Video: Woodpecker in slow motion

The Slo-Mo Woodpecker

Wowwwww

What is your acne telling you?

1 & 2: Digestive System — Eat less processed or junk food, reduce the amount of fat in your diet, step up water intake and opt for cooling things like cucumbers.

3: Liver — Cut out the alcohol, greasy food and dairy. This is the zone where food allergies also show up first, so take a look at your ingredients. Besides all this, do 30 minutes of light exercise every day and get adequate sleep so your liver can rest.

4 & 5: Kidneys — Anything around the eyes (including dark circles) point to dehydration. Drink up!

6: Heart — Check your blood pressure (mine was slightly high) and Vitamin B levels. Decrease the intake of spicy or pungent food, cut down on meat and get more fresh air. Besides this, look into ways to lower cholesterol, like replacing “bad fats” with “good fats” such as Omegas 3 and 6 found in nuts, avocados, fish and flax seed. Also, since this area is chock-full of dilated pores, check that your makeup is not past its expiry date or is skin-clogging.

7 & 8: Kidneys — Again, drink up! And cut down on aerated drinks, coffee and alcohol as these will cause further dehydration.

Zone 9 & 10: Respiratory system — Do you smoke? Have allergies? This is your problem area for both. If neither of these is the issue, don’t let your body overheat, eat more cooling foods, cut down on sugar and get more fresh air. Also keep the body more alkaline by avoiding foods that make the body acidic (meat, dairy, alcohol, caffeine, sugar) and adding more alkalizing foods like green veggies and wheatgrass juice. Another thing that most of forget – dirty cell phones and pillow cases are two of the top acne culprits and this area is what they affect the most!

Zone 11 & 12: Hormones — This is the signature zone for stress and hormonal changes. And while both are sometimes unavoidable, you can decrease their effect by getting adequate sleep, drinking enough water, eating leafy veggies and keeping skin scrupulously clean. Another interesting point: breakouts in this area indicate when you are ovulating (and on which side).

Zone 13: Stomach — Step up the fibre intake, reduce the toxin overload and drink herbal teas to help with digestion.

14: Illness — Zits here can be a sign that your body is fighting bacteria to avoid illness. Give it a break, take a yoga class, take a nap, take time to breathe deeply, drink plenty of water and know that everything always works out!

So the next time you break out or notice dark under-eye circles, look to your face map: your skin is probably trying to communicate on behalf of the internal organs. However, do remember that, as with all medical issues, it is always best to see your doctor or dermotologist for a proper prognosis. This is just a general guide to head you off in the right investigative direction – just because you break out between the brows doesn’t always mean you have a bad liver!

whoa. I’m keeping this.

I DONT THINK ANYONE REALIZES HOW MUCH THIS HAS HELPED ME OH MY GOD

This makes so much sense

If anyone’s uncomfortable with downloading that set that circulating around (I’m guilty of reblogging that post, and have deleted it since), here’s a list of free resources from subreddits I visit.

/r/mcat’s sidebar (in masterpost form:)

Free Resources:

Lillian Schneider (via mortalhusk)

Michelle Obama’s instantly classic speech at the ‘Black Girls Rock’ Awards is a must-watch.

Dopaminergic neurons derived from musculus embryonic stem cells. I love biology art.

The gallbladder functions to store bile, which is produced by the liver. 

via The Awkward Yeti

Seriously, gallbladder, be still!

That’s the most gangsta thing I’ve ever seen.

I’ll probably just wear T-shirts forever.

I'm tired of fear mongering for ESC research

So many people are now posting how they are anti ALS research because they donate to embryonic stem cell research and I have the hardest time not writhing in anger reading these posts. In a positive light, I’m glad people aren’t ignorant in where their money is going. That’s a great way to avoid a lot of crappy companies that give most of the money to the CEOs or to bad organizations. But when people are actually refusing to donate money because a stem cell line used from an embryo killed in 2008, things are getting ridiculous. I personally would be considered “pro-life.” I’m not out there throwing signs out in front of abortion clinics or judging women who choose it, because that’s unkind and ridiculous. I just wouldn’t have an abortion myself. So I’m not saying this because I’m one of those “evil” people who enjoy killing babies (I’m obviously being facetious, relax). But these embryos come from IFV (in vitro fertilization) clinics. Normally women have around two embryos that are placed in the uterus for implantation. Sometimes people come back because the first didn’t work or they have enough money for another child. Many times, however, they don’t. Not only does it cost a crap load, but most of the time, they don’t simply don’t want any more children.

These IVF clinics don’t keep thousands of individuals’ embryos in a giant ever-expanding freezer that would eventually have to become like a TARDIS, they dump them. Yes, it’s inevitable unless you specifically take your leftover embryos and donate them yourself to what’s called a “snowflake” facility for the couple people that actually want random embryos implanted in them instead of adopting. As you can guess, that rarely ever happens unless someone specifically wants to have the experience of being pregnant. But hey, it’s happened before. The lesson is this: embryos are not stolen from women walking down the street, they are leftover embryos that are inevitably going to be destroyed, and most embryos are clones anyways from a law passed years ago from the Bush administration stopping the process of getting new embryos (which Obama later stopped). So the original embryo died years ago, and any new ones to create new potential lines are taken from embryos that never would have existed in the first place without IVF, and are going to be dumped in a tiny trash can. Women can technically donate embryos now, but no one ever does this. It’s an excruciatingly painful process, and women donating eggs to make money will normally donate them to people who need the actual eggs that they can’t produce on their own. No woman  just goes to some in vitro clinic and asks to have eggs scraped out for the hell of it, just to kill some embryos. In all, these embryos are going to die or died years ago.

So why aren’t we “just using adult stem cells?” Once an embryo is implanted, it is officially an adult stem cell. This is the part no one seems to grasp the concept of (ignore the fact that I’m repeatedly ending sentences with prepositions, I’m on a rant). Fetuses are not pluripotent, they have adult stem cells. Only pre-implanted embryos have the pluripotent nature, which is what embryonic stem cells are. The pluripotent nature of embryonic stem cells is everything. This means it can become absolutely any cell in the entire human body, minus placenta. The reason we are more behind in embryonic stem cell (ESC) research than adult stem cell research (called “somatic” stem cell research), is because we’ve been experimenting with adult stem cells since the late 1950’s, and experimenting with ESCs since the mid 1990’s which later was halted in the late 2000’s by an unmentioned political party at the time. We’ve had barely any time to work with them, but the research has been phenomenal so far. Just last year we grew an entire ear in a laboratory using a 3D printer. Yes, a real human ear with human flesh. Don’t believe the lies that claim that ESC research doesn’t work. It does, and it is amazing. You can even youtube videos of  ESCs that have been made to become heart cells beat in a petri dish. So what is the difference between somatic and ESCs? The difference is an individual receiving a bone marrow transplant, a result of somatic stem cells, and possibly experiencing graft verses host or host verses graft (GVH or HVG, otherwise known as “rejection”), and an individual being given bone marrow with their own individual DNA. It means diabetic patients can have their OWN pancreas without the faulty gene re-grown in a pig and implanted. No more diabetes. It means children will be off of heart transplant lists while their own new heart grows and is implanted. It saves millions of lives from millions of different problems. It’s creepy, I know. But it is cool as hell. This is why ASL is working with embryos. It might be the only way to change the lives of the people who suffer from it. No medication can magically fix it. There is no cure. 

That’s why I’m quite tired of fellow “pro life” individuals freaking out over ESC research while embryos are getting consistently tossed in the trash and a variety of illnesses can’t be treated because of the lack of research. How backwards from a truly pro life perspective. You refusing to donate to ESC research is not going to magically stop embryos from getting tossed in the trash unless you specifically fight against IVF. But what about those potential lives that would have never exited without it? Until we grasp ahold of induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cell research, which sets adult stem cells back into an embryonic-like form, this is some of the best research we have so far. Like I said, maybe we won’t have to use them at all in the future. But enough of this jumping on the “lets refuse to donate to all of the evil scientists killing babies” bandwagon. There is reason ESCs are used, they are not going to be implanted in anyone, and it has the potential to save millions of lives.

Basic life of someone with a biology degree

Person: “I have this thing in my foot, can you tell me what it is?” Me: “I don’t know, ask a nurse.” Person: “can you do anything?” Me: *draws perfect hexagon*

I can’t stress the importance of practice tests for the MCAT. Concepts are way more important than details, so don’t waste your time studying for random things you don’t understand every aspect of. Chances are, it will never be asked, and you just wasted hours of precious study time going over a couple problems. You have 100 questions and 120 minutes to work with per section (on the 2014 and prior MCAT). So it’s roughly 1.2 minutes per question, which wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t for long passages you have to completely grasp every concept of in a couple minutes (they usually try to find a passage you know nothing about beforehand) and giant scientific notations to work with during many of the questions. With the passages included, you pretty much have less than 45 seconds. What they’re mainly trying to is stress the shit out of you. Really. 50 percent of it is knowing the concepts, and the other half is time management and not saying “fuck this, I’m becoming a stripper” halfway through the exam. It’s training yourself not to eat your pen (I broke mine with my teeth, really), because you have no idea what the hell the passage is asking. You do, they’re just purposely ensuring it’s hard to understand. Pretend it’s a marathon. Except one where Einstein beats you with a stick during it. It takes months of training, and endurance training is much more important than weight training with your leg muscles. You’ve got this.

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.

This is my new favourite story.

When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring. 

IT GOT SO MUCH BETTER