Thomas Pynchon has suggested a rainbow’s true shape is not parabolic, but circular. Well, thanks to this photo taken from the window of a Thai Airways jet, we now have some documentation:
The picture shows the ring-shaped spectrum against a backdrop of cumulocirrus clouds. Rainbows are formed when sunlight strikes the curved inside of a raindrop at a specific angle and is reflected back through the water, creating a prism effect. The apparent semicircle of a normal rainbow is only limited by the horizon. The full circle could be seen if the viewer were standing on a sufficiently high cliff, although it is more easily seen from aircraft.
Rainbows are long said to have had a profound religious and mythological significance. Before they were explained scientifically, they were described in the Bible as a symbol of God?
This is just frightening! From Berno Polzer, director of artistic programming at the Wien Modern: “I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously aren’t normal music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.”
Just in time for pandemic season: starting Thursday, the Haruyama Trading Co. will begin offering suits designed to protect the wearer from the deadly H1N1 strain of influenza:
The suit is coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, which reacts to light to break down and kill the virus when it comes into contact with it, according to Junko Hirohata. The chemical is a common ingredient in toothpaste and cosmetics.
The suit—which is indistinguishable from any other worn by Japan’s legion of “salarymen”—comes in four colors and styles, which are medium grey, charcoal, navy and a grey pinstripe.
Note: for illustration purposes only, the above suit reflects the Haruyama Trading Co.‘s water-repellent suit, and not the one designed to shield its wearer from swine flu.
For centuries, various controversies (carbon dating, image creation) have dogged the Shroud of Turin. But Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, chimed in today with what he thinks is the final word.
An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.
The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.
Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Skeptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business. But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.
Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages. They placed a linen sheet flat over a volunteer and then rubbed it with a pigment containing traces of acid. A mask was used for the face.
The pigment was then artificially aged by heating the cloth in an oven and washing it, a process which removed it from the surface but left a fuzzy, half-tone image similar to that on the Shroud. He believes the pigment on the original Shroud faded naturally over the centuries. They then added blood stains, burn holes, scorches and water stains to achieve the final effect.
Images (above and below) from Garlaschelli’s recreated shroud are on the right.
Fascinating article this week in the NYT that suggests it’s time for a more nuanced definition of extreme grieving, what Columbia University’s Dr. M. Katherine Shear calls a “loop of suffering.” Unlike “normal” grief, or even depression, extreme grieving persists for six months or more and strips away from life any sense of meaning or purpose. Grieving of this sort has been linked to higher frequencies of drinking, suicide, even cancer.
But a recent study involving MRIs arrived at an even more provocative conclusion: when an extreme griever was shown photos of a loved one, their brain received a jolt of dopamine, indicating the possible addictive qualities of memories themselves.
When your grief, though, is of the more manageable variety, you no longer have to rely exclusively on head-to-toe black. Artist Matthew Coombes has just come out with a grief-chic line that includes everything from a single tear catcher (see above) to special finger protectors designed to preserve your cuticles in times of stress and sorrow.
Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media’s complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.
He observed: “[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed.”
A glimpse of today’s mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed—with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government’s longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.
Here are five recent stories the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know about pot
SIT on the steps of Mexico’s El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza and you may hear a confusing sound. As other visitors climb the colossal staircase their footsteps begin to sound like raindrops falling into a bucket of water as they near the top. Were the Mayan temple builders trying to communicate with their gods?
The discovery of the raindrop “music” in another pyramid suggests that at least some of Mexico’s pyramids were deliberately built for this purpose. Some of the structures consist of a combination of steps and platforms, while others, like El Castillo, resemble the more even-stepped Egyptian pyramids.
I have to admit the question of why humankind is so hairless compared to most other mammals has crossed my mind, but it never occurred to me that Science itself would not actually know:
For most of the past century it was assumed that the problem had been solved. Raymond Dart, the anthropologist who recognised the significance of the famous Taung baby’s skull in 1924, began promoting the idea that while the apes’ ancestors stayed in the trees, our ancestors moved onto the open plains. There the males became hunters, got overheated in the chase, and shed body hair to cool down.
The problem with that theory is that no other mammal has resorted to this method of cooling down. Hair insulates animals against the sun by day as well as against the cold by night. The hominid females are not thought to have become overheated hunters, so they would merely have suffered the downsides of hairlessness - being cold at night, more prone to abrasions, and having no fur to provide a handhold for infants to cling to. Yet they ended up even more hairless than the males.
Dart’s solution, while the front-runner for more than 50 years, failed to win everyone over. In 1970, Russell W. Newman from the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine argued in Human Biology that hominids could never have evolved on the plains with their “unique trio of conditions: hypotrichosis corpus, hyperhydrosis, and polydipsia”. In other words, too little hair, too much sweat, and a need to drink little but often. Newman’s paper ran counter to contemporary beliefs and was largely ignored.
William Montagna, the most indefatigable student of primate skin of his generation and then at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, regretfully reported in 1972 that after years of research his investigations had “failed to explain the unique feature of man’s skin - his almost complete nakedness. We are left with the major objective… unattained.”
And it keeps going. Many intelligent people and big name scientists have come up with plausible sounding theories and they all get shot down, sooner of later. The fact is, they really don’t know!
Speaking of Naked Apes, here is zoologist Desmond Morris interviewing Kate Bush on his BBC talk show in 1980:
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