So Today I Learned That When A Pregnant Woman Suffers Organ Damage (such As A Heart Attack), The Fetus

Bond of Brothers, the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, by David Lloyd:⠀

“These two adult male lions, probably brothers, greeted each other by rubbing faces for 30 seconds before settling down. Most people never have the opportunity to witness such animal sentience.”

Climate Change

Time flies when you’re diverging at approximately 2% per million years

Anyway if you’re a nerd check out the coolest website ever: http://www.timetree.org/

You can input things like “dog” and “oyster mushroom” and it’ll tell you how long ago they diverged based on current data averages.

Transcript below the cut.

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The Field Museum’s Economic Botany collection contains everything from a seed bank (literally vials upon vials of organized seeds), to hats made out of various grasses and straw material, musical instruments and shoes made from certain trees and barks, stalks of wheat, cobs of corn, bags of tea, dyes, medicines. Some of the items are decades old, and a large portion date back to the 1893 World’s Fair, when the trade and sale of such products was essential to industry growth.

This is a collection about the relationship between people and plants, documenting our use and interactions with items we’ve grown and harvested. It’s botanical as much as it is anthropological: the variety of uses for plants that people have discovered and created over thousands of years is staggering and astounding. As we continue to move towards automated agriculture and become less removed from the direct sources for our food and raw materials, I am grateful and intrigued that we may look into a jar of cherry syrup from the 1890′s and gain a bit more knowledge about the way we used to live. 

Pictures: 

A jar of cherry syrup from Guyana, 1893

A variety of pasta products, presented by the National Macaroni Association, 1920′s

Tortillas from Mexico, 1901 

Sugars from Egypt, 1904 

Maize from Brazil, 1948-1949

See more about the Economic Botanical Collection on The Brain Scoop!

The Neuroscience of Serial Murder

Why do serial killers commit heinous acts of murder? The answer may be found in the reward center of our brains, or the Nucleus Accumbens. This is where dopamine is created. When you eat sugar, snort cocaine, snack on chocolate, or have sex, that reward center is triggered and dopamine is released. This chemical conveys the feeling of pleasure, reinforcing those prior indulgences you’ve engaged in. If a serial killer has linked sex with torture, killing, or dismemberment, his brain is sending him a signal, making him feel rewarded for his behavior. It’s the same feeling we may get from eating some chocolate ice cream after a long day or a really good orgasm. A serial killer’s brain reinforces his behavior, telling him that whatever he is doing is good and that he should keep doing it. This may explain why serial killers often do not stop until they are caught.

When a feather and a bowling ball are dropped in a vacuum, they hit the ground at the same time. This experiment demonstrates Galileo’s falling objects theory, which states that the speed of a falling body is independent of its weight. Watch the BBC video clip here.

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

Ever wondered about the chemistry behind the colours of bodily fluids? Well, urine luck! Larger image and more info: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-2j2

reasons why i claim to learn latin:

it’s a beautiful language

its historical importance

the literature is brilliant and best enjoyed in its original language

reasons why i actually learn latin:

so when people ask me to say something in latin i can tell them a meme and claim it means something beautiful

so if i ever get a chance to go back in time, i can talk about dumb shit with people like cicero and mark antony

so i can communicate with my brethren, the demons from hell