Strange Bodies

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Lui Hua suffers from a rare disease known as macrodactyly: his fingers are HUGE! He was operated in 2007 and the doctors measured his index finger at 12 inches long… A team of surgeons took out 11 pounds of flesh and bone over a 7 hour operation. The word "blood" is from the PIE root "bhlo-", which means "that which bursts out." This root is also related to "bloma," (flower), which also "blossoms" outward. [3] In November 2018 Shmuel Bialy of the University of Maryland and Avi Loeb of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian proposed that the nongravitational force could be caused by sunlight, which exerts a weak pressure on any object placed in its path. To experience enough radiation pressure that we could measure it, however, ‘Oumuamua would have to be either extraordinarily thin like a sheet of Mylar (the aluminized plastic used to make birthday balloons) or of very low density. Bialy and Loeb suggested that the object could be a “light sail,” a flat, sail-shaped vehicle sent from another civilization and designed to be pushed through space by starlight.

Have you ever felt taller in the morning? That's probably because you are! Over the day, the pressure caused by moving and walking impacts on your body, meaning that you lose height (about ) over the course of your waking hours. When you're asleep and resting, your spine has the chance to decompress. So if you want to look your tallest, make sure to measure yourself in the morning! 26. Your Biggest Muscle is Your ButtOverall, I loved this book and felt a real sense of connection and accomplishment when I finished it. I loved the analogies between books being the unloved, transcended and left-behind things and the vision of a dusty library at the end gave real context to this story and Dr Slopen’s journey. The real message though, books, the written word, and love, well, they never die. The awfulness of my position almost defies summary. I was detained two weeks ago after an incident that took place at the home of my wife and in the presence of my son, Lucius. I am now being held for assessment under Section 2 of the 1983 Mental Health Act. Under the terms of the section, Leonora is my nearest relative and has the right to request my discharge. However, as far as Leonora is concerned I have been dead for months. All she knows is that a total stranger burst into her house, berated her, and tearfully claimed to have usurped her dead husband's identity. There's little doubt that I would, in her position, have called the police as well. To improve our understanding of interstellar objects, we need to find more examples. Currently, with only two to go on, our grasp is limited. Fortunately, new developments in astronomy make it very likely that we will soon observe dozens of similar objects, and those discoveries will allow us to better pin down the statistics and to understand their physical properties. Most professional telescopes have very small fields of view, often only a few thousandths of the area of the full moon. But optics and large detectors are now capable of capturing the whole moon and more in a single shot and the entire sky in a night or two of continuous scanning. Powerful computers make it possible to compare successive all-sky scans to find moving objects, including interstellar interlopers.

Dr. Slopen (or should I say Theroux?) is at least self-aware, though of course he feels more smug than anything else about his "peculiarity."While it was always billed as a 'one and done', writer Paul Tomalin has spoken out once more to make clear that this remains his intention. During the unfolding of the story, we discover that Stephen Graham's enigmatic leader, Elias Mannix, has created a time-travelling loop that spans over 150 years.

Told through a combination of written forms including a psychiatrist’s case notes and the memoir of one of her patients, Strange Bodies explores some expansive themes, including identity, our thirst for immortality, scientific ethics and what really makes us the people we are. I added that it didn't seem all that crazy to ask an auditorium full of strangers to turn their mobile phones off, just a little unusual. I really, really like this premise. And in some ways, the book delivered what it promised. This book isn't an objectively bad book. And yet ... Forget occupying your kid with a book or screen. There is no better juvenile distraction than playing with your weenus. The extra skin on your elbow, known scientifically as olecranal skin or colloquially at the weenus, is basically nature’s Silly Puddy because there are fewer sensory neurons located there. That means you can keep kneading it all day long, and as hard as you want. That’s not to say that you can’t injure your elbow in other ways like playing tennis or overdoing it at the gym, but treating your extra skin like a stress ball is fair game. 3. Your Brain Is Fat If I could give this 2.5 stars, I would. Strange bodies, strange read. My god, it was a trudge to get through. The most annoying part was that it was JUST interesting enough to force me to keep reading it through to the end, but getting there was such a damn headache. There was just too much philosophy forced into the plot in such a heavy-handed way. Also, the main character, Nicholas Slopen, is a Samuel Johnson scholar. Who the hell is Samuel Johnson?!? Is this just a UK or maybe English major thing, and that is why I have never heard of this guy before? This is such a central point to the first half of the book, that it unfortunately kept me completely disassociated from so many parts of the book (plot, character, etc) and therefore made me care less. Gloss over -- next!Think of Hamlet," she went on. "What appalls him is not the terrible death of his father, but a guilty glimpse of the dark part of him that willed it ... Harbottle and you were not mentor and disciple, you were father and son, with all the shades of Sophocles that entail. You resented the joint authorship. The bulk of the work was done by you. And on a psychic level, you wished him dead. Long before Tilda Swann, you wanted to usurp his throne. But when he - as it were - took his own life, the guilt almost destroyed you." (p. 11X) Larry. " Medical Mystery: How Can Some People Hear Their Own Eyeballs Move?" Scientific America. September 1, 2011. Accessed: August 20, 2016. Besides teaching us about how planetary systems form, the discovery of interstellar visitors may have a bearing on one of the most fundamental mysteries in science: How did life on Earth begin? One idea, called panspermia, is that the seeds of ancient organisms hitched a ride on asteroids hailing from other systems. I like the theme. I like the twist. I like the last 20% of the book. But the rest made me groan aloud, literally, so many times that I can only give it three stars. Just before Hillinghead was pulled from his cell to be transported to prison, Maplewood informed him that Elias would intercept his carriage and kill him.

These sections of the novel are rather preposterous, tied up as they are in meditations on Russian mysticism and pseudo science. I think Theroux wrongly tries to straddle the fence here: he should either have opted for more mysticism and horror, or injected more scientific speculation and hence increased the thriller quotient. Semen normally contains 1-8 billion sperm per fluid ounces (140-300 million sperm per millimeter). [13] Kathleen. " 12 Famous Artists With Synesthesia." Mental Floss. November 10, 2016. Accessed: June 10, 2019. And yet, it nailed on the head one of my greatest pet peeves when it comes to first-person writing. Of all things, it chooses to narrate a modern story in the voice of a 19th-century British gentleman, with all its Latinate vocabulary, passive voice and nominalizations, tortuous sentences that turn at least three times before you see the period, and general melodramatic bemoaning about the transience of life and the pain of love. I am already groaning as I type this sentence.Scientists believe that having a baby changes the brain of new mothers, resulting in less gray matter in areas of the brain involved with responding to social signals and general processing. However, new research recently revealed that dads experience similar shrinkage in their brains in regions related to executive functioning and visual processing. If you've ever wondered why that baby is staring at you, it's probably not their fault! Babies blink way less than adults, who blink about 15 times a minute. Babies, on the other hand, only blink a few times. Once theory behind this is that babies need to take in more information than adults, as their eyes aren't fully functioning yet. Or maybe they're just really cool. 16. It's Good For You To Have Some Bacteria To me, Johnson's recognition of that ["reality" is merely a consensus] is part of his acute modernity as a moralist. I think he saw the relation between individual and collective delusion: the threat of madness to the human mind and the body politic. He knew that it was a small step from religious mania to religious wars. Madness is a part of that turn away from the real that Johnson was so vigilant in confronting wherever he found it - not because of his confidence in reason, but because he knew from his own experience how fragile the rule of reason is.