Benefits Of Bike Riding

When they invented the bike for the first time, they had no idea that a time will come when it will have all these benefits, otherwise its price would have been too high to afford! — Here is my new infographic on the “Benefits Of Bike Riding”…

➤ Runs on Fat Not Fuel
➤ Reduces Stress
➤ Reduces Risk of Diabetes
➤ Reduces Risk of Blood Pressure
➤ Increases Muscle Tone
➤ Gives You Legs of Steel
➤ Helps You See The World Differently
➤ Unlimited Free Parking
➤ Faster & Easier Than Walking
➤ Zero Emission
➤ No Noise Pollution
➤ It Feels Like Flying
➤ It Carries Your Goodies Home
➤ Whizzes Past Traffic Jams
➤ Puts A Big Fat Smile on Your Face
➤ Bye Bye Spare Tire
➤ Reduces Roadkill & Saves Animals

Enlarge This Graphic : http://is.gd/FSF6R8

(Source: atomstargazer)

Brains built from newspapers, chocolate and fruit. What are you feeding your mind with?

Great work by artist Kyle Bean.

(Source: itsokaytobesmart.com)

The Skin We’re In

Nina Jablonski, distinguished professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, discusses why/how different levels of skin pigmentation evolved. She also talks about the impacts of the concept of race. She presented her work at the topical lecture, “The Evolution and Meanings of Skin Color,” at the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting.

by AAAS.

(Source: skeptv.net)

Hominid | Brian Andrews

Brian Andrews is a contemporary artist, critic, and visual effects supervisor currently living in San Francisco. His work employs a range of technologies in photography, video, and taxidermy in order to confront the viewer with images that reside on the uncanny line between the living and the automaton. The images are rooted in perceptual experience, and are mediated by the techniques of special effects. These effects are not reality simulations or surreal aberrations; rather they are visual mechanisms that expose political and ontological undercurrents of contemporary culture. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hong Kong Exhibitions Centre and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

Understanding art-making as a communicative exercise, Brian Andrews also records on contemporary art as the west coast bureau chief for Bad at Sports Contemporary Art Talk. His writings can be found in Artnet, Art Practical, Beautiful / Decay Magazine, as well as numerous catalogs. He received a Masters of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and a Bachelors of Arts in Visual Arts and Psychology with Highest Honors at the University of California San Diego in 2000. Currently, he is the Director of Animation & Visual Effects and Associate Director of Digital Filmmaking at Ex’pression College for Digital Art in Emeryville, California.

Body Worlds: Donating Your Body to Science

It’s one of the most revealing science exhibits out there. Trace heads to New York for the opening of Body Worlds: Pulse— a show made up of human bodies, donated to science and on display. It’s like nothing else you’ve ever seen.

via DNews Channel.

(via skeptv)

Earliest Great Ape Had Posture Like Humans, Fossils Suggest

image: An examination of the pelvis of the oldest known great ape fossil suggests the creature may have adopted the upright posture often linked with humans and living great apes. credit: Moya Sola Et Al 2004 Science

The oldest known hip from a great ape is now shedding light on the evolution of hominids, revealing the ancient creature may have adopted the upright posture often linked with humans and living great apes, researchers say.

Scientists discovered the fossil skeleton of an ape near Barcelona in Catalonia in northeastern Spain in 2002, when a bulldozer was clearing the land for digging. They named it Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, or the ape from near the village of Els Hostalets de Pierola in Catalonia.

The researchers estimate the ape lived about 11.9 million years ago. Analysis of its skeleton and teeth suggest it was male, weighed about 77 lbs. (35 kilograms) and dined on fruit.

Ancient ape bones
The great ape family, which includes gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, is thought to have diverged from the lesser apes, which include modern gibbons, about 11 million to 16 million years ago. The age of the fossil and a prior study of Pierolapithecus’ wrist, spine, rib cage and shoulder hintedit could be the last relative the great ape family had in common.

“It provides us with information about the condition of the earliest great apes — what they looked like, how they behaved and moved about the environment, what their diet might have consisted of,” researcher Ashley Hammond, a biological anthropologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told LiveScience.

For instance, Pierolapithecus’shoulder blades lie along its back just like those of modern great apes and humans; but in monkeys, the shoulder blades rest on the sides of the rib cage, like in dogs. Moreover, like modern great apes, Pierolapithecushas a wider and flatter rib cage than monkeys and a relatively short and stiff lower spine that would make it easier to assume an upright posture to climb vertically. It also had flexible wrists like apes and humans, although it kept the relatively short fingers and toes of monkeys, suggesting it did not do a lot of hanging from trees.

Straight walker
Now the first analysis of the ape’s pelvis reveals Pierolapithecus had even more in common with the great ape family than previously thought, adopting an upright posture more often than monkeys.

Hammond employed a tabletop laser scanner attached to a turntable to capture detailed surface images from all sides of the fossil. The laser-scanning data helped the researchersdevelop a 3D model to compare the pelvis anatomy of Pierolapithecus with living and extinct species. Hammond and her colleagues focused on the pelvis because it can reveal a lot about how a creature moves and is key to virtually all discussions of human origins.

The researchers found that in Pierolapithecus, the ilium, the largest bone in the pelvis, is wider than that found in most monkeys or a more ancient, monkeylike ape, Proconsul nyanzae, which lived about 18 million years ago. This wider pelvis could have made Pierolapithecus more like an ape than a monkey and helped with balance and stability. Also, the shape of an important attachment point for back muscles in the ilium appeared to lie between those found in monkeys and great apes.

Altogether, Pierolapithecus’ pelvis suggests it could have adopted an upright posture more often than monkeys, but less often than modern great apes. In addition, the pelvis in this early great ape does not look evolved for a life spent hanging from trees, a key trait distinguishing all living species of apes from their monkey relatives. This suggests the behavior evolved later in great apes and not from a common ancestor, but perhaps independently within multiple lineages.

“The research on Pierolapithecus is ongoing,” Hammond said. “There are still regions of the skeleton that deserve additional study in order to gain insight into this particular species.”

In addition to Pierolapithecus, “there are many other understudied species of fossil apes in Spain and in other regions of Europe, Asia and Africa,” Hammond said. “More laboratory and field-based research is necessary in order to understand more about how apes, and later humans, evolved.”

The scientists detailed their findings online March 30 in the Journal of Human Evolution.

source: livescience

Messenger bags from the CraftieRobot Etsy store

(Source: staceythinx)

There’s something Fishy About Microraptor

by Brian Switek

I don’t know why a raven is like a writing desk, but I do know that Microraptor was like a cat. The feathery little dinosaur was cute and glossy, but those adorable features were offset by the carnivore’s excessive pointiness. Even though the non-avian dinosaur was about the size of a raven, and even had feathers with an iridescent corvid sheen, Microraptor still bore pointed teeth, grasping hand claws, and the classic deinonychosaur switchblade talons on each foot. All of this made Microraptor a cuddly-looking little cutter, much like a cat. And the dinosaur shared something else with felines – a fondness for fish.

Since the time the dinosaur was named in 2000, paleontologists have discovered multiple specimens of Microraptor in the 120 million year old lake deposits of China. Many of these are not only articulated, but fossilized to such a fine degree that the petrified remains of their feathers remain intact. This hi-def preservation also safeguarded tatters of Microraptor meals. One Microraptor individual, described two years ago, had feasted on an early bird shortly before perishing in a case of non-avian dinosaur eats avian dinosaur. But a Microraptor known as  QM V1002 enjoyed a different last meal.

Fossilized in the position of QM V1002′s stomach, paleontologist Lida Xing and colleagues explain in a new Evolution paper, are the scraps of bony fish. A small mass of fin rays, vertebrae, and other piscine tidbits are tucked between the dinosaur’s ribs, some of which had been etched by digestive fluids when the Microraptor was still alive. The question is whether this Microraptor actually caught fish or just happened along some convenient snacks thrown up onto the lakeshore…

(read more: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/22/theres-something-fishy-about-microraptor/)

(images: T - Jason Brougham, UT - Austin; B - UT - Austin)

(Source: rhamphotheca)

Birds’ “Crouching” Gait Born in Dinosaur Ancestors

Getting closer to the ground helped dinosaurs take flight, says a new study.

by Brian Handwerk

Watch a bird’s odd, bent-legged gait and you’ll see an evolutionary adaptation born millions of years ago in its dinosaur ancestors while they were still confined to the ground.

The crouched stance developed to compensate for the growth of larger forelimbs that eventually made flight possible, according to new research that digitally “fleshed out” fossils to show physical changes over the eons as bipedal dinosaurs evolved into birds. (Read about the evolution of feathers in National Geographic magazine.)

Birds and humans are the most common bipedal species in the modern world, but their legs are strikingly different. Humans are basically straight-legged, which allows their bones to support their resting body weight. But bird legs are bent into a zigzag, putting them in a crouched position that requires much more muscular effort to stand.

“It’s more efficient to bear weight passively, in a straight line down your long bones [like] a pillar,” said Vivian Allen of theRoyal Veterinary College’s Structure and Motion Lab at the University of London, and co-author of astudy published this week in the journal Nature.

(read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130424-dinosaurs-birds-flight-paleontology-evolution-science/)

(photos: T - Luis Rey; M - Allosaurus reconstruction, by Vivian Allen; B - Kozarluha)

(Source: rhamphotheca)

Look at this tiny (dinosaur) I was bonding with a few days ago.

I couldn’t help but stare into the eyes of this living creature, examining its feet, beak & simply observing its attentiveness to its surroundings..

Brain biology tied to social reorientation during entry to adolescence

A specific region of the brain is in play when children consider their identity and social status as they transition into adolescence — that often-turbulent time of reaching puberty and entering middle school, says a University of Oregon psychologist.

In a study of 27 neurologically typical children who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at ages 10 and 13, activity in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex increased dramatically when the subjects responded to questions about how they view themselves.

The findings, published in the April 24 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, confirm previous findings that specific brain networks support self-evaluations in the growing brain, but, more importantly, provide evidence that basic biology may well drive some of these changes, says Jennifer H. Pfeifer, professor of psychology and director of the psychology department’s Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab.

“This is a longitudinal fMRI study, which is still relatively uncommon,” Pfeifer said. “It suggests a link between neural responses during self-evaluative processing in the social domain, and pubertal development. This provides a rare piece of empirical evidence in humans, rather than animal models, that supports the common theory that adolescents are biologically driven to go through a social reorientation.”

Participants were scanned for about seven minutes at each visit. They responded to a series of attributes tied to social or academic domains — social ones such as “I am popular” or “I wish I had more friends” and academic ones such as “I like to read just for fun” or “Writing is so boring.” Social and academic evaluations were made about both the self and a familiar fictional character, Harry Potter.

In previous research, Pfeifer had found that a more dorsal region of the medial prefrontal cortex was more responsive in 10-year-old children during self-evaluations, when they were compared to adults. The new study, she said, provides a more detailed picture of how the brain supports self-development by looking at change within individuals.

The fMRI analyses found it was primarily the social self-evaluations that triggered significant increases over time in blood-oxygen levels, which fMRI detects, in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Additionally, these increases were strongest in children who experienced the most pubertal development over the three-year study period, for both girls and boys. Increases during academic self-evaluations were at best marginal. Whole-brain analyses found no other areas of the brain had significant increases or decreases in activity related to pubertal development.

“Neural changes in the social domain were more robust,” Pfeifer said. “Increased responses in this one region of the brain from age 10 to 13 were very evident in social self-evaluations, but not academic ones. This pattern is consistent with the enormous importance that most children entering adolescence place on their peer relationships and social status, compared to the relatively diminished value often associated with academics during this transition.”

In youth with autism spectrum disorders, this specialized response in ventral medial prefrontal cortex is missing, she added, citing a paper she co-authored in the February 2013 issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and a complementary study led by Michael V. Lombardo, University of Cambridge, in the February 2010 issue of the journal Brain. The absence of this typical effect, Pfeifer said, might be related to the challenges these individuals often face in both self-understanding and social relations.

“Dr. Pfeifer’s research examining self-evaluations during adolescence adds significantly to the intricate puzzle of this turbulent age period,” said Kimberly Andrews Espy, vice president for research and innovation and dean of the graduate school. “Researchers at the University of Oregon are piecing together how both biology and the environment dynamically and interactively support healthy social development.”

(Source: neurosciencestuff, via neurosciencestuff)

Ketupa javanensis now called Bubo ketupu by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

Osteologia avium, or, A sketch of the osteology of birds /.
[Wellington] :Published by R. Hobson, Wellington, Salop,1858-1875..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41398929

(Source: scientificillustration)

The evolution of the human face over 7 million years.

(ᔥ kottke)

(Source: , via explore-blog)

anthrocentric:

Biometric Evidence that Sexual Selection Has Shaped the Hominin Face [PLOSone]

Abstract: We consider sex differences in human facial morphology in the context of developmental change. We show that at puberty, the height of the upper face, between the lip and the brow, develops differently in males and females, and that these differences are not explicable in terms of sex differences in body size. We find the same dimorphism in the faces of human ancestors. We propose that the relative shortening in men and lengthening in women of the anterior upper face at puberty is the mechanistic consequence of extreme maxillary rotation during ontogeny. A link between this developmental model and sexual dimorphism is made for the first time, and provides a new set of morphological criteria to sex human crania. This finding has important implications for the role of sexual selection in the evolution of anthropoid faces and for theories of human facial attractiveness.

skeptv:

2012 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge: Alya Red — A Computational Heart

Guillermo Marin and colleagues’ video was named the winner in the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, hosted by Science Magazine and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The video is about a project to build and use a computational model of the heart.

[Credit: Guillermo Marin, Fernando M. Cucchietti, Mariano Vázquez, Carlos Tripiana, Guillaume Houzeaux, Ruth Arís, Pierre Lafortune, and Jazmin Aguado-Sierra, Barcelona Supercomputing Center]

by Science Magazine.