“Schrödinger’s Smoke. We Describe A New Approach For The Purely Eulerian Simulation Of Incompressible

This is a ghostly web-footed gecko, they can be found and perfectly camouflage among the powdery reddish sands of the Namib Desert, their primary habitat.These geckos have adapted their webbed feet not only to help them stay atop, but to bury beneath the dunes of the Namib Desert. Strictly nocturnal lizards, they spend the day in self-dug burrows and emerge at night to feed.

Their bloodshot-looking eyes are massively oversized to help them detect prey, which includes crickets, grasshoppers, and small spiders. They move surprisingly quickly across the sand, and adhesive pads on their toes make them excellent climbers.

People sometimes hunt these tiny lizards for food, and human encroachment is destroying some of its habitat. Their estimated lifespan in the wild is about five years.

#KnowYourHistory: #Stonewall

There’s now a smart menstrual device called my.Flow

Meet my.Flow. It’s not a tampon covered with sensors, but rather a special tampon string connected to a wearable sensor. It will monitor your tampon and send you alerts via an app on your phone. Is this really the best solution to the menstruation problem they’re trying to solve?

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Skull Armchair

This part is very representative and in line with Gregory Besson creations, who is working on the vanities revisited since 2008. It connects aesthetics and timeless questioning, that the human has against death. Sitting on death and having fun on it is like trying to forget death a moment. The user of this chair will be backwards to death, maybe trying to outsmart it ? This true masterpiece appeals to old and recent techniques for its manufacture.The body of the skull is made of polyester, this technique is used by many carver since the 60s. The seat is leather and installation is Chesterfield type, which requires techniques of 18th century. Different unique finishes are coming and will be available. Get yours here

Dull and dirty: Your workplace could affect brain function

A new study by a Florida State University researcher shows that both a lack of stimulation in the workplace and a dirty working environment can have a long-term cognitive effect on employees.

“Psychologists say that the brain is a muscle, while industrial hygienists point to chemicals in the work environment that may cause decline,” said Joseph Grzywacz, the Norejane Hendrickson Professor of Family and Child Sciences and lead researcher on the study. “There are real things in the workplace that can shape cognitive function: some that you can see or touch, and others you can’t. We showed that both matter to cognitive health in adulthood.”

In the past, researchers had been divided on whether it was working in an unclean workplace — facing exposure to agents such as mold, lead or loud noises — or working in an unstimulating environment that took the biggest toll on brain health as people aged.

This new study is significant because it showed both can play an important role in long-term cognitive well-being.

Grzywacz’s findings are published in the June issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Grzywacz and his team obtained cognitive function data from working adults participating in the Midlife in the United States study. Their results had two major takeaways: One was that greater occupational complexity — that is the learning of new skills and taking on new challenges — resulted in stronger cognitive performance particularly for women as they aged.

The second result was that men and women who had jobs that exposed them to a dirty working environment saw a cognitive decline.

“Both of these issues are important when we think about the long-term health of men and women,” said Grzywacz, who also serves as the chair of the Department of Family and Child Sciences.

Grzywacz and colleagues analyzed the data to examine individuals’ workplaces and their ability to maintain and later use information they learned. They also looked at their executive functioning skills such as their ability to complete tasks, manage time and pay attention. Additionally, the data included responses from participants asking them about any memory issues they were experiencing.

“The practical issue here is cognitive decline associated with aging and the thought of, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it,’” Grzywacz said. “Designing jobs to ensure that all workers have some decision making ability may protect cognitive function later in life, but it’s also about cleaning up the workplace.”

The data included 4,963 adults ages 32 to 84 from the 48 contiguous states. The sample was 47 percent male and 53 percent female.

(Image caption: Because babies born prematurely are still developing, they typically have smaller brains than full-term infants. Shown are depictions of the cortical-surface area of the brain at different points in gestation. Illustration by Eric Young)

Breast milk linked to significant early brain growth in preemies

Feeding premature babies mostly breast milk during the first month of life appears to spur more robust brain growth, compared with babies given little or no breast milk.

Studying preterm infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, the researchers found that preemies whose daily diets were at least 50 percent breast milk had more brain tissue and cortical-surface area by their due dates than premature babies who consumed significantly less breast milk.

The researchers, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, presented their findings May 3 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, in Baltimore.

“The brains of babies born before their due dates usually are not fully developed,” said senior investigator Cynthia Rogers, MD, an assistant professor of child psychiatry who treats patients at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “But breast milk has been shown to be helpful in other areas of development, so we looked to see what effect it might have on the brain. With MRI scans, we found that babies fed more breast milk had larger brain volumes. This is important because several other studies have shown a correlation between brain volume and cognitive development.”

The study included 77 preterm infants. The researchers retrospectively looked to see how much breast milk those babies had received while being cared for in the NICU. Then, the researchers conducted brain scans on those infants at about the time each would have been born had the babies not arrived early. All of the babies were born at least 10 weeks early, with an average gestation of 26 weeks, or about 14 weeks premature. Because they are still developing, preemies typically have smaller brains than full-term infants.

First author Erin Reynolds, a research technician in Rogers’ laboratory, said in gauging the effects of breast milk on the babies’ brains, the researchers didn’t distinguish between milk that came from the babies’ own mothers and breast milk donated by other women. Rather, they focused on the influence of breast milk in general.

“As the amount of breast milk increased, so did a baby’s chances of having a larger cortical surface area,” Reynolds said. “The cortex is the part of the brain associated with cognition, so we assume that more cortex will help improve cognition as the babies grow and develop.”

Preterm birth is a leading cause of neurologic problems in children and has been linked to psychiatric disorders later in childhood. Rogers and her team plan to follow the babies in the study through their first several years of life to see how they grow, focusing on their motor, cognitive and social development. As the babies get older, the researchers believe they will be able to determine the effects of early exposure to breast milk on later developmental outcomes.

“We want to see whether this difference in brain size has an effect on any of those developmental milestones,” Rogers said. “Neonatologists already believe breast milk is the best nutrition for preterm infants. We wanted to see whether it was possible to detect the impact of breast milk on the brain this early in life and whether the benefits appeared quickly or developed over time.”

Rogers said further investigation is needed to determine specifically how breast milk affects the brain and what is present in the milk that seems to promote brain development. She explained that because all of the babies in the study were born early it isn’t clear whether breast milk would provide similar benefits for babies born at full term.

All of the animals above — and more — are “critically endangered.”

Today’s ‪#‎dalithistory‬ month post is on the Adi-movements of the 1920’s and 30s. For Dalit history, ‘Adi’ ideologies are highly significant as they bear testament to some of our earliest assertion of equal rights, humanity and citizenship on level with other castes.

By the late 19th century, leaders like the social reformer Jyotirao Phule, had created a powerful anti-caste space, upholding non-Brahmanical thought and presenting the dream of a new egalitarian value system on which to model society on. Soon after, the early 20th century saw several archeological discoveries being made in Mohenjodaro and Harappa in the North, pointing to the existence of an unexpectedly ancient civilization that was likely much older than Aryan migrations. These discoveries struck a profound chord with Dalits all over the subcontinent, who immediately began to identify as an indigenous population who were conquered and subsequently oppressed by an alien religion. Although, the evidence for Aryan conquests remains contested, these interpretation was so compelling that such “Adi” (Ancient/Old/Original) movements sprung up all over the nation completely independently of each other.  

The names of these movements are telling -  Ad-Dharm in Punjab, Adi-Hindu in U.P. and Hyderabad, Adi-Dravida, Adi-Andhra and Adi-Karnataka in South India - all indicating a common claim to nativity and original inhabitation.

The provocative effects of the Adi-movements are best illustrated by an early Maharashtrian pre-Ambedkar Dalit leader, Kisan Faguji Bansode, who warned his caste-Hindu friends in 1909, stating: “The Aryans - your ancestors - conquered us and gave us unbearable harassment. At that time we were your conquest, you treated us worse than slaves and subjected us to any torture you wanted. But now we are no longer your subjects, we have no service relationship with you, we are not your slaves or serfs… We have had enough of the harassment and torture of the Hindus.”

In Andhra, the process was accelerated by the commercialized coastal areas that produced both a mobile Dalit agricultural class and a small educated section that produced leaders Bhagyareddy Varma and Arigyay Ramswamy who managed to mobilize nearly a third of the Malas and Madigas of the Madras Presidency to state their identity in the official census of 1931 as Adi-Andhra.

In Tamil Nadu, some Dalits identified themselves as Adi-Dravidas while Telugu and Kannada counterparts also identified as Adi-Hindu or Adi-Karnataka. In the north, in Uttar Pradesh, an untouchable ascetic, who radically called himself Acchutananda, began to organize an Adi-Hindu identity, arguing, “The untouchables, are in fact Adi-Hindu, i.e. the original and autochthonous Nagas or Dasas of the north and the Dravidas of the south, the undisputed, heavenly owners of Bharat.”

In Punjab, Mangoo Ram Mugowalia, a Dalit who had left the Gaddar movement, unable to stand the Casteism within it, began the Ad-Dharmi movement. By 1926, he had influenced a huge number of Dalits to boldly register themselves a separate “quaum” (religious group) in Hoshiarpur despite the threat of imminent violence. By the 1931 census, nearly 500,000 Dalits registered themselves as Ad-Dharmis all over Punjab.

To counter a growing ‘Adi’ consensus, Brahmins began actively renaming Dalits, ‘Panchama’ (the Fifth). Gandhi used it in his Young India for a long time. Many Dalits of the day strongly pushed back against the term insisting the idea of ‘Panchama’ was derogatory and only served to attenuate the age-long hyper-oppressive framework of Hindu society and solidify their position outside the caste order.

Meoww!