So just how impossible are the odds of you coming into being? According to the infographic below -which is based on the calculations made by Dr. Ali Binazir, from Harvard University- they are kind of like zero, nil, nada. You are either a miracle or a huge cosmological oddity. You should not be here.
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Guest post by Alexis Bonari - Richard Hoover, a scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama has published a paper in the Journal of Cosmology claiming to have found the fossilized remains of microbes within a rare meteorite. I’m no biologist, but looking at the pictures of the squiggly little structures he’s found does look like microbes. Certainly his claims have been met with a healthy bit of skepticism, and for good reason, your case needs to be nothing short of bulletproof to prove such a claim.
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We spend years of our lives feeling overwhelmed by the puny events that take place in it, worrying about problems at work, yesterday’s argument with your wife or the piling bills on the kitchen table.
Puny?! Who said they were puny?
Oh… I did?
Well… I meant puny within the greater scheme of things.
We live our short existence trapped in this organic and perennial carcass only gifted with our “evolved(?!)” minds -which most times are the source of our sorrows-.
When was the last time you took a step back to put things in perspective. How far back did you go?
If you ever need time off from your present, either because your own reality has overloaded you or you simply have the time to do it, take this mental tour to the perspective-most point known to mankind:
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A protein was found, that just as a pencil eraser, is able to forever delete traumatic events from our minds. It was discovered by scientists from John Hopkins University through experiments with rats. The results promise to one day fight PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) caused by war, rape and other traumatic events.
The study was published by Science Express, which publishes brealthroughs before they reach their print version in Science Magazine.
In order to verify the validity of the discovery, researchers scared rats with a loud noise and after eliminating the afforementioned protein the rats no longer associated the noise to fear. The rats had forgotten the terror that the sound initially generated.
The protein is located in the amygdala -a group of neural nuclei located in the depth of the temporal lobes of the brain-, an area responsible, among other things, for conditioning to fear both in humans and animals. The study proved that these proteins can be removed from the nerve cells.
The idea is to delete this proteins and weaken the connections with the trauma, erasing the memory itself. This study opens the possiblility of one day manipulating memories with drugs destined to improve cognitive therapies for these type of ailments.
This discovery opens more than a few interrogants and concerns.
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Lately, finding extra-solar planets has become a routine. The count of planets outside our solar system goes up to 592 (September 2010), but what sets this new discovery aside is the likelihood of this planet to harbor water and life.
The planet, called Gliese 581g, orbits a red dwarf 1/3 of ...
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No, I’m not talking about my place. I’m talking about real black holes. What you are about to read, if you dare stick around what could be a very boring post, is no science fiction.
One of the biggest mysteries of our times is what happens inside a black hole. According ...
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MRSA is a bacteria that breeds in hospitals, nursing homes and residential treatment facilities. Every year 880.000 people in the US become infected and 5% of them die -between 20,000 - 40,000-. Per year, MRSA infections generate losses for $8 billion US dollars to both the private sector and government. ...
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The planet, orbiting a star 85% the size of our Sun, was detected in April of 2008 and it’s the first ever to be directly photographed. Its solar system is very young -5 million years old- compared to the 4.600 million years of our teenage solar system (the Universe is approximately ...
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Greenland is moving up at a pace of 1 inch per year. The ice is melting so fast that the island is rising noticeably as the weight is lifted.
Greenland used to be white
Even though the ice is 2km (1.2 miles) thick in some places, its formerly ubiquitous ice cap is shrinking ...
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Who said that Biology and Computer Science have nothing in common? Craig Venter, the biologist who led the effort to map the human genome, has reported that the first cell controlled entirely by man-made genetic instructions had been produced.
With four bottles of chemicals and a computer, Dr. Venter’s team coded ...
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You may have heard stories of people who, after recovering from a life-threatening injury or condition, have experienced extra-corporeal experiences (leaving owns body), seen a tunnel of light, dead family members and even angels. These kind of events have been reported for years all around the world.
According to a recent ...
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People with Alzheimer’s disease often have trouble remembering recent events but are able to recall distant memories. This is due to the damage produced to the hippocampus, a seahorse shaped structure located in the core of the brain. This area is usually the first to be affected by Alzheimer, which ...
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I was listening to NPR (National Public Radio) on my way to work yesterday and heard a story that caught my attention. Did you ever think that magnets and morality could be related? According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a person’s moral ...
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Geologists from the University of Leicester -including a Nobel prize-winner- suggest that the Earth has entered a new age of geological time. They’ve called it the Anthropocene Epoch (New Man Epoch). The paper has been published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal (link). They add that the dawning of this ...
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Chile’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake shook the whole continent and tilted Earth’s axis thus making our days shorter. Now it’s moving us.
The city of Concepcion (Chile’s second largest) moved at least 10 ft (3 m) to the West. Other parts of the continent such as Fortaleza (Brazil’s North-East) and the Falkland Islands. Buenos ...
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By Maria Gonzalez.- Cancer is a sort of disease which can be described by the uncontrolled growth of a group of unusual cells within the body. This uncontrolled growth of cells can then cause death if left untreated. Thus, you have to make sure to immediately treat your cancer if ...
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In 1996, I was almost finishing high school and we were still concerned about the Ozone hole. Global Warming “did not exist” back then. We were in Biology class discussing cancer. I remember saying that I knew it was an uncontrolled growth of a group of cells product of a maladaptive ...
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![Post image for You Shouldn’t Exist, Statistically Speaking [Infographic]](http://fernandotarnogol.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/abstract_lights.jpg)
