Check out Visions of Science for a whole host of really cool photos related to science.
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Tracheostomy patient
by Catherine O’Malley
A tracheostomy is performed when a patient’s airway becomes blocked. A hole is made in the front of the windpipe in the neck, through which the patient can breathe. To inhale through the nose, for instance to smell a flower, the tracheostomy tube is held in the mouth.
Nikon D1x with 90mm lens, 1/125s at f22
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Mating toads
By Sheila Pearce
Male toads mob a female in a mating frenzy. Only one male can mate with the female, and competition is fierce. Such is the toads’ single-mindedness that they ignore everything else, including predators, traffic and photographers.
Canon EOS 300 with 100mm macro lens
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Hatching mosquito
By Dr Christian Laforsch
This Culex mosquito is just emerging from its pupa (brown). Culex mosquitoes are found worldwide and carry a number of diseases. A single female can lay some 400 eggs, which are deposited on the surface of still water. The larvae filter plankton from the water before pupating at the surface. Adults emerge from the pupae a few days later, using the floating pupa as a raft prior to flying free.
LEO 1430 VO scanning electron microscope at 20 kV. Coloured using Adobe Photoshop 7.01
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Posted by drpoo as General at 10:38 PM PDT
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Yea Astros! Can they win the world series for the first time! THat’s be pretty f’ing cool if they did. I bet it’s pretty crazy down in H-town (houston…) right now! I can only imagine downtown and every single bar in h-town is bumping hardcore right now. WOW! I think i can feel a seismic shocks all the way up here in Maine….all those people jumping up and down!
Congratulations to those bad ass houstonians.
-Chris
Posted by drpoo as News at 11:44 PM PDT
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Get out your history books my friends, this still happens today. The shitty thing is, is that we all as westerners (or westernized non-westerners…) do it too. Well, i think for the most part, please correct my thinking if i am wrong.
What are the consequences of the Western Superiority complex? I ask about the Western complex because it is the dominant world culture today and has been for hundreds of years. It is what much of the world trusts to lead us forward to better things….will it? can it when in the language lays age old structures of stratification of the people into better…and worse?
Anyway, here’s what made me ask the question.
A small excerpt from 7 Myths of the Spanish Conqest by Matthew Restall. Page 132
Shocked
‘Denis Dideror characterized the Spanish explorers as “ a handful of men surrounded by an innumerable multitude of natives.” When anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot quotes this sentence, he italicezes men and natives to emphasize their juxtaposition.
This oppostition of man and native, the civilzed and the barbarous, the advanced and the primitive, is seen everywhere, not only in colonial and early modern sources. The more extreme views on the relative merits of the civilization that produced the Spanish Conqest were brough out by the public and highly politicized Quicentennial debate over Columbus and his legacy. Michael Berliner wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Western civilization sands for man at his best” and should be honored (through the celebration of Columbus’s discover) “ because it is the objectively superior culture.” Berliner’s juxtaposition of a barbarous pre-columbian native America (“sparesly inhabited, unused, undeveloped” but racked with “endless, bloody wars”) with a Western Europe that defined civilization’s virtues (“reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement”) is a version of the trope that Europeans used for centuries to justify the exploitation of Native Americans and the enslavement of West Africans.
Not long ago, professional historians expressed simliar views. Although the language of civilization versus barbarism is nowadays more subte and disguised in academic media, the words “superior” and “superiority” often crop up in modern texts and discussions of the Conquest. ‘
-Chris
Posted by drpoo as College Of The Atlantic, Peace Works!, Personal Endeveavors at 11:21 PM PDT
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Wow, to me this is a bit worrysome. Many think patenting genes and other biological ‘codes’ is good for innovation because it allows the code finder to release what they have found and not allow anyone else to use it without conforming to there patent liscenses and such, which is said to encourage innovation and expansion of public knowledge. However I worry a bit that patenting biological codes has more long term consequences than that.
What do you think about the fact that over 20% of the human genes have already been patented by corporations and some universities?
1/5 of human genome patented
How about when you hear that companies like IBM are declaring that they will not use genetic information about people to descriminate. Wow, have we really already gotten to that point in time where that is becoming a concern? Seems like science fiction…
IBM says no to Genetic Discrimination
Posted by drpoo as News at 11:19 AM PDT
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It’s my birthday soon; October 10th to be exact. That’s cool, but it’s also Columbus day. I think we should celebrate!
Why? What could we possibly be celebrating, well this of course:
“During the early years [after Columbus’ discovery of the New World], Hispaniola with its dense population was almost the sole focus of Spanish settlement. The inevitable clashes of the early years were eased by the tolerance of the Tainos [native people living on the island when Columbus opened up shop] who did not object to the Spaniards’ presence, at least initially. In 1494, however, the first Indian rebellion broke out in response to the capture of a native ruler [a tactic the spanish liked to use to instill fear into a people to subordinate them]. Spanish retribution was harsh and, over the next two years, Columbus militarily subdued all the natives of the island and subjected them to Spanish control. There was little of direct material weath for the Spaniards to seize [on Hispaniola], save the labour of the Indians themselves and this they did through the institution of the ecomienda. The encomienda was a political-economic system in which rights to the labour of the Indians residing in the granted area were allocated. Their labour was managed through the cooperation of the local caciques [native authorities], but enforced by the Spaniards.
Spanish subjugation of the indigenous population was a blow to native society, but it was disease that was to prove the most devastating. New World populations had never been exposed to most of the major contagious diseases that had evolved in the Old World. As a consequence, the Indians lacked immunities to the diseases the Spaniards brought with them, leading to massive deaths and precipitous depopulation. In Hispaniola alone, the population dropped from perhaps one million in 1492 to under sixteen-thousand by 1518: within thirty years of Columbus’s landing, the native population of the island was virtually extinct. The same fate befell the natives elsewhere in the Caribbean somewhat later, matching the slower rate of colonization in those areas. [Some 80% of the native population of Latin America–that is present day Mexico and the entire South America–died within the first 100 years after contact with Columbus; millions upon millions died almost instantaneously. Much due to disease, but not nearly all. ]”
That was an excerpt from Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, by Ross Hassig.
Happy Columbus Day!
-Chris
Posted by drpoo as Peace Works!, Personal Endeveavors at 12:18 AM PDT
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Can you imagine for a moment what it would be like if millions of people could be justifiably kidnapped, forced into a life of hardship, and none ever having the opportunity nor any generation’s of children to follow to be free again?
Of course you can.
Why is it so easy to imagine this?
Why has it been so easily justifiable throughout time?
What drives such a system
What allows it to perpetuate?
Matthew Restall points out in his book The Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, “Unlike in later expeditions, Africans did not participate in the Conquest of Mexico in the hundreds, for as Bernal Diaz observed, ‘at that time Blacks and horses were worth their weight in gold.’”
Can you imagine for a moment what it would be like if this was common history of your ancestors; can you imagine what it would be like if that was the shadow of reality that you lived in still today; how would you feel if it was you?
-Chris
Posted by drpoo as Peace Works!, Personal Endeveavors at 10:45 PM PDT
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Can you believe it? In the Everglads of Florida there’s stiff competition between the native alligators and the non native Pythons.
Scientists had hoped that the Python population could be checked by the alligators but they might be wrong to think so. According to this news article, there have been a number of cases of Pythons eating alligators WHOLE! like the one talked about here. Except, the python in this story didn’t win exactly, i’d say it was more like a tie! About half-way through the digestion of the alligator, the python burst open!
Read news.yahoo.com for more.
Posted by drpoo as General at 10:44 AM PDT
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