Queer Bookworm
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have a Destiel-Speedpaint because I can’t sleep
Dean: fuck you Naomi, fuck you God, fuck destiny, fuck everything, Cas is mine
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Somehow I think saying something rude about my friend won’t make me like you
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Anonymous asked: if you're aware that iphones are "horrifically bourgeois" then why would you by one? there is like 50 other phones to choose from.
because i don’t give two shits about customizing my phone or any of that pointless shit they use to sell you other phones with. i just want a phone...
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one spn lady per episode » like a virgin
✿ eve -
I’m sorry I can’t participate in societies’ bullshit because of my severe gender blindness
(via noonturnsmidnight)
Prototype Real / Digital Info Interface System
Using projection and gestures to create interactive relationship with information - video embedded below:
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.
“We think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware; it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology.”
Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.
More at DigInfo here
RELATED: This is very similar to a concept developed in 1991 called ‘The Digital Desk’ [link]
(via pavelchekovbodypillow)
why would you even drop acid? people are gonna slip on it and hurt themselves!
only drop the acid if you can neutralize it by dropping the base
(via bemusedlybespectacled)
African brilliance from Cameroon.
24-year-old Arthur Zang, a Cameroonian engineer, invented the Cardiopad. The Cardiopad is a portable, touch screen device that enables heart examinations such as the electrocardiogram to be performed at remote locations while results of the test, are transferred wirelessly to specialists who can interpret them.
Arthur Zang also became a finalist in the 2012 CPS Distinguished Award for the Sciences.
Image and commentary via African Heritage City.
But you’ll never hear about him on CNN, MSNBC or FOX.
I can’t even begin to tell you the number of people I personally know/knew whose lives would have been significantly different had this device existed and been available to them. Absolutely brilliant.
(via bropunzeling)
Fibromyalgia has a reputation as a mysterious illness: The symptoms are diverse, the causes are unknown and the diagnosis is difficult. For the first time, researchers at the University Hospital of Würzburg now have found clear proof of damage to patients’ small fibers.
The responsibility for pain and temperature sensation lies with so-called small fibers, i.e. small-caliber pain-transmitting nerve fibers terminating in the skin. In the search for the causes of fibromyalgia-related pain, University of Würzburg researchers have focused their research on these fibers. With success: “We have detected clear signs of damage to the small fibers in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome,” says Nurcan Üçeyler, a private lecturer at the Department of Neurology of the University Hospital of Würzburg. The results of their study are reported in the current issue of the journal Brain.
According to Üçeyler, this discovery heralds a “paradigm shift”: The results of the study are highly relevant in that they challenge the conventional pathophysiological concept of fibromyalgia. “Since we have established that the small fibers are impaired in patients with fibromyalgia, the pain related to this disease now fulfils the criteria for being considered as neuropathic pain, i.e. pain arising from an impairment or illness of the nervous system,” Üçeyler explains. Furthermore, for the first time, medical professionals have an objectively measurable criterion at their disposal to help them with their diagnosis.
Universität Würzburg: Fibromyalgia: First Proof Found
can’t wait to prove all those fuckers wrong
(via heatherpattern)(via kengrii)
The glass tank is filled with a gas called Sulfur Hexaflouride which is a one of the more dense gases, and it also happens to be as transparent as air so it gives the illusion of something floating in mid air, when it is really just acting like a boat in water.
(via urlgrayhot)
![sagansense:
Designers Create A Prototypical “Star Trek” Computer SystemWhat’s the Latest Development?
Technologists at the Austin offices of design firm frog have combined sensors, projectors, and custom-built software to create an entire room that responds to voice and motion commands. The project, titled RoomE, is one of the first examples of a type of interface previously only seen in science fiction, where the computer is always aware of who’s in the room and can react accordingly based on the person’s needs. Frog fellow Jared Ficklin says, “A lot of people seem to be working on various pieces [of the interface] but no one has yet to combine them. That’s one reason we had to build one for ourselves.” The project is a proof-of-concept and not intended for commercial release.
What’s the Big Idea?RoomE represents an attempt to traverse the gap between today’s heads-down interfaces and the resulting behavioral issues — such as people bumping into each other because they’re deep into their smartphones — and more natural interfaces that “act like ecologies, rather than single organisms.” As a potential template, the project offers lots of ideas for a future world in which everything is connected. In the meantime, the frog team offers a guide on their Web site for people who want to build their own RoomE.
via Big Think](http://24.media.tumblr.com/2d2f3b70f86807aa5eba724e8958e42d/tumblr_ml4jduInSS1r01w8mo1_500.jpg)
Designers Create A Prototypical “Star Trek” Computer System
What’s the Latest Development?
Technologists at the Austin offices of design firm frog have combined sensors, projectors, and custom-built software to create an entire room that responds to voice and motion commands. The project, titled RoomE, is one of the first examples of a type of interface previously only seen in science fiction, where the computer is always aware of who’s in the room and can react accordingly based on the person’s needs. Frog fellow Jared Ficklin says, “A lot of people seem to be working on various pieces [of the interface] but no one has yet to combine them. That’s one reason we had to build one for ourselves.” The project is a proof-of-concept and not intended for commercial release.What’s the Big Idea?
RoomE represents an attempt to traverse the gap between today’s heads-down interfaces and the resulting behavioral issues — such as people bumping into each other because they’re deep into their smartphones — and more natural interfaces that “act like ecologies, rather than single organisms.” As a potential template, the project offers lots of ideas for a future world in which everything is connected. In the meantime, the frog team offers a guide on their Web site for people who want to build their own RoomE.via Big Think
(via thesecretmichan)
Dear people who claim that vaccines cause autism, therefore people shouldn’t vaccinate their kids,
vaccines exist to prevent deadly illnesses. You are literally saying that endangering your child’s life is preferable to them being autistic. Never mind whether they actually do cause it or not, you’re saying that death is preferable to autism.
Congrats, you’re a piece of shit and the autistic person/people in your life deserve better.
actually vaccines exist for the profit of the pharmaceutical corporations.
vaccination and immunisation are two different things. bet ya didn’t know that because you don’t know your ass from a hole in the fucking ground.
every disease ‘cured’ by vaccination was, in reality, controlled by better living conditions, better nutrition and better hygiene. Tell me how you think we got rid of scurvy, scarlet fever and reduced the incidences of typhus in the first world without vaccines? But how is whitey gonna spin a massive profit from that mundane shit?
well done on being a talking monkey with zero research skills, fucknuts.
It’s really rich for you to talk about not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground when you’re comparing Scurvy (a vitamin deficiency), Scarlet Fever (a bacterial infection that actually does still exist, one of my friends niece and nephew got it this year, it’s just an advanced form of Strep), and Typhus (another bacterial infection), with the VIRUSES that vaccinations are intended to prevent.
Before I start, your comparison is kinda like saying “we can treat cuts with bandaids so I don’t know why you insist on setting that broken bone”.
Let’s get a little more detailed, so you can see just how fucking wrong you are and how ignorant your little screed was.
A condition like scurvy is simply the symptoms that manifest when the human body has a deficiency in one of more nutrients, in the case of scurvy it’s vitamin C, but Vitamin A deficiency can lead to blindness and there are various other vitamins that either too much of or too little of can have deleterious effects. The treatments for these are simple, either change diet to address the imbalance or in sever cases take a supplement to treat. Also, how fucking classist of you to think that we’ve gotten rid of it when Scurvy still effects the very poor and Vitamin A deficiency still claims the lives of 670k children under 5 annually.
Bacteria are single celled organisms capable of reproducing on their own. The human immune system can deal with bacteria through white blood cells consuming and destroying the bacteria or through the immune system generating anti-bodies that bind with the receptor sites that the bacteria uses to bond with cells. We also have nifty antibiotics which can directly kill off bacteria once in the human body.
Some bacterial infections, like pertussis and tuberculosis are VERY difficult to treat through standard antibacterial therapies and without detection within days of infection can still be lethal or life altering in the damage they cause. As it takes the body about 2 weeks to generate an antibody for an infection that it hasn’t encountered before we have largely relied on vaccination (and quite successfully at that) to prevent serious cases of these bacterial infections from being able to take hold as the secondary anamnestic response time (read, production of anti-bodies that the immune system remembers from previous encounters) peaks in 1-3 days. The difference between a pertussis infection with a primary antibody generation response and that with a secondary anamnestic response can quite literally be the difference between life or death.
Once a virus is in the body though the only way to treat them is to manage the symptoms and try and boos the immune systems response. There are a handful of anti-viral cocktails but they have limited efficacy and only work on a handful of viruses. Unlike bacteria viruses depend on taking over host cells and using them to reproduce, once the virus has stripped all it can from the host cell it bursts open spreading more viruses to infect other cells repeating the process. Many viruses also directly target the immune system rendering an effective immune response impossible which is why many of the viruses which we are vaccinated against are still lethal if contracted even in medically advanced countries (Other than vaccination, treatment of smallpox is primarily supportive, such as wound care and infection control, fluid therapy, and possible ventilator assistance.). Therefore we have to rely on vaccination to give our immune systems that antibody memory that I discussed above.
Viruses reproduce at a logarithmic rate, compared to the doubling rate of bacteria, With each new generation of a bacteria the number of new bacteria is at most double the number of the previous generation, however take a virus that can produce 50 copies for each infected cell. Say you initially get infected with 5 active copies of the virus (and these numbers are small for ease of comprehension, typical infection numbers are much higher). Those 5 viruses infect 5 cells and produce 250 new viruses, those 250 viruses turn into 12,500, which turns into 625,000, so you went from 5 to over a half million in 3 generations, (5 bacteria would yield 40 bacteria in 3 generations for comparison). This is why we can’t rely on primary immune responses for viral infections, they simply aren’t fast enough. In the two weeks it takes for antibodies to form for the kind of lethal viruses that we vaccinate against the human immune system has likely already been overwhelmed. However, if we provide the immune system with the memory of the anti-bodies needed it can provide an immune response much more efficiently and deal with the virus before it becomes a major threat. By keeping people vaccinated for these viruses it also prevents them from establishing a foothold in communities and spreading, it also protects those who can’t be vaccinated (due to compromised immune systems among other reasons) from infection through herd immunity, reducing the chances that those they come into contact with could be infected reduces the chances that the immuno-compromised will come into contact with those viruses.
tl,dr: You don’t know fuck all about viruses, bacteria, nutritional deficiencies, immunology, or vaccines, and your comment showed nothing but a massive amount of haughty ignorance. How about you actually learn something about biology before you try and act like I’m the one who needs to do research.
Unf, that scientific smackdown was so satisfying I need a cigarette now.
that was a work of fucking art.
(via kvothetheraving)
WHY DON’T PEOPLE CARE ABOUT NASA AND SPACE IT IS SOMETHING I LITERALLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND BECAUSE SPACE IS SO INCREDIBLE AND JUST ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDING AND NASA IS JUST THIS MASSIVE POWERHOUSE OF SCIENCE AND IT ACTUALLY PUTS PEOPLE IN SPACE WHAT ABOUT THAT IS NOT AMAZING TO PEOPLE AND WHY DO PEOPLE ACTUALLY THINK THAT NASA NEEDS TO STOP DOING THIS AWESOME STUFF SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME BECAUSE I GENUINELY DON’T GET IT
(via teroknortailor)
This is how nature works.
Vegans take note.
Well done, Sherlock. Apart from Lions have a much higher stomach acid pH to break down meat than us, and their bodies are designed to deal with what comes with it. You don’t see a lion developing heart disease or cancer from meat, do you?
Some animals eat their own shit, just because its natural doesn’t mean we should do it too. We are intelligent and sufficient enough not to HAVE to kill other beings to survive. In fact, our such high demand for meat is killing other humans.
Take note.
The teeth in your mouth (part of your digestive system) aren’t sufficient hunting tools to kill the animals you eat. Apes don’t naturally eat animals, they eat plants.
Y’know, there are a ton of valid arguments for vegetarianism and veganism—incredibly good arguments, actually (biological, moral, social). But none of the shit you two wrote is one of them.
Firstly, you don’t actually see people developing heart disease or cancer from meat either. It’s not Step 1) eat meat; Step 2) die. There are a variety of factors, and the link between red meat and those diseases is due to lifestyle. And, in captivity, you do actually see lions developing heart disease. And gorillas. And many other animals. It’s not the diet; it’s largely the sedentary lifestyle. And you do see wild animals get cancer. In fact, scientists say cancer kills almost the same percentage of animals in the wild as it does humans.
Secondly, if you’re going to mention how much better-suited lions’ digestive systems are to eating meat than humans’, then it’s really dishonest to not also mention how absolutely craptastic the human digestive system is at digesting vegetables. Because, in our current stage of evolution, our digestive systems aren’t actually capable of digesting raw plant material in any efficient way without aid. And, when we aren’t digesting food well, we’re not absorbing the carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals we need to thrive, which can totally lead to malnutrition, digestive disorders like IBS, and, yes, even cancer.
And, because militantweasel brought it up, let’s actually talk about animals that eat their own shit: gorillas do. And do you know why they do it? It’s because they don’t eat meat. They have very similar dietary needs to ours, but they can’t pop into a pharmacy for a multivitamin—and the only appreciable way to get Vitamin B12 that isn’t from meat or a supplement is to eat your own shit… or someone elses’.
And speaking of apes—because degaussme brought it up and they’re our closest relatives—they don’t just eat plants (and shit). All of them also eat insects; it’s a minor secondary source of B12. And chimpanzees and bonobos do, in fact, naturally eat meat; they’ll even hunt and eat other primates. Also, all apes, even those that are pretty much exclusively folivores, have digestive systems capable of digesting meat.
And, unlike other apes, people aren’t just capable of digesting meat, we’re actually well built for it because humans evolved by eating meat and cooking. If both those things hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be humans as we are today. To have evolved here without both, we would have to spend half the day eating and eat like 15+ pounds of raw plants every single day.
As for the argument about our teeth not being capable of killing prey, well: you can’t logically exclude the use of tools for procuring meat—which is what the teeth argument does—without also excluding the use of tools for procuring vegetables, preparing food, and creating dietary supplementation. And, I mean, not only is that argument proven ridiculous by animals’ frequent use of tools, but it also has you literally eating shit or termites every day.
best argument i’ve ever read
That was the argument equivalent of a 100-hit combo in Killer Instinct
God damn
I’ll just throw in my two cents here. We NOW have ways to survive perfectly well on a vegetarian and vegan diet, but that doesn’t change the fact that humans are initially omnivores and in nature, before the wonders of agriculture, globalization and generally development of how we eat and deal with things we HAD TO EAT MEAT TO SURVIVE. You can’t just erase that. Seriously, if you’re a vegetarian, that’s great. If you live vegan, that’s great too (and I kind of envy you for your morals being that much higher than your appetite - I couldn’t stand a week without milk). And if you like to eat meat that is great too enjoy that burger now can we please all stop being dicks about what we eat because seriously people are already fighting over every little bit of life can’t we just all get along mother of God!
As a grad student, and a scientist, I found these to be hysterical……and frighteningly accurate!!!!!
Like seriously, this exists??
(via endquestionmark)
The media is only perpetuating ignorance and inciting false hope by blowing up with articles and stories regarding the first person being “cured” of HIV.
Here are the facts:
- The person in question is a toddler. A baby girl. She was infected by her HIV-positive mother, who didn’t receive the proper, recommended care for her condition during gestation.
- She wasn’t cured. She was functionally cured. And that, in itself, was a medical fluke — not a marvel. More on that below.
- She was administered a highly concentrated cocktail of three antiretroviral drugs within her first 30 hours outside of the womb. Before the HIV lab test results even came back.
- Two tests were done an hour apart from each other shortly after birth, and the baby was positive, but with a fairly low reading of 20,000 copies per milliliter (c/mL) of HIV RNA. But the fact that she tested positive so early in life was indicative of the time of her infection: likely to have been in the womb, rather than during delivery.
- Her atypical treatment regimen was prescribed in an effort to suppress the virus before it progressed to tissue/cells colloquially referred to as viral reservoirs…anatomical areas where latent viral infections are at the peak of their persistence.
- 2.5 years later, the anonymous baby girl tested HIV “negative” — due the fact that her viral traces are so low, they can’t be picked up by standard clinical tests. She’s been off treatment for over eight months. This is the definition of a functional cure.
- Researchers as well as the virologist who treated her made it a point to stress that her current state is largely attributed to the intensity and the timing of the treatment — in absence of prophylactic measures.
- This is the second reported case of an HIV “cure.” In 2007 a man famously known as the “Berlin patient,” Mr. Timothy Brown garnered the media’s attention. He was battling both Leukemia and HIV, when he received a bone marrow transplant to treat the latter. The bone marrow he received was from a person with an HIV-resistent mutation, one only found in 1% of the caucasian population. And thus, he is now HIV-free.
What does this all mean? There still isn’t a medical cure for HIV. And that girl, as well as Mr. Brown are no more than fortunate and blessed.
guys, please. signal boost this. i already knew some of the facts when i first saw the reports on tumblr but i wasn’t sure about the whole story.
this is the kind of shit that needs to make it onto the tumblr radar, not nonsensical drawings that pass as “abstract art”.
The media is the worst at reporting science and medicine.
(via noonturnsmidnight)
