Benedetta Bonichi
Fantastical creatures, x-rayed combinations of human and animals, describe the work of Italian artist Benedetta Bonichi. You can see more of her amazing body of work in her website, To See in the Dark.
ThatScotsman
Benedetta Bonichi
Fantastical creatures, x-rayed combinations of human and animals, describe the work of Italian artist Benedetta Bonichi. You can see more of her amazing body of work in her website, To See in the Dark.
Photographer Tor-Ivar.
Do you understand how scary this picture is
god forbid a real person do real person things he wasnt just a robot who killed people jesus fucking christ
uh yeah its not like he killed and tortured six million jews or anything
Hold on just a tick. Listen, I’m Jewish, so I’m perfectly capable of understanding that what he did was just…..well, there are no words for it. But let’s not round it up to simply Jews that got killed. It was six million people that died in those camps, not just Jews. Did you know that homosexuals were sent there, too? Yeah, I’m sure you did. They had to wear special little symbols on their clothes. Do you know what it was? It was a pink triangle.
It was six million PEOPLE.
But you let that roll over in your mind for a while and you are going to forever see this man as a monster, but that’s not what he was. He was someone who thought he was truly doing something right for his nation, no matter how shitty he was doing it. Believe me when I say that I don’t like him. I really don’t. My grandfather’s brothers died in those camps, and my grandfather escaped to Spain, then to Mexico. He was lucky.
This is not a monster holding hands with a little girl.
This is Adolf Hitler, a man, holding hands with a little girl.
Yeah. It’s fucking scary. It really is. Do you know why?
It’s because you’re seeing that he wasn’t, in fact, a monster. You’re seeing in this picture that he was a man. He was a man, and that’s really the saddest part of it all.
As a History major who specializes in the history of early modern Europe, I’ve studied a lot of dictators in detail, not just Hitler. The number one mistake anyone could ever make in history is making the assumption that only inhuman monsters are capable of doing terrible things.
Stop dehumanizing Hitler just so you can reassure yourself that “normal” humans aren’t capable of doing bad things. Hitler liked children and dogs, he was a vegetarian and he cried like a little boy when his mother died. I’m not saying he was a good, innocent person, but when you stop attributing human characteristics to historical figures like Hitler, it’s how you overlook people just like him in real life, and it’s how people like him end up back in power.That’s the real truth: Human Beings are scarier than any ‘monsters’ out there because we’re all born blank slates and BECOME our legacy.
This is the best post I’ve seen in a while.
(Source: satanel)
Dinosaur bone cells from the Morrison Formation in Utah that have been petrified with silica and quartz crystals. The Morrison Formation features dinosaur fossils dating back to the Late Jurassic period.
Image by Douglas Moore, University of Wisconsin.
In case it ever comes up.
Bridging the Zap
When very high voltages are applied to water in two adjacent beakers, they spontaneously form a “water bridge”. It’s a phenomena that, despite being known for more than 100 years, is not completely understood to this day. It is thought that the extreme voltages, in the thousands of volts, are able to pull the positive and negative charges of the water apart in a way that the thread can overcome gravity.
From this video. Read more here.
(via Science-Based Life)
From the Department of Awesome Natural Wonders comes this impressive geological formation - an enormous rock perfectly balanced atop a smooth mound. Located deep inside the forests of Finland, the balancing rock is called Kummakivi:
“There is still no scientific explanation for how the rock, whose given name translates as ‘strange rock’ in Finnish, has wound up in such a perplexing position.”
However it happened, it’s a pretty awesome sight. But we don’t recommend standing under it for too long.
[via My Modern Metropolis]
LAWS OF NATURE
Why Do We Blink So Much?
Blinking is like breathing. Try not to do it and you can succeed for a while, but eventually you have to give in (seriously, I dare you to not blink while reading this). It’s really an oddly ubiquitous behavior. Blinking is definitely one of those things that starts to weird you out the more you think about it: Why the heck would we evolve to manually extend two opaque flaps of skin over our eyeballs an average of fifteen times every minute?
The obvious answer is to lubricate our eyes. But lots of creatures have found ways to do that without pulling the blinds closed and descending into darkness for a tenth of a second. Snakes and fish have different types of non-moving clear disks over their eyes. Alligators and crocodiles have a third, translucent eyelid that they use when underwater and to wipe debris. Most geckos just lick their eyes clean. This suggests our eyelid blinking might serve an additional purpose.
Some new research claims that blinking may serve as a temporary mental resting period. By hooking people up to brain imaging machinery while they watched Mr. Bean episodes (who has huge eyes, incidentally), the scientists saw brain activity spike in the same regions that control daydreaming and relaxed, introspective thought. They didn’t see the activity when they simply inserted a quick black frame, showing that closing the eyes signals a certain brain region to send a “relaxing” wave through the rest of your head.
Earlier in 2012, a different team of researchers showed that closing one’s eyes engaged brain waves that are key to “wakeful rest”, and that having your eyes open in the dark was not enough to chill your brain out. Any time our eyes are open we can’t seem to truly relax, even if we can’t see anything. Think about how this relates to meditation, creative daydreaming and staring at bright smartphone screens before we try to sleep.
To me, it seems like we probably evolved the need to blink for the purposes of having clean eyes, and the relaxation and brain wave effects came later to respond to those patterns. Let me just close my eyes and think about that scenario for a minute …
(via Surprising Science)
Tuberculosis has declined globally over the past decade, but drug-resistant forms of the bacteria have emerged around the world.
This type of TB is super tough to treat. It often requires two years of strong antibiotics, which have horrible side-effects, like hearing loss. Even then, there’s no guarantee of a cure.
Nature’s Leigh Phillips explains how the formidable bug rose up in Russia and Eastern Europe:
Experts agree that the biggest driver for the growth in drug-resistant TB has been the deterioration in some countries’ health-care infrastructures, including TB programmes, since the 1990s — particularly in the former Soviet bloc…In a stroke of bad luck, the virulent and often drug-resistant ‘Beijing’ strain of TB, identified in 1995 in China, swept through Russia and eastern Europe just as the region’s public-health provision was being dismantled.
Read more in Phillip’s feature article on drug-resistant TB.
Map by Nature.
Never-Before-Seen Stage of Planet Birth Revealed
Astronomers studying a newborn star have caught a detailed glimpse of planets forming around it, revealing a never-before seen stage of planetary evolution.
Large gas giant planets appear to be clearing a gap in the disk of material surrounding the star, and using gravity to channel material across the gap to the interior, helping the star to grow. Theoretical simulations have predicted such bridges between outer and inner portions of disks surrounding stars, but none have been directly observed until now.
t8el:
Shark swallows another shark, or more precisely, “a tasseled wobbegong halfway through swallowing a brownbanded bamboo shark”. Daniela Ceccarelli and David Williamson from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in the National Geographic.
