Clipmarks | arifsali's 'discovery' clips

5 Tips to Increase Your Likeability

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 06:17:48 GMT

clipped by: adamc
clipper's remarks: Descriptions for each at the source.

via www.fark.com

1. Be positive.

"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." - John Keats

2. Control your insecurities.

"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything." - Theodore Roosevelt

3. Provide value.

"The art of being yourself at your best is the art of unfolding your personality into the person you want to be... Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others." - Wilfred Peterson

4. Eliminate all judgments.

"Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again." - Og Mandino

5. Become a person of conviction.

"One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds." - Mahatma Gandhi

Tags: likeability, tips

40 Facts About Sleep You Didn't Know

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:11:49 GMT

clipped by: zlaw777
clipper's remarks: Visit page to see all 40. Fact "- Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock."

Clip Source: abc.net.au

40 FACTS ABOUT SLEEP YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T KNOW...
(OR WERE TOO TIRED TO THINK ABOUT)

-The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.

- It's impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it.

- Anything less than five minutes to fall asleep at night means you're sleep deprived. The ideal is between 10 and 15 minutes, meaning you're still tired enough to sleep deeply, but not so exhausted you feel sleepy by day.

A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year

- One of the best predictors of insomnia later in life is the development of bad habits from having sleep disturbed by young children.

- The continuous brain recordings that led to the discovery of REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep were not done until 1953, partly because the scientists involved were concerned about wasting paper.

- REM sleep occurs in bursts totalling about 2 hours a night, usually beginning about 90 minutes after falling asleep.

- Dreams, once thought to occur only during REM sleep, also occur (but to a lesser extent) in non-REM sleep phases. It's possible there may not be a single moment of our sleep when we are actually dreamless.

- REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery - obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.

- Certain types of eye movements during REM sleep correspond to specific movements in dreams, suggesting at least part of the dreaming process is analagous to watching a film

No-one knows for sure if other species dream but some do have sleep cycles similar to humans.

Elephants sleep standing up during non-REM sleep, but lie down for REM sleep.

Tags: sleep, facts, bizarre

Earth Pic in The Cosmos

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 08:43:56 GMT

clipped by: zenu1luv
clipper's remarks: This made me stop and think. Wow!!

Clip Source: www.smart-kit.com

Powerful words by Carl Sagan

If you look carefully at the NASA photo below, you will see a little white dot. This minute speck is Earth seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it exits the solar system, nearly 4 billion miles away. The photo was taken back in 1990.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Tags: discovery, images, photo, space, thought-provoking, solar system, earth

Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 06:08:20 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: check out the source for descriptions and animations of the experiments.

Clip Source: physics-animations.com

Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. Based on the paper of George Johnson in The New York Times we list below 10 winners of this polling and accompany the short explanations of the physical experiments with computer animations.

1. Double-slit electron diffraction

2. Galileo's experiment on falling objects

3. Millikan's oil-drop experiment

4. Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism

5. Young's light-interference experiment

7. Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference

8. Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes

9. Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus

10. Foucault's pendulum

Tags: science, experiment, list, videos, physics, beauty

Sea Water as Fuel??

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 02:12:14 GMT

clipped by: mrouk

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

'Remarkable' Discovery: Scientists Burn Saltwater

ERIE, Pa. (AP)—An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Tags: science

The fish that can survive for months in a tree

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:26:25 GMT

clipped by: michellezm

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

t's one of the golden rules of the natural world – birds live in trees, fish live in water.

The trouble is, no one bothered to tell the mangrove killifish.

Scientists have discovered that it spends several months of every year out of the water and living inside trees

Hidden away inside rotten branches and trunks, the remarkable creatures temporarily alter their biological makeup so they can breathe air.

Biologists studying the killifish say they astonished it can cope for so long out of its natural habitat.

The discovery, along with its ability to breed without a mate, must make the mangrove killifish, Rivulus marmoratus Poey, one of the oddest fish known to man.

Around two inches long, they normally live in muddy pools and the flooded burrows of crabs in the mangrove swamps of Florida, Latin American and Caribbean.

The latest discovery was made by biologists wading through swamps in Belize and Florida who found hundreds of killifish hiding out of the water

Tags: fish, animals, fauna

The God Particle Finally Found ?

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:42:05 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: Read more about the God Particle on wired.com.
Exciting stuff.

Clip Source: www.wired.com

For weeks, the physics world has been buzzing with rumors juicier -- at least in context -- than any Washington scandal: Researchers at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider may have made one of the biggest scientific discoveries in decades, just months before a new European facility supplanted their position at the top of the field.

According to the rumors, researchers may have experimental results compatible with the discovery of a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson, sometimes dubbed the "God particle," which is widely regarded as giving all other particles mass. Depending on the details, this could be a Nobel-level discovery, and could lead to a reexamination of much of today's physics.

Nevertheless, the blog-spread buzz is polarizing the physics community. The tension, and the ongoing silence from researchers in the know, says much about a field on the brink of changes that will shape research for decades to come.

Tags: god particle, physics, blogging, wired, science

Who Discovered The Clitoris?

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:09:44 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: everything2.com

The clitoris was "discovered" (at least by males) and documented for the first time by Matteo Realdo Colombo: a lecturer in surgery at the University of Padua, Italy.

In 1559 he published a book called De re anatomica in which he described the "seat of woman's delight." He concluded, "since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus."

However others made claims to have discovered it. Gabriel Fallopius - Columbus' successor at Padua - disputed the assertion that Columbus discovered claiming credit for himself.

There are also several claims that knowledge of the clitoris was widely known well before either man's 'discovery'. But Colombo's remains the earliest physical documentation of the bud that would one day become a phenomenom leading to the sexual revolution.

Tags: columbo, discovered, more, than, america

It's Electrifying!

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:41:27 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: fascinating

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

It's Electrifying! Scientists Discover Human Cells have Internal Electric Fields as Strong as Lighting Bolts

Using newly developed voltage-sensitive nanoparticles, researchers have found that the previously unknown electric fields inside of cells are as strong, or stronger, as those produced in lightning bolts. Previously, it has only been possible to measure electric fields across cell membranes, not within the main bulk of cells, so scientists didn't even know cells had an internal electric field.

This discovery is a surprising twist for cell researchers. Scientists don't know what causes these incredibly strong fields or why they' are there. But now using new nanotools, such as voltage-sensitive dyes, they can start to measure them at least. Researchers believe they may be able to learn more about disease states, such as cancer, by studying these minute, but powerful electric fields.

Tags: science, human cells, electric fields

Garlic attacks brain cancer

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:19:59 GMT

clipped by: hudgal1

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Garlic can kill cells that cause glioblastoma, a brain cancer that is usually fatal, researchers in South Carolina have found.

Swapan Ray and Narendra Banik, neurosciences professors at the Medical University of South Carolina, said their discovery came during a search for a way to kill the cancer without harming healthy cells, The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier reported.

"In the disease, you want to kill the cells, but you want to protect others," Banik told the newspaper. "Our tests were to see how effective the compounds were."

Banik, Ray and post-doctoral fellow Arabinda Das tested several organic compounds on cancerous cells. They included garlic in the test program because of its reputation for having healing powers.

Three organo-sulfur compounds they tested effectively stopped the cancerous cells, Ray said.

"This research highlights the great promise of plant-originated compounds as natural medicine for controlling the malignant growth of human brain tumor cells," Ray said.

Tags: cancer, garlic

Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:02:42 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: "That is to say, the melanin molecule gets struck by a gamma ray and its chemistry is altered. This is an amazing discovery, no one had even suspected that something like this was possible. Aside from its novelty value, this discovery leads to some interesting speculation and potential research. Humans have melanin molecules in their skin cells, does this mean that humans are getting some of their energy from radiation? This also implies there could be organisms living in space where ionizing radiation is plentiful."

Clip Source: unitedcats.wordpress.com

The abandoned town of Pripyat, the Chernobyl reactor in the background.

There has been an exciting new biological discovery inside the tomb of the Chernobyl reactor. Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.

This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source.

Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level.

The fungi appear to use melanin, a chemical found in human skin as well, in the same fashion as plants use chlorophyll.

Tags: radiation

Huge 'Ocean' Discovered Inside Earth

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:58:27 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.

The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle.

Looking down deep

The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet.

They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

“That’s a real back of the envelope type calculation,” Wysession said. “That’s the best that we can do at this point.”

Tags: science, earth, water, ocean

Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:38:23 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: physics-animations.com

Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments

1. Double-slit electron diffraction

2. Galileo's experiment on falling objects

3. Millikan's oil-drop experiment

4. Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism

5. Young's light-interference experiment

6. Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment

7. Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference

8. Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes

9. Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus

10. Foucault's pendulum

Amazing diabetes breakthrough

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:14:53 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead

Clip Source: www.canada.com

Diabetes breakthrough

Toronto scientists cure disease in mice

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body's nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas.

"I couldn't believe it," said Dr. Michael Salter, a pain expert at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the scientists. "Mice with diabetes suddenly didn't have diabetes any more."

"I've never seen anything like it," said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the hospital and a leader of the studies. "In my career, this is unique."

Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an "enormous" number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.

Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick -- injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.

Tags: diabetes, health, science

Dark Matter Caught Behaving Strangely

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:14:24 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Aug. 21, 2007 — Dark matter detected in the midst of a galactic slam dance is acting badly, say astronomers who made the discovery using space and ground-based telescopes. Instead of hanging out with the stars, as it was found doing in another collision of galactic clusters a few months ago, it’s mingling with the dust and gases — which is unbecoming of the mysterious stuff.

"That’s weird because according to current theory, stars and dark matter should stay together," said astronomer Andisheh Mahdavi of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. "But here they didn’t."

Mahdavi and his colleagues will be publishing their discovery about the galactic cluster known as Abell 520 in the October issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Tags: dark matter, physics, science