It’s Easy:  Form A Triangle, Then A Hexagon, Then A Bicycle Wheel

Frogs and toads in Scotland

Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and shag a nun.

(via Feminism)

Knowing the 20 Amino Acids is definitely a MUST for the 2015 MCAT 

Amino acids that are usually negative (i.e. de-protonated) at physiological pH:

- Glutamate (E) Glu, and Aspartate (D) Asp

Amino acids that are usually positive (i.e. protonated) at physiological pH:

- Lysine (K) Lye, Arginine ® Arg 

Histidine is sometimes charged at physiological pH. 

physiological pH = 7, Neutral 

Awesome infographic work by designer Yang Liu. Check out her book ’East Meets West’ (Amazon).

Once Upon a Time t

Once upon the time t(0) there was a young buck named Butterbean who wanted nothing more than to know his ontological value.  Being familiar with the concepts of quantum mechanics he was sadly aware that this was theoretically impossible, but remained unsatisfied with the notion.

In an undying effort to discover the nature of his own existence he set out on a journey to seek the answer from all those most wise and perceiving.

Clearly the first stop was at the front door of Glad the hippopotamus.    

Glad was of the notion that all things are ultimately mundane and that it is simply a matter of time and “progress” before esoteric conundrums become  simple everyday knowledge.  Surely this most assured creature could derive an unknown variable to discover the true nature of Butterbean himself. They were both of the mind at this time t(realist) that all the probabilistic nonsense was clearly just a cop out for those ninnies who fancied themselves finished with discovering the universe.

Alas after decades, or maybe days (no one can be sure given that time itself is a construct  commonly defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, and who can really say cesium 133 even exists… really), Glad was forced to admit that he could not tell Butterbean of his ontological state prior to Butterbean’s arrival on his doorstep, nor could he possibly without any reference to his own experience as a literalist hippo,  and was forced to admit that this coveted obscure variable was beyond his abilities of perception.

With a sense of hopelessness Butterbean sought out the comfort and guidance of Ol’ Trusty, the Wire Stripper.  They adventured together for t(hedonist) to t(fundamentalist) without ever committing to any defined notion as after all, how can you find the answer to a paradox, oxymoron much?  

However comfort in ignorance becomes unsettling after you’ve had your fun and Butterbean became restless.  There was one more known avenue he had not yet travelled…

With a renewed sense of wonder and determination Butterbean approached the Oak, which shook its branches excitedly upon Butterbean’s arrival to see such a valiant seeker of answers.  “Oak, what can you tell me about my ontological value?” asked Butterbean humbly.  The Oak remained silent, but a slight breeze rustled loose a few leaves from its massive head which fluttered to the ground and landed lightly at Butterbean’s feet, Butterbean faltered and then turned and retreated thoughtfully sensing that the conversation was over. 

Upon further consideration over Δt(orthodox) Butterbean understood Oak’s lesson— the leaves could change position through many methods all resulting in different outcomes, however before any leaf falls, it has not fallen.  Butterbean had discovered that no matter who or what observes him, there would be an outcome, but it could not be these interactions which defined the whole of himself, surely he must be something inherently like the leaves of Oak’s mane.  

One day, a little time later at approximately t(decision), Butterbean decided to venture forth in search of a method of measurement that excluded observation.  Knowing that the existence of alligators had long been debated among those with a higher understanding of the nature of things, he knew he should seek within the mind of that which may or may not exist; namely an alligator (though a unicorn or manticore could have sufficed, they are not quite as easy to find nowadays).

Unfortunately all alligators are actually just dead trees and Butterbean had to once again rethink his strategy. 

It occurred to Butterbean, after his most recent experiences, that perhaps his disbelief in alligators had caused their value to be null, distracted in hoping that his mind was not quite that powerful Butterbean mistakenly stomped on a daisy which let out a loud squeal, “watch out dummy!”  “OH!” replied Butterbean, “Sorry I didn’t see you there, though come to think of it I’m surprised you even exist as I hadn’t yet observed you my friend.”   The daisy straightened herself and smoothing out her petals scoffed and said jeeringly, “you think that you are the only one who exists, eh?”  “Well,” began Butterbean thoughtfully, “no, but I don’t understand how anything or anyone has any sort of defined nature without something else purposefully interacting with it, after all, how do you know that you exist?” “Oh for goodness sake,” exclaimed young Daisy, “Of course you’ll remain limited as long as you keep collapsing your wave function with all that introspection!”  And she turned her face to the sun clearly dismissing Butterbean and all his angsty questions.  

Butterbean, with all known theories exhausted, was still unsatisfied and longed to know the mystery of his own nature of being and the recent dismissal of the daisy weighed heavy on his soul.  “Why can she be so satisfied just being,” he wondered, “when I spend all of my time dedicated to the mystery and nature of life but still feel so empty and unfulfilled?”  And suddenly it struck him! It had been so obvious all along and basically verbatim the retorts he had only just received from the annoyed flower he had trod on, Butterbean ceased to observe himself and existed infinitely in all possible states of being.

The alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwing grandma out to be eaten by polar bears; “ We are prepared to believe almost anything about such an unfamiliar and peculiar group,” says Martin, in a gentle reminder of our buried racist tendencies. The tale she tells is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people’s languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself. The original source is Franz Boas’ introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911). And all Boas says there, in the context of a low-key and slightly ill-explained discussion of independent versus derived terms for things in different languages, is that just as English uses separate roots for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning ‘water’ in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput 'snow on the ground’, qana 'falling snow’, piqsirpoq 'drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift’. Boas’ point is simply that English expresses these notions by phrases involving the root snow, but things could have been otherwise, just as the words for lake, river, etc. could have been formed derivationally or periphrastically on the root water.  But with the next twist in the story, the unleashing of the xenomorphic fable of Eskimo lexicography seems to have become inevitable. What happened was that Benjamin Lee Whorf, Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier, picked up Boas’ example and used it, vaguely, in his 1940 amateur linguistics article 'Science and linguistics,’ which was published in MIT’s promotional magazine Technology Review (Whorf was an alumnus; he had done his B.S. in chemical engineering at MIT). Our word snow would seem too inclusive to an Eskimo, our man from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company confidently asserts. With an uncanny perception into the hearts and minds of the hardy Arctic denizens (the more uncanny since Eskimos were not a prominent feature of Hartford’s social scene at the time), he avers:  “We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different.” […] Notice that Whorf’s statement has illicitly inflated Boas’ four terms to at least seven (1: “falling”, 2: “on the ground”, 3: “packed hard”, 4: “slushy”, 5: “flying”, 6, 7 …. : “and other kinds of snow”). Notice also that his claims about English speakers are false; I recall the stuff in question being called “snow” when fluffy and white, “slush” when partly melted, “sleet” when falling in a half-melted state, and a “blizzard” when pelting down hard enough to make driving dangerous. Whorf’s remark about his own speech community is no more reliable than his glib generalizations about what things are “sensuously and operationally different” to the generic Eskimo.  But the lack of little things like verisimilitude and substantiation are not enough to stop a myth. Martin tracks the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax through successively more careless repetitions and embroiderings in a number of popular books on language. […] But never mind: three, four, seven, who cares? It’s a bunch, right? Once more popular sources start to get hold of the example, all constraints are removed: arbitrary numbers are just made up as the writer thinks appropriate for the readership. […] Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for different fonts (Caslon, Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough. If these obvious truths of specialization are supposed to be interesting facts about language, thought, and culture, then I’m sorry, but include me out. Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng’s Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: “It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos… snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes…” (p. 137). Imagine reading: “It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers.., fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes…” Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.

Geoff Pullum, in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. (via allthingslinguistic)

The spread of the word for ‘tea’ across the world.

Oh me! Oh my! Oh, what did you say? That in 1904 Dr. Seuss was born on this day?

Yes that is true and as much as we knew, Turns out he did more than write kids books for you!

Though he may have been a literary tycoon he still found success penning political & industrial cartoons

For instance the bug spray company Flit had him do this poster warning about malaria back in World War Two.

With a vampiric pout and a blood cocktail in hand he introduced us to this Mosquito named Ann.

Though this rhyme may be forced and really contrived, Do check out this blog post from which these lines were derived.

Because on this date, March 2nd, 1904 was born Dr. Seuss, a man we all surely adore!

Happy 113th birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Top image via The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre

Happy Roald Dahl Day, everyone!  

Here’s a selection of some of our favorite stories about the man behind Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG and all the other books that traumatized us so delightfully as kids (Vermicious Knids, eeeeeggghhh).

Roald Dahl Wanted His Magical ‘Matilda’ To Keep Books Alive

Roald Dahl, A Bottle Of Dreams And A 'Letter Of Note’

'Where Am I Now?’ Mara Wilson Explains What Happened When Matilda Grew Up

Roald Dahl: The Story Of The 'Storyteller’

And lest we forget – Dahl’s memoirs and fiction for adults are great too. Just don’t  give Someone Like You to a kid.

Wicked And Delicious: Devouring Roald Dahl

– Petra

Tough as a Tardigrade

Without water, a human can only survive for about 100 hours. But there’s a creature so resilient that it can go without it for decades. This one millimeter animal can survive both the hottest and coldest environments on Earth, and can even withstand high levels of radiation. This is the tardigrade, and it’s one of the toughest creatures on Earth, even if it does look more like a chubby, eight-legged gummy bear. 

Most organisms need water to survive. Water allows metabolism to occur, which is the process that drives all the biochemical reactions that take place in cells. But creatures like the tardigrade, also known as the water bear, get around this restriction with a process called anhydrobiosis, from the Greek meaning life without water. And however extraordinary, tardigrades aren’t alone. Bacteria, single-celled organisms called archaea, plants, and even other animals can all survive drying up.

For many tardigrades, this requires that they go through something called a tun state. They curl up into a ball, pulling their head and eight legs inside their body and wait until water returns. It’s thought that as water becomes scarce and tardigrades enter their tun state, they start synthesize special molecules, which fill the tardigrade’s cells to replace lost water by forming a matrix. 

Components of the cells that are sensitive to dryness, like DNA, proteins, and membranes, get trapped in this matrix. It’s thought that this keeps these molecules locked in position to stop them from unfolding, breaking apart, or fusing together. Once the organism is rehydrated, the matrix dissolves, leaving behind undamaged, functional cells.

Beyond dryness, tardigrades can also tolerate other extreme stresses: being frozen, heated up past the boiling point of water, high levels of radiation, and even the vacuum of outer space. This has led to some erroneous speculation that tardigrades are extraterrestrial beings.

While that’s fun to think about, scientific evidence places their origin firmly on Earth where they’ve evolved over time. In fact, this earthly evolution has given rise to over 1100 known species of tardigrades and there are probably many others yet to be discovered. And because tardigrades are so hardy, they exist just about everywhere. They live on every continent, including Antarctica. And they’re in diverse biomes including deserts, ice sheets, the sea fresh water, rainforests, and the highest mountain peaks. But you can find tardigrades in the most ordinary places, too, like moss or lichen found in yards, parks, and forests. All you need to find them is a little patience and a microscope.

Scientists are now to trying to find out whether tardigrades use the tun state, their anti-drying technique, to survive other stresses. If we can understand how they, and other creatures, stabilize their sensitive biological molecules, perhaps we could apply this knowledge to help us stabilize vaccines, or to develop stress-tolerant crops that can cope with Earth’s changing climate. 

And by studying how tardigrades survive prolonged exposure to the vacuum of outer space, scientists can generate clues about the environmental limits of life and how to safeguard astronauts. In the process, tardigrades could even help us answer a critical question: could life survive on planets much less hospitable than our own?

From the TED-Ed Lesson Meet the tardigrade, the toughest animal on Earth - Thomas Boothby

Animation by Boniato Studio