

The quest to crystallize time

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see ‘How to create a time crystal’). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty’ diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It’s less weird than the first idea, but it’s still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.

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smithsonianzoo 🐣Our kiwi chick at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute is 2 weeks old! She is eating a mixture of meat, fruit and vegetables. Kiwi chick look like adults when they hatch, but are not fully grown until they are about 18 months old. 

Women’s History Month – Dr. Rosalind Franklin, Pioneer Molecular Biologist and Uncredited for Discovering Double Helix Structure of DNA

Why beehives are hexagons.

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.