October 2011
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
—
Sylvia Plath | via atomos
This is me.
(via spaceships)
“love is like the inside of a kaleidoscope, constantly reassembling into new and exciting shapes, exploding from so many different sources – a cat, a man, a girl, a cupcake – it’s there if you let it be. In that way, maybe it’s not about finding purpose, but about decorating your pursuit of it.”
—http://oflittlemy.blogspot.com/2011/09/quarter-of-century.html (via chasingdisasters)
The Six Degrees of Wikipedia Game
- Go to Wikipedia.
- Click on or search for any article you want.
- When the article loads, click on the first legitimate link to another article in the first paragraph (the phonetic links don’t count).
- Repeat until you end up in the article for Philosophy.
- Say, “There’s no way in hell that’ll work again.” Spend the next two hours trying and failing to break the system.
“When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can’t eat money…”
—Greenpeace (via pehthestar)
“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (via loveyourchaos)
Scientists turns liver cells directly into neurons with new technique →
medicalxpress.com
(Medical Xpress) — Fully mature liver cells from laboratory mice have been transformed directly into functional neurons by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The switch was accomplished with the introduction of just three genes and did not require the cells to first enter a pluripotent state. It is the first time that cells have been shown to leapfrog from one fundamentally different tissue type to another.
The accomplishment extends previous research by the same group, which showed in 2009 that it is possible to directly transform mouse fibroblasts, or skin cells, into neurons. “These liver cells unambiguously cross tissue-type boundaries to become fully functional neural cells,” said Marius Wernig, MD, PhD assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. “Even more surprising, these cells also simultaneously silence their liver-gene expression profile. They are not hybrids; they are completely switching their identities.” The cells make the change without first becoming a pluripotent type of stem cell — a step long thought to be required for cells to acquire new identities.
