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An experimentally produced Neolithic arrowhead. Produced on Irish flint by the experimental knapping group at University College Dublin, Ireland. Bound with sinew and glued with experimentally produced pine pitch glue.

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Celebrated artist Richard Diebenkorn’s 10 rules for beginning a painting — a brilliant checklist for beginning any creative project.

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Mary Ross Ellingson: Insightful but Invisible

Mary Ellingson (1906-1993), nee Ross, was an archaeologist who made important contributions to the study of ancient Greek terracotta figurines but who never received credit for her work.  A graduate in classics from the University of Alberta, Ellingson came to Johns Hopkins University to study under David Robinson in 1930.  Robinson was preparing for his second season of excavation at the Greek site of Olynthos and asked Ellingson to join the staff the following year.  Robinson was one of the first classical archaeologists to excavate houses and to search for evidence of Greek private life; the 14 Excavations at Olynthus are his legacy.  Ellingson supervised the excavations of several houses and a cemetery managing up to 60 Greek workmen at a time.  She also kept her own records, independent of the excavation records, of all the terracotta figurines discovered during the season.  Her master’s thesis is unusual for its day in that in addition to the typical chronological catalog of figurines, Ellingson included an analysis of their find spots.  Prior to her work it was believed the figurines were for use in cemeteries or temples; Ellingson was able to demonstrate that the ancient Greeks used them in household shrines, as domestic decorations, and even as toys.  Her dissertation was an expansion of her master’s thesis to include terracotta figurines found in other seasons at Olynthos and also at other sites in northern Greece and the Balkans.  Shortly after receiving her PhD in classical archaeology from Johns Hopkins, Ellingson married and, although she tried to publish her work, the disruptions of World War II and motherhood combined to make sure she never achieved her goal.

Ellingson never received credit for her work.  Without seeking her permission or mentioning her contribution, Robinson published her master’s thesis as volume VII in the Excavations at Olynthus series and her dissertation as the first chapter and a half of volume XIV.  Reviewers praised Robinson’s insights in both works, not realizing he had not written them.  Ellingson returned to academia in the 1960s becoming a full professor at the University of Evansville and retiring in 1974.  She never revealed the secret of her contributions to the Excavations at Olynthus series to anyone in the field.

Post submitted by Alan Kaiser

Edited by Brenna

More Information:

Kaiser, Alan.  2014.  Archaeology, Sexism, and Scandal.  The Long-Suppressed Story of One Woman’s Discoveries and the Man Who Stole Credit for Them.  Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield.*

Olynthus 1931:  The Mary Ross Ellingson Photo Archive

*Psst…Read the accompanying book review on trowelblazers.com

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This is a nanoinjector:

a tiny machine that can inject egg cells like this one with DNA without causing them harm. If you think threading a needle can be fiddly, trying to inject DNA into a single human cell using a syringe (by hand!) is very difficult indeed! 

Before machines like these, about 40% of egg cells receiving DNA from a syringe would be destroyed. 

The way a nanoinjector works is very clever; there’s no ‘squeeze’ like that of a syringe. Instead, it uses an electrical charge on the lance to attract DNA, and when the point is inside the egg the charge is reversed and the DNA is released within. Doing so puts very little pressure on the egg and it is more likely to survive.

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Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (via blunt-science)

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Mind = blown.

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We asked for your nominations for unsung women in science – and you did not disappoint.

More coming soon!

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Genus Lybia

(Boxer Crabs)

also known as pom-pom crabs, Boxer Crabs are a genus of small crabs in the family Xanthidae (mud crabs). the name pom-pom/or boxer comes from the mutualism that they hold with sea anemones, in which they hold the cnidarian in their claws and use them for defense, and in turn the sea anemone gets more food by moving around.

Phylogeny

Animalia-Arhtropoda-Crustacea-Malacostraca-Decapoda-Branchyura-Xanthidae-Lybia

Source,Source

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A friendly reminder that you never know what’s resting just beneath your feet…

First image via Evgenia Arbugaeva for National Geographic (unedited). Second image a fun photoshop for reference.

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Astronomy Photo of the Day: 3/29/15 — NGC 5253

This galaxy may not look like much, and by galactic standards, it totally isn’t—that’s not to say it doesn’t have interesting qualities. Specifically, as strange as it probably sounds, it’s not notable for what we can see, but what we can not.

You see, the galaxy—called NGC 5253—is a dwarf galaxy found within the constellation of Centaurus. Buried within its core is a huge gaseous formation, known as a supernebula. In the center lies a hot cluster of stars that, when combined, shine one billion times brighter than the Sun, only that light is hidden almost entirely by the gaseous filaments surrounding the cluster.

Presently, around 1,000,000 stars are being forged within these dusty, gaseous filaments—an impressive number given the small galaxy’s size. Even more impressive is the fact that the stars are so young—around 3 million years old—the gas and dust envelope—all 15,000 solar masses of it—hasn’t yet dispersed.

Learn more here: http://bit.ly/1EQeJ1O

Image Credit: J. L. Turner et al.

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Crossing fingers can reduce feelings of pain

How you feel pain is affected by where sources of pain are in relation to each other, and so crossing your fingers can change what you feel on a single finger, finds new UCL research.

The research, published in Current Biology, used a variation on an established pain experiment, known as the “thermal grill illusion”. In the thermal grill illusion, a pattern of warm-cold-warm temperatures applied to the index, middle and ring finger respectively causes a paradoxical, sometimes painful, sensation of burning heat on the middle finger - even though this finger is actually presented with a cold stimulus.

"The thermal grill is a useful component in our scientific understanding of pain," says Angela Marotta (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), co-lead author in the research, "It uses a precisely-controlled stimulus to activate the brain’s pain systems. This can certainly feel painful, but doesn’t actually involve any tissue damage."

The thermal grill produces burning heat sensations because of a three-way interaction between the nerve pathways that tell the brain about warmth, cold and pain. The warm temperature on the ring and index fingers blocks the brain activity that would normally be driven by the cold temperature on the middle finger.

"Cold normally inhibits pain, so inhibiting the input from the cold stimulus produces an increase in pain signals," explains co-lead author Dr Elisa Ferrè (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "It’s like two minuses making a plus."

The researchers showed that this interaction was based on the spatial arrangement of the fingers. When the middle finger was crossed over the index finger, the paradoxical sensation of burning heat on the middle finger was reduced.

However, if the index finger was cooled and the middle and ring fingers were warmed, the burning heat sensation was now increased when the middle finger was crossed over the index finger.

"Our results showed that a simple spatial pattern determined the burning heat sensation," says Dr Ferrè. "When the cold finger was positioned in between the two warm fingers, it felt burningly hot. When the cold finger was moved to an outside position, the burning sensation was reduced. The brain seemed to use the spatial arrangement of all three stimuli to produce the burning heat sensation on just one finger."

"Interactions like these may contribute to the astonishing variability of pain," says senior author Professor Patrick Haggard (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "Many people suffer from chronic pain, and the level of pain experienced can be higher than would be expected from actual tissue damage. Our research is basic laboratory science, but it raises the interesting possibility that pain levels could be manipulated by applying additional stimuli, and by moving one part of the body relative to others. Changing the spatial pattern of interacting inputs could have an effect on the brain pathways that underlie pain perception."

(Image credit)

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El próximo 24 de abril se cumplen 25 años del lanzamiento del Telescopio Espacial Hubble. He aquí una de sus tantas maravillosas fotografías tomadas.

V838 Monocerotis

Es una estrella variable roja en la Constelación Monoceros. Distancia Aproximada: 20,000 años luz del Sol. Temperatura Superficial: 3,270 K Radio: 264,300,000 km (380 R☉) Magnitud: 15.74

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if i ever get killed i hope you all assume it’s because i knew too much about aliens

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Earliest humans had diverse range of body types, just as we do today

One of the dominant theories of our evolution is that our genus, Homo, evolved from small-bodied early humans to become the taller, heavier and longer legged Homo erectus that was able to migrate beyond Africa and colonize Eurasia. While we know that small-bodied Homo erectus - averaging less than five foot (152cm) and under 50kg - were living in Georgia in southern Europe by 1.77 million years ago, the timing and geographic origin of the larger body size that we associate with modern humans has, until now, remained unresolved.

But a joint study by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Tübingen (Germany), published today in the Journal of Human Evolution, has now shown that the main increase in body size occurred tens of thousands of years after Homo erectus left Africa, and primarily in the Koobi Fora region of Kenya. Read more.