Theidlerhour - Bricolage Brain

A group of researchers have trained pigeons to identify malignant breast tissue in exchange for pigeon pellets. Here’s the real, not made up study.

This doesn’t mean hospitals will start employing pigeons. But it does suggest that studying pigeons could help us teach doctors how to process medical images. From the study:

Pigeons (Columba livia)—which share many visual system properties with humans—can serve as promising surrogate observers of medical images, a capability not previously documented. 

… The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception, and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.

Image credit: Levenson et. al.

A man came across a beach covered in starfish that had washed ashore.  Further along he saw a boy throwing the starfish back into the ocean.  “What are you doing?” he asked the boy.  The boy responded “The tide is going out and if the starfish don’t get back into ocean they will die.”

“But there are thousands of starfish on this beach!” the man said.  “You can’t possibly save them all.  Even if you worked all day, it wouldn’t make a difference.”

The boy picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean.  “It made a difference to that one.”

That starfish was Albert Einstein.

But “All Lives matter” doe…

Talk with people who make you see the world differently.

(via thategyptianqueen)

Imagine a droplet sitting on a rigid surface spontaneously bouncing up and then continuing to bounce higher after each impact, as if it were on a trampoline. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are two key features to making such a trampolining droplet–one is a superhydrophobic surface covered in an array of tiny micropillars and the other is very low air pressure. The low-pressure, low-humidity air around the droplet causes it to vaporize. Inside the micropillar array, this vapor can get trapped by viscosity instead of draining away. The result is an overpressurization beneath the droplet that, if it overcomes the drop’s adhesion, will cause it to leap upward. For more, check out the original research paper or the coverage at Chemistry World.  (Video credit and submission: T. Schutzius et al.)

We can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (via shrinemaidens)

Tonight please pray for all the innocent lives that will be lost in Syria due to the airstrike decision which has been agreed upon.

debate debate debate debate debate feeeeeevvvvveeeerrrrrrr