Kawah Ijen by night

Photographer Olivier Grunewald has recently made several trips into the sulfur mine in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java, Indonesia, bringing with him equipment to capture surreal images lit by moonlight, torches, and the blue flames of burning molten sulfur. Covered last year in the Big Picture (in daylight), the miners of the 2,600 meter tall (8,660ft) Kawah Ijen volcano trek up to the crater, then down to the shore of a 200-meter-deep crater lake of sulfuric acid, where they retrieve heavy chunks of pure sulfur to carry back to a weighing station. Mr. Grunewald has been kind enough to share with us the following other-worldly photos of these men as they do their hazardous work under the light of the moon. (30 photos total)

via Kawah Ijen by night – The Big Picture – Boston.com.

The Earth, as small as you’ve ever seen it.

Earth from the edge of the Solar System, acquired by Voyager 1, at a distance of more than 6000 million kilometres.  (That’s 3.7 billion miles – 3,728,227,150 mi.) 

‘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. ‘ Carl Sagan

via Earth and other unlikely worlds: Perspective.

Brain damage might actually create fake memories

Brain damage, which can be caused by conditions such as amnesia and Alzheimer’s Disease, doesn’t just erase memories. In a shocking new discovery, it turns out brain damage can also cause its sufferers to experience false memories of familiarity.

The perirhinal cortex is one of the brain’s most important memory centers, charged with forming memories by arranging sensory information into a detailed, comprehensible picture of the event. It’s also one of the most vulnerable sections of the brain to damage, as Cambridge psychologist Lisa Saksida explains: “The perirhinal cortex is one of the first regions that is affected in Alzheimer’s disease, and it is very often damaged in cases of amnesia, so specific damage in this region is highly relevant to both of these conditions.”

The loss of this cortex forces the brain to improvise when it comes to making new memories, relying on simpler parts of the brain to fill in and help make sense of incoming information. To do this, the brain has to start relying on far simpler features that can be found on a wide variety of objects. Saksida explains how this can lead to problems:

“The remaining representations of simpler features of objects are relatively easily confused, and as a result, false memories are generated.” …

via Brain damage might actually create fake memories.

1m deaths a year by 2030

BY 2030, climate change will indirectly cause nearly one million deaths a year and inflict US$157 billion (S$205 billion) in damage in terms of today’s economy, according to estimates presented at UN talks on Friday.

The biggest misery will be heaped on more than 50 of the world’s poorest countries, but the United States will pay the highest economic bill, it said.

‘In less than 20 years, almost all countries in the world will realise high vulnerability to climate impact as the planet heats up,’ the report warned.

The study, compiled by a humanitarian research organisation and climate-vulnerable countries, assessed how 184 nations will be affected in four areas: health, weather disasters, the loss of human habitat through desertification and rising seas, and economic stress.

Those facing ‘acute’ exposure are 54 poor or very poor countries, including India. They will suffer disproportionately to others, although they are least to blame for the man-made greenhouse gases that drive climate change, it said.

‘Without corrective actions’ a press release accompanying the study said, the world is ‘headed for nearly one million deaths every single year by 2030.’ More than half of the 157 billion dollars in economic losses will take place in industrialised countries, led by the United States, Japan and Germany. — AFP

via 1m deaths a year by 2030.

Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk

Robert Krulwich – In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?

Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:

* It was really, really hot on the moon, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We needed protection.

* We were wearing new-fangled, water-cooled uniforms and didn’t know how long the coolant would last.

* We didn’t know how far we could go in our space suits.

* NASA wanted us to conduct our experiments in front of a fixed camera.

* We [meaning Neil] cheated just a little, and very briefly bounded off to take pictures of some interesting bedrock.

But basically, he says, we were part of a team and we were team players on a perilous, one-of-a-kind journey. Improvisation was not really an option. …

via Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR.

At 200 degrees, wouldn’t the film in the cameras melt?

Imagine eating if you want to lose weight, say scientists

Just imagining eating calorific food such as chocolate can reduce your appetite and help you lose weight, claim psychologists

Ever wished you could cut down on the amount you eat without going hungry? It turns out all you need is a good imagination. Scientists have found that going through the mental motions of eating, say, a chocolate bar, will help.

The result, from a study of more than 300 volunteers, seems to fly in the face of intuition that imagining a delicious meal will make your mouth water even more.

Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, and the lead author of the research, which is published in Science, said: “We think our results may be used to craft behavioural interventions that allow people to eat less of the unhealthy foods they crave and also to choose healthier foods.

“We hope it can also be used to give us [help] on cravings for other substances including cigarettes and alcohol.”

He said: “Trying to suppress one’s thoughts of desired foods in order to curb cravings for those foods is a fundamentally flawed strategy.

“Our studies found that people who repeatedly imagined the consumption of a morsel of food — such as an M&M or cube of cheese — subsequently consumed less of that food than people who imagined consuming the food a few times or performed a different task.”

Some of the volunteers were asked to imagine eating either three or 30 chocolate M&Ms, or small cubes of cheddar cheese. Others imagined carrying out various actions such as eating a different food or moving the M&Ms or cheese cubes around rather than eating them.

After that, each participant was given a bowl filled with M&Ms or cheese cubes and asked to rate the food for a taste test.

Morewedge and his team saw a reduction of around 50% in the amount of food consumed by participants who had been told to imagine eating before being given the bowl of food …

via Imagine eating if you want to lose weight, say scientists | Science | The Guardian.

Lego Antikythera Mechanism

YouTube – Lego Antikythera Mechanism.

Man heals himself by eating parasites

Elizabeth Cohen – One day in 2004, a 29-year-old man with a terrible stomach problem stepped off a plane from the United States in Thailand. He wasn’t there for the sights, or the food, or the beaches. He had traveled thousands of miles for worms — parasitic worms [helminths] whose eggs he intended to swallow by the thousands. His doctor back home had told him his idea was crazy, that infesting himself with parasitic worms wouldn’t do anything to help his ulcerative colitis, and in fact could make him very sick. The gastroenterologist had told the man if he pursued this course of treatment, he would refuse to be his doctor anymore. …

His gastroenterologist wanted to admit him to the hospital for an intravenous round of cyclosporine, a potentially helpful yet dangerous medicine that depresses the body’s immune system and can increase the risk for getting cancer later in life.

If the cyclosporine didn’t work — and there was a 50 percent chance it wouldn’t — the doctor said his last hope was to remove his colon entirely, an extreme measure that would cause him to have to have a colostomy bag attached to him for the rest of his life to collect his stool. …

“You’ll be on your own,” the man remembers the doctor telling him.

Indeed, he was on his own, standing in the office of a Thai doctor, asking her to pick the worm eggs out of an 11-year-old girl’s stool. …

The eggs needed to be cleaned in case the girl had hepatitis or some other infectious disease, and the eggs needed to mature for them to be helpful. It was up to him to clean the eggs and grow them in a process called “embryonation.”

“There wasn’t much guidance on how to do it, since most people are trying to destroy these worms, not grow them,” he says.

But he managed to do it and ingested first a dose of 500 eggs and then another of 1,000. The worms could live in his intestinal tract for many years.

Three months later he had fewer bloody bowel movements, and soon, none at all. His bowel movements were normal. …

By 2007, having made so much progress, the patient wanted to document his journey scientifically, and he contacted various researchers to help him, including P’ng Loke, who was then a postdoctoral fellow in immunology at the University of California-San Francisco.

“He e-mailed me, and I ignored it,” Loke remembers. “I was very skeptical at first, but he convinced me to have lunch with him.”

At their meeting, the patient laid out his story in more detail, and Loke became fascinated.

“It’s an amazing story, and he’s quite possibly one of the smartest people I know,” he says.

By the end of their meeting, they’d started to hatch a plan: Loke and his team would do colonoscopies to track the patient’s ulcerative colitis and look for the presence of worms in his colon.

The researcher, now an assistant professor of medical parasitology at New York University Langone Medical Center, and his team did a colonoscopy on the patient, which revealed an abundance of worms and no signs of ulcerative colitis.

When the patient suffered a flare-up of his disease in 2008, a colonoscopy showed fewer worms and typical signs of ulcerative colitis.

When he ingested more eggs, a third colonoscopy showed the colitis was once again in remission.

The study was published in this month’s Science Translational Medicine. …

via CNN

Gross! But hey, it worked.  Read the entire article on CNN and all the cautions. My caution is that you turn off images before you go read the article.

Boxing — bad for the brain

Up to 20% of professional boxers develop neuropsychiatric sequelae. But which acute complications and which late sequelae can boxers expect throughout the course of their career? These are the questions studied by Hans Förstl from the Technical University Munich and his co-authors in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[47]: 835-9).

Their evaluation of the biggest studies on the subject of boxers’ health in the past 10 years yielded the following results: The most relevant acute consequence is the knock-out, which conforms to the rules of the sport and which, in neuropsychiatric terms, corresponds to cerebral concussion. In addition, boxers are at substantial risk for acute injuries to the head, heart, and skeleton. Subacute consequences after being knocked out include persistent symptoms such as headaches, impaired hearing, nausea, unstable gait, and forgetfulness. The cognitive deficits after blunt craniocerebral trauma last measurably longer than the symptoms persist in the individual’s subjective perception. Some 10-20% of boxers develop persistent neuropsychiatric impairments. The repeated cerebral trauma in a long career in boxing may result in boxer’s dementia (dementia pugilistica), which is neurobiologically similar to Alzheimer’s disease.

With regard to the health risks, a clear difference exists between professional boxing and amateur boxing. Amateur boxers are examined regularly every year and in advance of boxing matches, whereas professionals subject themselves to their fights without such protective measures. In view of the risk for injuries that may result in impaired cerebral performance in the short or long term, similar measures would be advisable in the professional setting too. …

via Boxing — bad for the brain.

This caught my attention because I’ve recently been watching The Twilight Zone. The episode “Steel” predicted human boxing would be illegal by now.

In a future where any boxing involving human fighters has been criminalized, the sport is now dominated by fighting robots. Former boxer Steel Kelly manages a B2-model robot called “Battling Maxo.”   … While Pole tests Maxo’s functions, an arm spring lets go and they don’t have the parts or the money to fix him. Kelly decides that since they are from out of town, he would disguise himself as Maxo in order to collect the money necessary for repairs. Steel enters the fight disguised as Maxo. However, despite a valiant effort, he is unable to damage the B7 robot he is fighting, even when he lands an unblocked punch directly in the back of its head. He is nearly killed after lasting a little under three minutes. …

via Wiki

Blog restored!

Last night at about 11:20 PM  xenophilius.wordpress.com displayed a message saying the blog was suspended due to a violation of the terms of service or advertising policy.

It turns out that this was just a mistake by WordPress. The blog xenophilius.wordpress.com is now restored. I remained fairly calm and within four hours activated my back up blog xeno-lovegood.blogspot.com.

 

Blog disaster drill results: Blog xenophilius.wordpress.com currently has 9,437 posts and 6,997 comments in 42 categories.  Only 1,141 posts could be imported to blogspot.com from wordpress in 4 hours. Thousands of posts and comments could not be rescued due to conversion and file size errors.

Unfortunately, I lost a night’s sleep scrambling to save as many posts as I could.

Lessons learned:

1) Exporting the entire blog results in a file far larger than than 15 MB limit that can be imported by WordPress into a new blog.

2) Imports from WordPress.com to Blogger.com are really lacking. Only 1 MB at a time can be imported, using a site that converts the exported WordPress .xml files to the Blogger.com format, and there are many errors that happen during the process.

3) You people are awesome. Thanks for the email of support and extra points to those who found my back up blog right away by going to www.Xenophilia.com and following the link there to my new blog.

Sleepily yours,

Xeno