02 4 / 2013
i know stuff i just dont know how to properly phrase it and that makes me so mad
(via theactofprocrastinating)
29 3 / 2013
29 3 / 2013
Dawes and Nothing But Nets adjust a bed net in the pediatric ward of the health clinic at Gihembe Refugee Camp, north of Kigali, Rwanda. Every 60 seconds a child dies from malaria and it doesn’t have to be this way (photo credit: Stuart Ramson/ Insider Images for UN Foundation)
(via auntless)
29 3 / 2013
"Somebody loves you if they don’t mind the quiet. They don’t mind running errands with you or cleaning your apartment while blasting some annoying music. There’s no pressure, no need to fill the silences. You know how with some of your friends there needs to be some sort of activity for you to hang out? You don’t feel comfortable just shooting the shit and watching bad reality TV with them. You need something that will keep the both of you busy to ensure there won’t be a void. That’s not love. That’s “Hey babe! I like you okay. Do you wanna grab lunch? I think we have enough to talk about to fill two hours!” It’s a damn dream when you find someone you can do nothing with. Whether you’re skydiving together or sitting at home and doing different things, it’s always comfortable. That is fucking love."
09 1 / 2013
Wrinkles Help Fingers Get a Grip
—
A long soak in the tub can wreak havoc on your fingertips, transforming your smooth digits into wrinkly eyesores. But this rumply skin may actually serve a purpose, according to a new study. It helps us get a stronger grip on slippery objects, especially those underwater.
Scientists long thought that wrinkly fingers were caused by osmosis—swelling of the outer layer of the skin as water seeped into cells. But experiments conducted in the past few years—as well as observations that water-induced wrinkles don’t form on the tips of previously severed but subsequently reattached fingers—suggest that the wrinkles are instead produced by nerves that automatically trigger constriction of the blood vessels beneath the skin, reducing the volume of the tissues there.
Having something under the direct control of a nerve, even an involuntary one, suggests it serves an evolutionary purpose. But that begged the question of what function finger wrinkles have. In 2011, a team of neuroscientists proposed that the folds improved our grip on wet or submerged objects, just as the treads on tires help improve traction. “That seemed like a clever hypothesis that would be easy to test,” says Tom Smulders, an evolutionary biologist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.
So, he and his colleagues designed an experiment where volunteers picked up 45 submerged objects such as glass marbles and lead fishing weights from a bin one at a time with their right hand, passed them through a postage stamp-sized hole in a barrier to their left hand, and then dropped them through another hole into a box. When test subjects had wrinkly fingertips—induced by soaking their hands in 40°C water for 30 minutes—they completed the task about 12% faster than they had when their fingers hadn’t been soaked, the team reports online today in Biology Letters. When performing the same task with dry objects, wrinkly fingertips didn’t provide a performance advantage.
The team’s results are “very interesting,” says Xi Chen, a biomechanical engineer at Columbia University who has analyzed how the skin on fingertips buckles when vasoconstriction causes underlying tissues to shrink. “They show that the wrinkles have a biological function.”
(via sciencemag)
