Category / Cool Stuff
NOMMMMMMMMM, NOMMMMMMMMM.
Genesis Is Coming!
Quite literally. Earlier today, Thoughts From Kansas pointed out The National Academies Press is holding a massive book sale and suggested getting Robert Hazen’s “Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins” for super cheap. So that’s just what I did.
I was extremely impressed with both of Hazen’s Teaching Company series, “Joy of Science” and “Origins of Life” so I’m sure this book with be both easy to understand and extremely informative at the same time. One thing I love about Hazen is his strong advocacy for a reformed, more integrated approach to science education, exemplified in his co-authoring of the highly acclaimed textbook “The Sciences: An Integrated Approach” with James Trefil that fully integrates physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences, and biology for students with little or no science background.
I highly recommend both of Hazen’s Teaching Company series and I’m quite sure that in a few weeks time, I’ll be able to recommend this book as well.
Two In A Row
That’s My Problem Too
Bad First Day
This is one of my all time favorite old Bob Newhart stand-up bits.
I Got Inspired
Every once in a while, I get inspired to create something. Sometimes it’s a music idea and sometimes it’s something more tactile. I was watching Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings last night and got a surge of inspiration. One of the combinations of art produced a silhouetted figure with various degrees of splatter art making up the insides. I didn’t get a screenshot of the Eno art but here are 3 small pieces inspired by it.
I’ve always liked working with the shapes of people without going into the details of those people’s appearances. I like leaving out things like facial expressions and emotional body language on purpose so you can focus on the overall common shapes and attributes that go along with those commonalities. I might do more of these but there’s a ‘tactile’ bug approaching me and I thing I’m going to be doing something more hands-on next.
Brian Eno On Evangelical Atheism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2shEwFjhzA4
Worth Mentioning This Week
With Memorial Day AND Towel Day both coming up, it’s been a very busy week at work and at home and the blog has suffered as a result. Here are some links worth mentioning that I most likely would have written blog posts about had I not been so busy.
- Mike the Mad Biologist posts about why Tenure is so important.
- The International Space Station (ISS) is visible in the sky all this week. Phil Plait has the scoop.
- The Texas State Board of Education is in very big trouble.
- The deepest living organisms on Earth have been discovered at temperatures reaching 100 °C.
- A new study shows some human traits aren’t so unique to humans after all.
Animated Wall Painting by Blu
Large-scale street artist Blu made this animated wall painting and it’s awesome. It also looks like a fantastic high school art project for a city wanting to clean up an area’s graffiti.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Click here if you don’t see the video above.
Women Have No Emotions During Orgasm
Somehow I knew this. I never had the evidence to back up my claim, until now.
To better understand the science of sex, researchers are using PET scanners to map the areas in the brain that are excited during sexual encounters and orgasm. When comparing the results of men to those of women, the researchers uncovered somewhat counter-intuitive data. The scans for men showed an increase in emotional activity as well as a decline in vigilance and fear whereas the women’s scans showed no emotional activity at all during orgasm.
[In men] scientists also saw heightened activity in brain regions involved in memory-related imagery and in vision itself, perhaps because the volunteers used visual imagery to hasten orgasm. The anterior part of the cerebellum also switched into high gear. The cerebellum has long been labeled the coordinator of motor behaviors but has more recently revealed its role in emotional processing. Thus, the cerebellum could be the seat of the emotional components of orgasm in men, perhaps helping to coordinate those emotions with planned behaviors. The amygdala, the brain’s center of vigilance and sometimes fear, showed a decline in activity at ejaculation, a probable sign of decreasing vigilance during sexual performance.
To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female brain, Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris—the site whose excitation most easily leads to orgasm—until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body and in describing a body sensation—for instance, labeling it “sexual.”
But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.
Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”
In all honesty, I’m a bit skeptical. I’m sure the act of being studied played a part in the results and I wonder if this was taken into consideration. That kind of ’stage fright’ or ‘performance pressure’ can play havoc on a person’s emotional state. Maybe their concentration on the job at hand shifted the balance of emotion and logic in favor of the latter.
Via: Scientific American
