Monks In Masks Perform During The Lamaist Devil Dance Ceremony At Tsurpu Monastery, About 70 Kilometers

Chain Reaction.

Everyone knows that a line of standing dominos creates a fun chain reaction when you knock the first one over; but did you know you can use increasingly larger dominos and get the same result? 

The setup.

Professor Stephen Morris knocks over a 1-meter tall domino that weighs over 100 pounds by starting with a 5mm high by 1mm thick domino.He uses a size ratio of 1.5, meaning each domino is one and a half times larger than the last one. This is the generally accepted maximum ratio that dominos can have to successfully knock each other over.

Hans Van Leeuwen of Leiden University in the Netherlands, published a paper online showing that, theoretically, you could have a size ratio of up to two. But that’s in an ideal (and probably unrealistic) situation.

Fun fact.

There are 13 dominoes in this sequence. If Professor Morris used 29 dominoes in total, with the next one always being 1.5x larger, the last domino would be the height of the Empire State Building.

Source: Physics Buzz.

These Lizards Are Full of Green Blood That Should Kill Them

They somehow seem to have evolved this weird trait several times.

“Animal blood comes in a rainbow of hues because of the varying chemistry of the molecules it uses to carry oxygen. Humans use hemoglobin, whose iron content imparts a crimson color to our red blood cells. Octopuses, lobsters, and horseshoe crabs use hemocyanin, which has copper instead of iron, and is blue instead of red—that’s why these creatures bleed blue. Other related molecules are responsible for the violet blood of some marine worms, and the green blood of leeches. But the green-blooded lizards use good old hemoglobin. Their red blood cells are, well, red. Their green has a stranger origin: Biliverdin.

They should be dead. Biliverdin can damage DNA, kill cells, and destroy neurons. And yet, the lizards have the highest levels of biliverdin ever seen in an animal. Their blood contains up to 20 times more of it than the highest concentration ever recorded in a human—an amount that proved to be fatal. And yet, not only are the lizards still alive, they’re not even jaundiced. How do they tolerate the chemical? Why did they evolve such high levels of biliverdin in the first place? And why, as Austin’s colleague Zachary Rodriguez has just discovered, did they do so on several occasions?”

Source: TheAtlantic

Fun fact: Egyptian gods do not have ‘animal heads’. The depictions of gods are meant to contain a duality, as is important in Egyptian Religion (life/death, red land/black land, chaos/order, human/animal). So when you see, say, Anubis with a man’s body and a Jackal head it represents both his human form and his Jackal form, meaning he might appear in either form. But never as a human with a Jackal head. That is only something you’d see on temple walls for the duality aspect.

Forensic Facial Reconstruction - Online Course

Learn about the forensic technique of facial reconstruction from the experts involved in a real crime case.

One of you guys messaged this in today. Thank you again. 

A short (FREE) two-week course on facial reconstruction!

This is where Art meets Forensic Science and Anthropology.

Desert Rain Frog Breviceps macrops

Stand Still, Stay Silent page 195; the differences between the major Scandanavian languages being illustrated by cats! On a related note, I’m totally Swedish cat.

Shedding light on our understanding of the universe.

Until recently, gravitational fields were only known to be generated near black holes, hundreds of light years away. But researchers at IBM’s Zurich lab successfully recreated one right here on Earth. While still theoretical, their findings have the potential to seriously change how we generate and conserve energy, which makes black holes look a little bit brighter.

See how they did it ->