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FREE Scanning Electron Micrographs of Just About Anything

Johnny — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:35:45 +0000

An interesting offer from ASPEX
November 10, 2009 2:54 PM – by PZ Myers

I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM (Scanning Electron Micrograph), and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they’ll have it scanned in and the image available on their website.

I asked them if they knew how many readers I have, and they said no problem, they can handle it.

Huh.

Well, you heard them. Scavenge your trash cans, dig into your local sources of vermin and oddments, and send them in. I’m thinking this could be really fun for any school teachers out there — you could have the whole class looking for interesting specimens to zoom in on. You can see their current galleries for ideas.

Follow the instructions here to get your dead bugs and rotten food scanned for free.

If you do send something in to get scanned be sure to note that you found them via PZ; and be sure to come back here and share your scan with the rest of us!

Happy Halloween!

Neece — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:07:48 +0000

Happy Halloween everyone!

I wanted to share some great lolcats with you on my favorite holiday, while warning you of some issues that may have passed below your radar for this All Hallow’s Eve.

Don’t buy candy for today! Halloween is Lucifer’s holy day and the candy in the store has been cursed and filled with demons according to Charisma Magazine. Kimberly Daniels wantonly tells us about the horrors of this most satanic day of the year.

I know, it’s probably too late for you. You already bought your Halloween candy weeks ago. My suggestion is to eat all of the candy in one sitting while praising Lucifer as you unwrap each blasphemous piece of chocolaty evilness. If you can’t light a bonfire to dance around naked in your front yard, light a candle and roast marshmallows over it. That will suffice.

Don’t give the candy to those little kids that come begging at your door! It will fill their innocent little souls with demons! You really must eat the candy for yourself and imbibe the demons to help save our future from demonic possession. Daniels says it all in her diatribe. But I give you solutions. That’s just the kind of blasphemous, godless heathen that I am.

On another note, why not find a Judgement House to scare you onto the straight and narrow? Having trouble with your kids? This is the solution for you. Drag your kids to JH to experience a dramatic walk-through of the “truth” of people’s choices and their horrific consequences. It’s good stuff for terrifying kids with the “love” of god into their hearts.

Another version is Hell House which shows all kinds of sin and torments of the damned in hell. It might help with those uppity kids you can’t manage, and again, it will show the boundless “love” of god in all his heinous “glory”.

And last but not least, the catholic church in Africa is being destroyed by witchcraft! Experts in Kenya say witchcraft is real and is destroying the church. Scholars are upset that the church continues to dismiss the dark arts as mere superstition, thereby unwittingly helping the devil advance his reign! Oh noes!

Unfortunately, on a serious note, in the name of witchcraft, many innocent children, albinos and people are killed, mutilated and tortured in the name of witchcraft in Africa.

So have a happy unholy day today! Happy Halloween!

This is for my Hunny Bunny on our 13th wedding anniversary today. Luvz U!

Life Is Good. Cinnamon Life Is Better!

Neece — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:47:33 +0000

You probably have to be American to get the joke in the title. Do other countries have Life cereal? I have no idea. That’s a phrase of my husband Butch’s anyway. I personally think the original Life cereal is the best, not the fancy versions that they also make, like cinnamon, chocolate oat crunch, etc.

Anyhoo, this is a roundup post in which I cover several topics that are tenuously connected at best. Here’s what I’m rambling on about:

I’m a citizen scientist now! WOOT!
- Encyclopedia of Life!
- My Flickr
Moving the body affects how we think – a study
Prayer and meditation may reshape the brain – a study

First, I want to talk about a ScienceDaily report: Massive Online ‘Macroscopic Observatory’ Of Earth’s Biodiversity To Be Created. “Wanted (soon): observations from environment-minded citizens that will allow science to study biodiversity at a planetary level in a massive, comprehensive virtual observatory of historic importance.”

This guy, Edward O. Wilson, created a website, Encyclopedia of Life (eol). His dream: “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth…” and they are starting to do just that. A page for every species. If you read the ScienceDaily article, it will be amazing. You’ll be able to get information from the Deep Web from images, maps, classification, common and scientific names, links to research and papers, etc.

It’s already there now, and growing all the time. In the future you’ll also be able to get genome sequences and much much more. Basically anything you want to know about a species will be there, at your fingertips, all on one page, for free. My scientific geekiness is giggling with delight!

And here’s where I get to finally call myself a scientist! Uh, well, a citizen scientist, which is still cool. eol wants people to submit their pictures. I’m a photographer, and I love taking pictures of nature, but I’ve never been able to do much with them. Now I can help with this project! Can you say WOOT!? I can. Woot WOOT! (Sorry, uber-geek moment there).

So what you do, what I did, was to open a Flickr account. I’m ZeNeeceC on Flickr now. I got some older pictures posted yesterday. Then here’s the tough part. You need to machine tag them with their scientific names. This is so that when you send them to the eol Flickr group, eol’s computer can get those images and put them on the right pages.

My friend Jeff said that eol sounded like a Wikipedia kind of thing for science. In a way, he’s right, because we get to contribute our images. But eol is serious about science, so the images will get authenticated. Until that time, they have a yellow box around them so people can see that they are contributed but might not be scientifically accurate like the rest of the info on the page.

Even further, though, if you just want high end science info, eol lets you set that up so that you don’t even see the citizen science stuff. It’s a very well done site.

Anyway, I am having trouble finding out what things are called. Flickr has a group called ID Please, which I joined. And I joined BugGuide.net as ZeNeece to help me ID bugs. But the flowers and plants, I will need to find an online source to identify those more readily.

So that’s that. I wanted to share it with you because it’s so exciting to me, but also in case you or someone you know might be interested as well.

Onto some studies!

Our Bodies, Our Brains: a recent study shows that moving your body in certain ways can improve your ability to think. Published in Psychological Science.

Working with 38 subjects, the scientists confirmed that either a step forward (a typically positive movement) or a step backward (usually negative) significantly changed one’s ability to perform a mental task.

Taking four steps back improved a subject’s accuracy and timing on the task, whereas taking four steps forward led to longer processing times and more errors.

How cool is that? Now, if you follow the link, you’ll see that this was on 60 second science on Scientific American, so there are no links to studies. But they list the publication, Psychological Science, if you want to look into it further.

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain… And Your Reality: This is interesting. I’ve told you about some studies (see below) in the past in this field, which this article calls “neurotheology”. The article from NPR is about Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at University of Pennsylvania who has written several books and studies very religious people and their brains. Newberg says: “The more you focus on something — whether that’s math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain.”

He also tested a doctor who meditates for an hour a day. He had him meditate in a brain scanner.

As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime’s parietal lobes went dark. Newberg said, “This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world,” he explains. “When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area.”

The article goes on to suggest that you can benefit from meditation and prayer as well, even if you don’t devote 1 or 2 hours a day to it. I find this interesting and compelling, and it goes along with the other studies listed below. I would have liked some studies referenced and linked to in the article, but I guess I’m not that lucky.

Here are the other posts I’ve done about other relevant brain and mind studies recently:

Church: No brain activity required- study showed how experiencing transcendence basically shut down the right parietal lobe.
More differences in the brains of believers and non-believers: A recent study that found religious people were less anxious about mistakes they made than non-believers.
Knowledge and Beliefs are stored differently in the brain: this wasn’t a specific study. Dr. Steven Novella mentioned it in passing on his podcast.
Religion is the path of least resistance: This was about an article in New Scientist where people are born believers. I strongly suspect the way they conducted the studies mentioned.
Superstitious? It could be your lack of control: This was a neat study about people who were basically put into a situation where they felt a lack of control found patterns more readily in random information.

Too Sick To Be Clever – Lolcat, save me!

Neece — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:57:03 +0000

I have a bad cold. I’ve been sick for a week and I don’t feel like I’m that much better. Now I’ve lost my voice (my husband doesn’t seem upset by that for some reason.. LOL). And to make matters worse, I am just really tired and can’t think of anything clever for you. Don’t worry. I’ll think of something soon. But just so you don’t feel forgotten or neglected, Lolcat is filling in for me.

“Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.” I love this bus slogan. It’s brilliant. This is my favorite so far.

“That’s right sweetheart; dreams and goals are satan’s way of distracting you from making dinner.” My comments all involve swearing so I’ll just let it stand as is.

oh JESUS! This is just too freaking much, this cake. I had to show it to you.

Happiness is submission to GodZILLA! LOL!

This is my favorite Russell’s Teapot. Get the drano!

Ceiling Cat guides the hand of man to write LOLbible.

Satan Cat: He’s going to kill you and your family once he gets outta there. LOL!

Atheist Fun

Neece — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:11:19 +0000

Sometimes I just want to relax and have a bit of fun.

I like this comic, jesus calling god the worst dad ever. LOL

Geez, those “evil” atheists are so wicked and skeery!

I just ate pat robertson’s brain and I’m still hungry! LOL

Creationism – because desert goat herders living in tents 3,000 years ago knew more about the cosmos and biology than modern day scientists.

jesus christ is the 33 year old virgin. better savior than sexy.. LOL!

the abrahamic god is such a jealous asshole.

religion is absurd.

This is too funny. Whoever translated this to lolcat is way more patient than me. LOL

Because the future is an adventure. And life is precious and wonderful!

Gee thanks, that’s .. uh.. awesome, you asshole.

Ok.. not funny, really. but it’s so irritatingly accurate.

How pope “ratz” benedict looks without his makeup artist. BLECH.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. Exactly!

HA! HAHAHAHA! Eeeevil Robot Jesus! LOL

Jesus endorses everything on this website.

Car Crashed Into Church Roof – god Asleep at the Wheel?

Neece — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:39:29 +0000

From the Telegraph: Emergency forces rescued a man from his car which he crashed into a church roof in Limbach-Oberfrohna, Germany. The 23 year-old was severely injured. According to the police the driver missed a turn at high speed, continued straight ahead on a slightly rising field and then finally ‘took off’ to land in the church roof seven metres above the ground.

Of course, we all hope the kid is ok. But sobriety aside, this is too funny. I guess god wasn’t paying attention? Or maybe Zeus wanted to up the ante in the card game they were all playing in heaven? I wonder if the poor kid said ‘Oh god’ as he saw the church looming in his vision? At any rate, this is proof once again that physics is both amazing and awesome. I’d say it might also reinforce the fact that there’s no god, but you can’t prove a negative, as we all know.

Richard Dawkins “Rose From The Dead”

sheisgod — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:41:21 +0000

From NewsBiscuit

via RichardDawkins.net

Confirmed atheist Richard Dawkins was forced onto the defensive yesterday after he died but subsequently rose from the dead in a miraculous resurrection, much like that of the son of God Jesus Christ.

‘There are a number of perfectly logical scientific explanations for what has happened’ he told journalists flocking to hear his story or just touch the hem of his clothing. ‘Although I was pronounced dead after the unfortunate incident on Friday, the doctors clearly made a mistake. The fact that there was thunder and lightning, and those around claim to have heard the sound of angelic voices is completely irrelevant.’

Dawkins suffered a shocking but ironic death on Friday having been seized by a mysterious gang of burly men dressed as Roman soldiers. They nailed him to a cross, and left him there until he died some hours later. However on Sunday, his body was no longer to be found in Slough mortuary, and he was seen walking on the A4 towards his home, where his resurrection was hailed as a miracle.

It is being suggested in some quarters that Richard Dawkins was being taught a lesson by God, who has now given him magical powers including the ability to walk on water and cast out demons. A bitter Pope Benedict said ‘Why is it the naughty ones get all the attention? I have been saying that I definitely, definitely believe in God for ages and I haven’t been given the ability to perform a single miracle. Unless you count progressing from the Hitler Youth to being God’s representative on Earth, I suppose.’

Despite the miraculous events of the past few days, Richard Dawkins was standing by his militant atheism. ‘All of it can be explained by science and rational thought’ he insisted to reporters outside his front door. At this point a leper rushed through the crowd, and kissed Dawkins’ feet, only to stand up apparently totally cured of her hideous affliction. ‘OK, that is pretty impressive, I admit’ said the author of The God Delusion. ‘Oh shit, I think I’m going to get pissed.’ At that he touched a bottle of mineral water, turning it into Chateau Lafitte 1967, and slunk inside to drink it.

Heaving Dead Cats » photos

FREE Scanning Electron Micrographs of Just About Anything

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Happy Halloween!

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