Tag: video
Sunday, April 7, 2013
statues also die
so now?
the ballad of lucy jordan
Sunday Poem
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
.
William Shakespeare
“In 2001 or 2002, guitarist and singer David Gilmour of Pink Floyd recorded a musical interpretation of William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18″ at his home studio aboard the historic, 90-foot houseboat the Astoria. This video of Gilmour singing the sonnet was released as an extra on the 2002 DVD David Gilmour in Concert, but the song itself is connected with When Love Speaks, a 2002 benefit album for London’s Royal Academy for the Dramatic Arts.”
from openculture.com
Saturday, April 6, 2013
3-D Printer Makes Synthetic Tissues from Watery Drops
Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science:
In the University of Oxford, Gabriel Villar has created a 3-D printer with a difference. While most such printers create three-dimensional objects by laying down metals or plastics in thin layers, this one prints in watery droplets. And rather than making dolls or artworks or replica dinosaur skulls, it fashions the droplets into something a bit like living tissue.
Each of your cells, whether it’s a neuron or muscle cell, is basically a ball of liquid encased by a membrane. The membrane is made from fat-like molecules called lipids, which line up next to one another to create two layers. And that’s exactly what Villar’s 3-D printer makes—balls of liquid encased by a double-layer of lipids.
Other scientists have already created 3-D printers that spit out human cellsin the shape of living tissues, and some have even created facsimiles of entire organs. But Hagan Bayley, who led Villar’s study, thinks that there’s value in creating tissues that look and behave like living ones, but that don’t actually contain any cells. They would probably be cheaper and without any genetic material, you don’t have to worry about controlling growth or division.
The team’s printer has two nozzles that exude incredibly small droplets, each one just 65 picolitres—65 billionths of a millilitre—in volume. The nozzles “print” the drops into oil at the rate of one per second, laying them down with extreme precision. As each drop settles, it picks up a layer of lipids from the surrounding oil, and the layers of neighbouring drops unite to create a double-layered membrane, just like in our cells.
Friday, April 5, 2013
Nelson Mandela – Retirement Speech: “Don’t call me, I’ll call you”
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Michael Caine does Michael Caine
Sunday, March 31, 2013
“Accidental” by RAVI SHAVI
This is a band to follow. Remember, you saw 'em first on 3QD!
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Steven Pinker – Is There Too Much Morality?
A wide-ranging and interesting interview with Pinker. If you want to skip the long intro and go straight to the interview proper, it begins at 5:50.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
the mechanical paradise
train for ill
things fall apart
Friday, March 22, 2013
Chinua Achebe interviewed by K. Anthony Appiah in 2012
[Thanks to Mira Kamdar.]
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite
[Thanks to Zaneb Khan Beams.]
The First Step Toward Mapping Human Thoughts
Robert Gonzalez in io9:
Today we are closer than ever to understanding the biological basis of human thought. In a major first for neuroscience, researchers have produced an image showing almost an entire vertebrate brain at work — down to the level of individual neurons. Soon we'll have a human brain “activity map” which reveals how electrical impulses in the brain correlate to thought patterns, biological processes, and more.
The neurons in question belong to a zebrafish embryo, and the researchers come from HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus. In the video up top, the activity of individual neurons appear as flashes, detonating across the fish's entire larval brain. And while the brain of a zebrafish only contains about 100,000 neurons (compared to the tens of billions in the human brain), it represents an important step along the path to creating a Brain Activity Map for us apes, a project into which the Obama administration may soon funnel billions of dollars.
According to findings published in the latest issue of Nature Methods, microscopist Phillip Keller and neurobiologist Misha Ahrens have modified an existing imaging technique (called light sheet microscopy) in such a way that enables them to record neuronal activity from the entire volume of the zebrafish's brain. They did this while the embryo was alive, and with a temporal resolution of 0.8 Hz (meaning they were recording activity about once every second). All told, Keller and Ahrens were able to capture “more than 80% of all neurons at single-cell resolution.“
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Arundhati Roy interviewed on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion
Monday, March 18, 2013
Little Scenes From My Lovely Little Life
I was walking in Vahrn a couple of days ago when I passed some strawberry fields covered in plastic sheets that looked like a plastic ocean with waves as it was a very windy day. I stopped for a minute to make this crappy video. (The real thing looked and sounded much more impressive than in the video.)
And today I was riding my bike back from the gym after a session with my sadistic (not really!) personal trainer (who is a kick boxer from Slovakia!) when I decided to make this little video. (Really, the only good thing about this video is the music: David Byrne and Brian Eno's “Strange Overtones”.)