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May 30 2014

Your New Source for Women in Tubes

Sarah Multiverse's avatar

As a grad student, it’s inevitable I’ll fall behind on the latest news. But I don’t know how I missed this one…

Fellow Macbot and talented illustrator Mike Clelland has started a blog inspired by Mac that is a spectacular image collection of women in tubes. I just found it through this post from io9 which is already over a year old, so I’m painfully behind in mentioning it. Le sigh. But if you need a women-in-tubes fix, head on over to Tubular Women!

Thanks for keeping the tradition alive, Mike!

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Oct 24 2013

The Octopus Tree of Oregon

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The Octopus Tree is a massive Sitka spruce located a few hundred feet from Cape Meares Lighthouse on the Oregon Coast, in the U.S. The tree is shaped like an inverted octopus with branches growing like giant tentacles from its 50-foot base. The tree has no central trunk. Instead, six candelabra limbs extend horizontally from the base as much as 16 feet before turning upward. The tree’s unusual shape, according to local historians and Tillamook tribal descendants, comes from the ravages of the wind, but it could also have been man-made.

Aug 26 2013

Hallucinations have Changed in 21st Century

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Thanks to that whole “mental” part, mental illnesses are often heavily influenced by the cultures and societies in which people live. Case in point: The way people with schizophrenia interpret their own hallucinations has changed over the course of the 20th century, keeping pace with changes in technology. Where people once believed that demons were speaking to them, they came to think of those voices as emanating from secret phonographs. Today, people with schizophrenia are likely to imagine hidden cameras taping them for a reality show. The paranoid delusions are always there, but the context changes.
Aug 10 2013

A Collection of Suicide Notes Left at Golden Gate Bridge

Suicide notes left by people jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, gathered by Marc Etkind for Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes, 1997:

“This is where I get off.” — Harold W., the first suicide, three months after the bridge opened, 1937

“Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.” — 49-year-old John Thomas D.

“I am sorry … I want to keep dad company.” — 24-year-old Charles G. Jr., whose father had jumped four days earlier

“Do not notify my mother. She has a heart condition.” — Steven H., the 500th person to jump

“Why do they leave this so easy for suicide? Barbed wires would save a lot of lives.” — A 72-year-old man

“I and my daughter have committed suicide.” — A man who jumped with his 5-year-old daughter

Jul 26 2013

Scientists Freeze Light for whole Minute

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In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute.