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For years we never had a clear picture of what Pluto really looked like, but the smallest member of our solar system has finally had its day in the spotlight!
NASA recently published some strikingly detailed images of our far off friend.
“So you’re made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?”
―Neil deGrasse Tyson
These photos are on the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2014, a competition and exhibition run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The winning images will be posted here on September 18.
Pressed Flowers. The oldest, dated collection of plants at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Arborum, fruticum et herbarum flores et folia in insula Gothlandia collecta annis (1701-02), by Antonius Christophori Münchenberg.
The flowers for the Herbarium were collected from 1699 to 1702, and contain 300 native and cultivated plant species from the island of Gotland, an island province of Sweden.
We’ve all been there: It’s been a long week at work, so Friday night, you reward yourself by going to bed early and sleeping in. But when you wake up the next morning (or afternoon), light scathes your eyes, and your limbs feel like they’re filled with sand. Your brain is still lying down and you even have faint headache. If too little sleep is a problem, then why is extra sleep a terrible solution?
Oversleeping feels so much like a hangover that scientists call it sleep drunkenness. But, unlike the brute force neurological damage caused by alcohol, your misguided attempt to stock up on rest makes you feel sluggish by confusing the part of your brain that controls your body’s daily cycle.
Your internal rhythms are set by your circadian pacemaker, a group of cells clustered in the hypothalamus, a primitive little part of the brain that also controls hunger, thirst, and sweat. Primarily triggered by light signals from your eye, the pacemaker figures out when it’s morning and sends out chemical messages keeping the rest of the cells in your body on the same clock.
Scientists believe that the pacemaker evolved to tell the cells in our bodies how to regulate their energy on a daily basis. When you sleep too much, you’re throwing off that biological clock, and it starts telling the cells a different story than what they’re actually experiencing, inducing a sense of fatigue. You might be crawling out of bed at 11am, but your cells started using their energy cycle at seven. This is similar to how jet lag works.
But oversleep isn’t just going to ruin your Saturday hike. If you’re oversleeping on the regular, you could be putting yourself at risk for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Harvard’s massive Nurses Health Study found that people who slept 9 to 11 hours a night developed memory problems and were more likely to develop heart disease than people who slept a solid eight. (Undersleepers are at an even bigger risk). Other studies have linked oversleep to diabetes, obesity, and even early death.
Oversleep doesn’t just happen as a misguided attempt at rewarding yourself. The Harvard Nurses Study estimated that chronic oversleep affects about 4 percent of the population. These are generally people who work odd hours, have an uncomfortable sleep situation, or a sleeping disorder.
People who work early morning or overnight shifts might be oversleeping to compensate for waking up before the sun rises or going to sleep when it’s light out. Doctors recommend using dark curtains and artificial lights to straighten things out rather than medication or supplements. Apps like the University of Michigan’s Entrain can also help people reset their circadian clock by logging the amount and type of light they get throughout the day.
When you go to bed, your body cycles between different sleep stages. Your muscles, bones, and other tissues do their repair work during deep sleep, before you enter REM. However, if your bed or bedroom is uncomfortable—too hot or cold, messy, or lumpy—your body will spend more time in light, superficial sleep. Craving rest, you’ll sleep longer.
If everything’s just fine with your sleep zone but you still can’t get under the eight hour mark, you might need to go see a doctor. It could be a symptom of narcolepsy, which makes it hard for your body to regulate fatigue and makes you sleep in more. Sleep apnea is a potentially more serious disorder where you stop breathing while you slumber. It’s typically caused by an obstructed airway, which leads to snoring. However, in a small number of sufferers, the brain simply stops telling the muscles to breathe, starving the brain and eventually forcing a gasping response. In addition to all the other terrifying aspects of this disease, it’s not doing your quality of sleep any favors.
No surprise, drugs and alcohol might also be causing you to sleep too much, as does being depressed (In fact, oversleep can contribute to even more depression). But no matter what’s causing it, too much sleep is not good for your long term health. Rather than kicking the can down the road, try getting some equilibrium between your weekend and weekday sleep.
Publication info London :Printed by Taylor and Francis ;1861 BHL Collections: Book of the Week Collection Smithsonian Libraries
First prize in Science’s Visualization Challenge (video category) went to this NASA video by Greg Shirah, Horace Mitchell, and Tom Bridgman. It shows Earth’s “climate engine” — the wind patterns and ocean currents that are powered by the sun.
Foxy Charaxes Charaxes jasius saturnus on its food-plant, Schotia brachypetala.
Clare Abbott and Stephen Henning, Southern African Butterflies (Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa, 1984).
Brainscapes
The MRI-inspired neuro art of Laura Jacobson, on display at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging. Photos by Marty Kelly.
Clear-winged Forest Glory (Vestalis gracilis) This large damselfly species has emerged as one of my favourite insects to observe and photograph. They are not associated with waterways but are found on hillsides in thick vegetation usually bordering a sunny clearing or path. They will always be in pairs or a group of distinct pairs and they inhabit the same trees and use the same perches which makes revisits possible. They congregate together in a dark corner as a group until the sun is at its warmest and then assume well-lit perches facing the open ground and from there they regularly dash out to capture small flying insects on the wing and returning to their perch to devour their meal. Initially they are very shy and flighty, but once I move amongst them for ten minutes or so they become amazingly tolerant to the point that I can reach out and touch them. Apart from their iridescence and hypnotising eyes, the most memorable feature in my mind is the crackling cellophane sound of their almost clumsy flight. They are the closest things to fairies I can imagine….. by Sinobug (itchydogimages) on Flickr. Pu’er, Yunnan, China See more Chinese dragonflies and damselflies on my Flickr site HERE…..
Google Doodle today (25.07.2013) to celebrate Rosalind Franklin’s 93rd Birthday.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.
Happy Birthday to one of my fav scientists!!
Rosalind Franklin 1920 - 1958
Rosalind Franklin always liked facts. She was logical and precise, and impatient with things that were otherwise. She decided to become a scientist when she was 15. She passed the examination for admission to Cambridge University in 1938, and it sparked a family crisis. Although her family was well-to-do and had a tradition of public service and philanthropy, her father disapproved of university education for women. He refused to pay. An aunt stepped in and said Franklin should go to school, and she would pay for it. Franklin’s mother also took her side until her father finally gave in.
War broke out in Europe in 1939 and Franklin stayed at Cambridge. She graduated in 1941 and started work on her doctorate. Her work focused on a wartime problem: the nature of coal and charcoal and how to use them most efficiently. She published five papers on the subject before she was 26 years old. Her work is still quoted today, and helped launch the field of high-strength carbon fibers. At 26, Franklin had her PhD and the war was just over. She began working in x-ray diffraction — using x-rays to create images of crystalized solids. She pioneered the use of this method in analyzing complex, unorganized matter such as large biological molecules, and not just single crystals.
She spent three years in France, enjoying the work atmosphere, the freedoms of peacetime, the French food and culture. But in 1950, she realized that if she wanted to make a scientific career in England, she had to go back. She was invited to King’s College in London to join a team of scientists studying living cells. The leader of the team assigned her to work on DNA with a graduate student. Franklin’s assumption was that it was her own project. The laboratory’s second-in-command, Maurice Wilkins, was on vacation at the time, and when he returned, their relationship was muddled. He assumed she was to assist his work; she assumed she’d be the only one working on DNA. They had powerful personality differences as well: Franklin direct, quick, decisive, and Wilkins shy, speculative, and passive. This would play a role in the coming years as the race unfolded to find the structure of DNA.
Franklin made marked advances in x-ray diffraction techniques with DNA. She adjusted her equipment to produce an extremely fine beam of x-rays. She extracted finer DNA fibers than ever before and arranged them in parallel bundles. And she studied the fibers’ reactions to humid conditions. All of these allowed her to discover crucial keys to DNA’s structure. Wilkins shared her data, without her knowledge, with James Watson and Francis Crick, at Cambridge University, and they pulled ahead in the race, ultimately publishing the proposed structure of DNA in March, 1953.
The strained relationship with Wilkins and other aspects of King’s College (the women scientists were not allowed to eat lunch in the common room where the men did, for example) led Franklin to seek another position. She headed her own research group at Birkbeck College in London. But the head of King’s let her go on the condition she would not work on DNA. Franklin returned to her studies of coal and also wrapped up her DNA work. She turned her attention to viruses, publishing 17 papers in five years. Her group’s findings laid the foundation for structural virology.
While on a professional visit to the United States, Franklin had episodes of pain that she soon learned were ovarian cancer. She continued working over the next two years, through three operations and experimental chemotherapy and a 10-month remission. She worked up until a few weeks before her death in 1958 at age 37.
photo 2 source
Brightly colored science-inspired jewelry by Gracie
