Feed Your Brain

Herkimer Diamond (Quartz)

Tab. III Scolia quinquepunctata and Tenthredo germanica (Wasp). 

Diagram of the Horse’s eye by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

A red-eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas). This species can be found throughout most of Central America, as far north as southern Mexico.

Credit: Joel Sartore

Catalogue of the Batrachia Salientia and Apoda (frogs, toads, and cœcilians) of southern India by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

The Manhattan Project

Some of the greatest advances in science have come from humanity’s more destructive impulses. This is not the fault of science - when we discover powerful truths about the universe it’s up to us to decide how to use them because they can either be boons or banes to the world. There may be no better example of this than the work done by the Manhattan Project - the years long, multinational effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The project created unfathomably destructive weapons and led to a 50 year Cold War with the USSR, but is also the source of a lot of information about the atom we didn’t have before, which has led to advances in many beneficial fields, like energy production and medicine. Science, like history, is always complicated.

References for this episode can be found in the Google document here: http://dft.ba/-4WtS

“The Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever”

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-is-most-detailed-picture-internet-ever

*Hacker who pulled it off brags in detail about his technique, dabbles in dazzling infoviz:

Tiny implant can transmit realtime blood data to your doctor.

Researchers at Switzerlands EPFL have demonstrated a 14mm long implant, able to analyse up to five proteins and organic acids in the blood simultaneously, and transmit the data to a doctor.

The data transmission works in several stages, with the implant using radio waves to transmit to a patch on the skin (which also provides power back to the implant through the patients skin). The patch then uses bluetooth to transmit data to a smartphone, which can then feed it into a web-based database accessible by a doctor.

The implant could be particularly useful in chemotherapy applications. Currently, oncologists use occasional blood tests to evaluate their patients’ tolerance to a particular treatment dosage. In these conditions, it is very difficult to administer the optimal dose. De Micheli is convinced his system will be an important step towards better, more personalized medicine. “It will allow direct and continuous monitoring based on a patient’s individual tolerance, and not on age and weight charts or weekly blood tests.”