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Documentary Heaven: Food for your brain [videos]

Documentary Heaven has a vast number of instructional videos in the following categories:

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Fun interactive site about Egyptian mummies

Image via Wikipedia

Fascinating Egyptian Mummies–Unwrapping history with science

This fun and educational four-stage interactive site is based on an exhibition at the Musee de la Civilisation in Quebec City.  Visitors discover different facets of ancient Egyptian cultures.  You must complete three games to enter the last one (which I haven’t achieved yet).

1. Mummification Process.  Put the mummification process in the right order.
2. Canopic Jars.  Place the organs into the right canopic jars.
3. The Weighing of the Heart.  Place the jar that contains a heart as light as the sacred feather on the other side of the scale.
4. Sarcophagi Chamber.  Can’t say what this is becuase I havent completed the first three stages.

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Interesting information about #3

“Ancient Egyptians believed that the deceased had to meet a challenge in order to achieve immortality.  After the deceased declared having committed no faults in life, the heart was weighed.  If it balanced with the feather, this meant that the deceased had lived according to moral standards and could move on to the afterlife, a realm of bliss and delight.  But if the weight of the heart was different from that of the feather, this meant that the deceased had lived in sin and that the heart would be eaten by Ammit, the devourer.”

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Source

via 10 Awesome Flash-Animated Interactive Websites

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• More re: Treasures – World’s Cultures from British Museum in western Canada (allaboutegypt.org)
• It’s a boy! Hospital brain scanner reveals the identity of 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy (allaboutegypt.org)

The Scientists Quiz

Image via Wikipedia

Questions

1. How did the Ancient Egyptians calculate when the River Nile would flood each year?
2. From what did the Mayans believe the world to be made?
3. Which Ancient Greek god was thought to cause earthquakes?
4. Name the two forces which Confucius believe were central to harmony in the Universe.
5. Name one of the two influential medical books written by IbnSina.
6. Name the four most important universities founded during the 12th-13th centures.
7. What part of Tycho Brahe’s body was cut off in a duel?
8. What two methods did Vesalius use to obtain specimens for this study of anatomy?
9. Vesalius wrote one of the greatest scientific books ever published.  What was it’s title?
10. What is the name given to the tiny blood vessels that connect veins and arteries?
11. Galileo was threatened with torture unless he denied which claim?
12. Name one of the founding members of the Royal Society.
13. What incident is said to have been the starting point for Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation?
14. Linaeus developed a method of classifying plants called “binomial nomenclature”.  What does it mean?
15. Which book proposed that species had developed over long periods of time?
16. Name the two different theories concerning the structure of the earth preferred by Werner and Hutton.
17. What is the name given to the supercontinent by Wegener?
18. What was the name of the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed to South America?
19. What is the modern name for the gas that Joseph Priestley called “dephlogisticated gas”?
20. What is the name given to Mendeleev’s grouping of elements?
21. What is the name of the device Ewald von Kleist designed for storing static electricy?
22. What apparatus did Benjamin Franklin use to prove that lightning is a form of electricity?
23. Which measurement of electricity is named after an 18th century scientist?
24. Which process, discovered by Edward Jenner, is considered to be one of the most important advances ever made in medical science?
25. Who was the first person to receive two Nobel prizes?
26. On which plant did Mendel perform most of his experiments?
27. Why did Niels Bohr go to live in the USA in 1943?
28. Who was the first woman to be appointed assistant to the Court Astronomer in 1787?
29. Why was Mary Somerville’s first scientific paper submitted to the Royal Society by her husband?
30. In 1927, Georges Lemaitre propsed an idea that explained the origins of the Universe.  What is it now known as?

Answers

1. They studied the position of the moon and the stars.
2. They believed that the world was made from the back of a giant crocodile living in a pond.
3. Poseidon
4. Yin and Yang
5. The Canon and The Cure
6. Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris
7. His nose
8. Grave robbing and taking bodies from the gallows.
9. The Fabric of the Human Body
10. Capillaries
11. The Earth moved around the Sun.
12. Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys
13. He saw an apple fall from a tree.
14. It means that each plant has two names. One indicates its genus, the other its species.
15. The Natural History by Georges de Buffon
16. The “Neptunist” theory and the “Plutonist” theory.
17. Pangaea
18. HMS Beagle
19. Oxygen
20. The Periodic Table
21. The Leiden Jar
22. A kite fitted with a metal key.
23. The volt, after Alessandro Volta
24. Vaccination
25. Marie Curie
26. The pea plant.
27. To escape the Nazis.
28. Caroline Herschel.
29. At that time, women were banned from the organization.
30. The Big Bang Theory

See your future face [computer face science]

When I look in the mirror and see the wrinkles and age spots starting to form, I wonder what I will look like in five or ten years.  Today I found out.  Yikes!

The Face Transformer will age your face make it look like a child again (wouldn’t we all like to do that).  Just follow the instructions.  At the end, click on the ‘transform’ list and watch what happens to your photo.  Try it for fun.

Note: It works better on Internet Explorer.

Striped icebergs and waves caught in mid-air [photos]

Just sharing what I received in an email…

Icebergs in the Antarctic area sometimes have stripes, formed by layers of snow that react to different conditions.  Blue stripes are often created when a crevice in the ice sheet fills up with meltwater and freezes so quickly that no bubbles form.  When an iceberg falls into the sea, a layer of salty seawater can freeze to the underside.  If this is rich in algae, it can form a green stripe.  Brown, black and yellow lines are caused by sediment picked up when the ice sheet grinds downhill towards the sea.

The water froze the instant the wave broke through the ice.  That’s what it is like in Antarctica where it is the coldest weather in decades.  Water freezes the instant it comes in contact with the air.  The temperature of the water is already some degrees below freezing.

Look how the wave froze in mid-air…

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NEWS: US Army awards researchers to develop “thought helmets”

At the moment I’m developing “thought knots” from trying to wrap my understanding around all the possibilities emerging from the hi-tech research that’s trying to hack into our brains–and those of animals (see my post link below).

Now, the US Army is trying to use “thought helmets” to transmit brain waves which would be translated into words in other soldiers’ headphones.

The US Army has recently awarded a five-year $4 million contract to researchers from the University of California at Irvine (led by UCI´s Mike D´Zmura), Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland to study the concept.

Because the brain is a complex system and generates such large amounts of data, researchers must also make improvements in computing power. Soldiers will also have to be trained to think “loudly” to make it easier for the system to pick out their words from the brain´s background noise. Also, every individual´s EEG signals are a little different, so users and computers will have to be calibrated so that computers recognize each person´s unique mental pattern.

Read more here

* See my related post on dream research [Link]

Listen to mosquito mate to the tune of “Feelings” [audio]

Image by Marcos Teixeira de Freitas via Flickr

Love is in the air–literally. When the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are looking for a mate, they create an overtone.  How did researchers figure this out?

First, the insects were anesthetized. “You make them a little bit chilly,” Hoy says, “then they don’t fly or walk around.” Next, he and his colleagues applied a small amount of superglue to the backs of the test mosquitoes, then affixed them to a tiny tether and suspended them in the air.

Once the mosquitoes began to beat their wings and produce their gender-specific flight tones, the scientists moved the insects close to each other.

The duet they produce (as you’ll hear in the audio) matches the pitch in the Morris Albert song “Feelings.”

[Audio]

[Video]

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• Mosquitoes make sweet love music
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Dream anatomy

This anatomical imagery is detailed inspiration.  Some are beautiful and whimsical,, while others are quite  grotesque.

Image via Wikipedia

“Drawn mainly from the collections of the National Library of Medicine, Dream Anatomy shows off the anatomical imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from 1500 to the present.”

Link

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Q: About your dreams: how do you interpret them?  Are they in color or black and white?  Have they ever helped you solve a problem or led to a published story/poem?

The beautiful world of sand

Image via Wikipedia

I love photographers who are able to lift me from my everyday unremarkable events and translate me into a ‘look closer’ realm.  According to this website, each grain of sand is a tiny work of art.  And after you look at the pictures, I think you’ll tend to agree.