I Come To You In Pieces

I'm Jasper and I blog about Criminal Minds, social justice and other crap. I wear queer-tinted glasses and react to most things with gifs.

I obsessively tag things, so check my link/tag page.

"weird shit happens here" - Sophie

ussawesome:

kvothetheraving:

The needle and syringe are icons of modern medicine.

But a device developed at MIT to squirt medicines quickly and pretty much painlessly through the skin suggests that the future of medicine could be needle-free.

The idea is to shoot an extremely thin, extremely fast jet of medicine straight through skin and into muscle. “It’s sort of like a laser beam,” project leader and mechanical engineering professor Ian Hunter tells Shots.



To silence her stubborn hiccups during the summer of 2010, Mallory Kievman tried swallowing saltwater, making herself gag, eating a spoonful of sugar, sipping pickle juice and drinking a glass of water upside-down. Nearly two years and 100 attempted folk remedies later, the 13-year-old is preparing to lead a team of M.B.A. students from the University of Connecticut in building a company that can bring her invention — Hiccupops, or hiccup-stopping lollipops — to market this summer.


staceythinx:

Japanese artist Mika Aoki uses the ethereal quality of glass to get us to look differently at subjects like viruses, reproduction and the origins of life.


aamukherjee:

expose-the-light:

Ingredients of life

Illustrations of Chemical compounds by Rex


❝

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

❞
(——

Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral” (source: npr)

This is one of the most lovely and comforting things I’ve ever read or heard about death and grieving, and I have been to more funerals than I can remember.

(via anachronistique)

(Source: lonelyheartsdeathmetal)

)


atheiststardust: Good analogy for explaining evolution.

atheiststardust:

Good analogy for explaining evolution.


tumblrpigeon: the-star-stuff: Neil deGrasse Tyson is behind the only major technical change in theTitanic re-release It took James Cameron 60 weeks to prepare Titanic for its rerelease, but apart from remastering the original at 4k resolution and converting it to stereoscopic 3D, nothing about the movie has really changed. Well, almost nothing. According to Cameron: “Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year [April 15, at 4:20 am], in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen.” “And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie.’” So Tyson did just that, and Cameron re-shot the scene. According to the Telegraph , it is the only major technical change in the film’s re-release. Like a boss

tumblrpigeon:

the-star-stuff:

Neil deGrasse Tyson is behind the only major technical change in theTitanic re-release

It took James Cameron 60 weeks to prepare Titanic for its rerelease, but apart from remastering the original at 4k resolution and converting it to stereoscopic 3D, nothing about the movie has really changed.

Well, almost nothing.

According to Cameron: “Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year [April 15, at 4:20 am], in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen.”

“And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie.’”

So Tyson did just that, and Cameron re-shot the scene. According to the Telegraph , it is the only major technical change in the film’s re-release.

Like a boss


A win! The Discovery Channel came under plenty of heat when news reports indicated its decision not to air “On Thin Ice,” the final episode of the Frozen Planet focused on climate change. Instead, Discovery planned to re-edit the highly-anticipated nature documentary to 6 parts, meaning U.S. viewers would miss out on the undeniable impact of the full, dedicated episode displaying the ways in which climate change is devastating the Earth’s polar regions.

Less than 48 hours after more than 75,000 people signed Claudia Abbott-Barish’s petition on Change.org, Discovery Channel announced that it has decided to air the full seventh climate episode.

“I am so completely bowled over by the support, more so than the actual outcome, which now seems almost secondary to the experience of such speedy mass-mobilization. Thank you everyone! Well done!,” said Claudia Abbott-Barish.

Wow. I had no idea this was happening. I’m watching this ep right now in the UK, where the final ep all about climate change was actually advertised as a specific hook for the series.


On my re-blog of drinking while pregnant…

esmeweatherwax:

cabell:

maevele:

alexandraerin:

momsstheword:

My comments have of course been re-blogged a few times already, and more than one irate person has suggested I get a fucking clue and produce some hard evidence. Well, here’s at least one link:

http://www.nofas.org/FASDMythsPerpetuatedbyMediaCoverage.aspx

In addition, I never said ONE drink causes FAS. I really wish people would read more thouroughly. I said that there is always a RISK involved evertytime you drink while pregnant. And I really, really don’t get why when there is objection to something like drinking, smoking cigarettes, or pot while pregnant, proponents of it will cite “fear-mongering” or other women being judgemental.

Also, I encourage you to show me YOUR evidence that a few drinks “won’t hurt” or that it is actually GOOD for your baby. Please. I’m dying to read it.

No Wikipedia, please. (-:

What the heck do you imagine pregnant women have done in the places throughout history and geography where alcohol was the easiest way to make water safe to drink?

You are being judgmental. That’s all this is. It’s not concern for anybody, it’s concern for the relative highness of your horse.

Link to all the single issue advocacy pages you want, that’s not evidence and it has no bearing on the central question here, which is: is this your business or isn’t it? If it isn’t, then let’s forget whether you’re “allowed” to have an opinion or not… why are you sharing it? 

If you can’t restrain yourself from throwing out an example of a real person you know and her choices and how her choices are OMGSOWRONG, then clearly you do think it’s your business.

As someone who has been pregnant and screw you, I totally drank beer, I just want to say  IF IT ISN’T YOUR BODY, SHUT THE FUCK ON UP. 

Here is a 2011 study showing that at five years of age, children born to people who drank “lightly” (no more than two drinks per occasion, no more than twice per week) during pregnancy actually performed better on cognitive and behavioral tests than children born to people who did not drink at all during pregnancy: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20924051

This study actually shows that light-to-moderate drinking (in this case defined as between 3-10 drinks per week) during pregnancy was associated with measures of positive behavior up to 14 years of age: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20528867

This study shows that light-to-moderate drinking during pregnancy (up to 6 drinks per week in this case) has no negative impact on fetal growth and may actually be associated with slightly greater fetal growth compared to complete cessation of drinking during pregnancy (so no risk of low birth weight or preterm birth): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20385669

This is a meta-study (an analysis of numerous other studies), finding that moderate drinking (in THIS case, defined as anywhere from 3 to 12 drinks a week) in the first trimester has no effect on the prevalence of fetal malformations (the study only looks at the first trimester): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9511170

I researched this extensively when I got pregnant.  There does seem to be some good evidence that even light drinking MAY increase the risk of miscarriage in the first trimester (this is still a bit dodgy, especially since there are a lot of people who don’t know they’re pregnant until halfway through the first trimester or even later ); however, if one doesn’t miscarry, light-to-moderate alcohol consumption is not associated with any lasting defects or problems.  And from the second trimester on, there is really no evidence that, say, fewer than six drinks a week (and no more than two drinks on any given occasion) is harmful to fetal development.

Fetal alcohol syndrome, which is what most people envision when they think about drinking during pregnancy, takes a HELL of a lot more than one drink.  FAS is caused by the equivalent of NINE DRINKS A DAY during the second trimester.  It entirely affects infants born to alcoholics.  Maternal malnutrition will become an issue long before there is risk of FAS, because people drinking heavily on a daily basis are unlikely to be getting calories from many other sources.

I remember an episode of Law & Order SVU fucking this up, apparently one little drink can cause FAS! Eh no.