An Illustrated Map of Every Known Object in Space: Asteroids, Dwarf Planets, Black Holes & Much More

in Astronomy, Science | November 28th, 2019

Name all the things in space in 20 min­utes. Impos­si­ble, you say? Well, if there’s any­one who might come close to sum­ma­riz­ing the con­tents of the uni­verse in less than half an hour, with the aid of a handy info­graph­ic map also avail­able as a poster, it’s physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man, who has explored oth­er vast sci­en­tif­ic regions in con­densed, yet com­pre­hen­sive maps on physics, math­e­mat­ics, chem­istry, biol­o­gy, and com­put­er sci­ence.

These are all aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines with more or less defined bound­aries. But space? It’s poten­tial­ly end­less, a point Wal­li­man grants up front. Space is “infi­nite­ly big and there are an infi­nite num­ber of things in it,” he says. How­ev­er, these things can still be named and cat­e­go­rized, since “there are not an infi­nite num­ber of dif­fer­ent kinds of things.” We begin at home, so to speak, with the Earth, our Sun, the solar sys­tem (and a dog), and the plan­ets: ter­res­tri­al, gas, and ice giant.

Aster­oids, mete­ors, comets, dwarf plan­ets, moons, the Kuyper Belt, Dort Cloud, and helios­phere, cos­mic dust, black holes…. We’re only two min­utes in and that’s a lot of things already—but it’s also a lot of kinds of things, and those kinds repeat over and over. The super­mas­sive black hole at the cen­ter of the Milky Way may be a type rep­re­sent­ing a whole class of things “at the cen­ter of every galaxy.”

The uni­verse might con­tain an infi­nite num­ber of stars—or a num­ber so large it might as well be infi­nite. But that doesn’t mean we can’t extrap­o­late from the com­par­a­tive­ly tiny num­ber we’re able to observe as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of gen­er­al star behav­ior: from the “main sequence stars”—Red, Orange, and Yel­low Dwarves (like our sun)—to blue giants to vari­able stars, which pul­sate and change in size and bright­ness.

Mas­sive Red Giants explode into neb­u­lae at the end of their 100 mil­lion to 2 bil­lion year lives. They also, along with Red and Orange Dwarf stars, leave behind a core known as a White Dwarf, which will become a Black Dwarf, which does not exist yet because the uni­verse it not old enough to have pro­duced any. “White dwarves,” Wal­li­man says, “will be the fate of 97% of the stars in the uni­verse.” The num­ber of kinds of stars expands, we get into the dif­fer­ent shapes galax­ies can take, and learn about cos­mic radi­a­tion and “mys­ter­ies.”

This project does not have the scope to include expla­na­tions of how we know about these many kinds of space objects, but Wal­li­man does an excel­lent job of turn­ing what may be the biggest pic­ture imag­in­able into a thumbnail—or poster-sized (pur­chase here, down­load here)—out­line of the uni­verse. We can­not ask more from a twen­ty-minute video promis­ing to name “Every Kind of Thing in Space.”

See oth­er sci­ence-defin­ing video maps, all writ­ten, researched, ani­mat­ed, edit­ed, and scored by Wal­li­man, at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

The Map of Biol­o­gy: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Biol­o­gy Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox Explained in Animation

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | November 21st, 2019

Many of us have heard of Stephen Hawk­ing but know him only as a sym­bol of a pow­er­ful mind ded­i­cat­ed for a life­time to the thorni­est prob­lems in astro­physics. Even more of us have heard of black holes but know of them only as those dan­ger­ous things in sci-fi movies that suck in space­ships. But if we gain an under­stand­ing of Hawk­ing’s work on black holes, how­ev­er basic, we gain a much clear­er view of both enti­ties and what they mean to the human endeav­or of grasp­ing the work­ings of real­i­ty. What it all has to do with “one of the biggest para­dox­es in the uni­verse,” and why that para­dox “threat­ens to unrav­el mod­ern sci­ence,” pro­vide the sub­ject mat­ter for the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above.

In order to explain what’s called the “Black Hole Infor­ma­tion Para­dox,” astro­physi­cist Fabio Pacuc­ci must first explain “infor­ma­tion,” which in this usage con­sti­tutes every part of the real­i­ty in which we live. “Typ­i­cal­ly, the infor­ma­tion we talk about is vis­i­ble to the naked eye,” he says. “This kind of infor­ma­tion tells us that an apple is red, round, and shiny.” But what physi­cists care about is “quan­tum infor­ma­tion,” which “refers to the quan­tum prop­er­ties of all the par­ti­cles that make up that apple, such as their posi­tion, veloc­i­ty and spin.” The par­ti­cles that make up every object of the uni­verse have “unique quan­tum prop­er­ties,” and the laws of physics as cur­rent­ly under­stood hold that “the total amount of quan­tum infor­ma­tion in the uni­verse must be con­served.”

Smash the apple into sauce, in oth­er words, and you don’t cre­ate or destroy any quan­tum infor­ma­tion, you just move it around. But in the parts of space­time with grav­i­ty so strong that noth­ing can escape them, bet­ter known as black holes, that par­tic­u­lar law of physics may not apply. “When an apple enters a black hole, it seems as though it leaves the uni­verse, and all its quan­tum infor­ma­tion becomes irre­triev­ably lost,” says Pacuc­ci. “How­ev­er, this doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly break the laws of physics. The infor­ma­tion is out of sight, but it might still exist with­in the black hole’s mys­te­ri­ous void.”

Then we have Hawk­ing Radi­a­tion, the epony­mous genius’ con­tri­bu­tion to the study of black holes, which shows that “black holes are grad­u­al­ly evap­o­rat­ing,” los­ing mass over “incred­i­bly long peri­ods of time” in such a way that sug­gests that “a black hole and all the quan­tum infor­ma­tion it con­tains could be com­plete­ly erased” in the process. What might go into the black hole as an apple’s infor­ma­tion does­n’t come out look­ing like an apple’s infor­ma­tion. Quan­tum infor­ma­tion seems to be destroyed by black holes, yet every­thing else about quan­tum infor­ma­tion tells us it can’t be destroyed: like any para­dox, or con­tra­dic­tion between two known or prob­a­ble truths, “the destruc­tion of infor­ma­tion would force us to rewrite some of our most fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digms.”

But for a sci­en­tist in the Hawk­ing mold, this dif­fi­cul­ty just makes the chase for knowl­edge more inter­est­ing. Pacuc­ci cites a few hypothe­ses: that “infor­ma­tion actu­al­ly is encod­ed in the escap­ing radi­a­tion, in some way we can’t yet under­stand,” that “the para­dox is just a mis­un­der­stand­ing of how gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty and quan­tum field the­o­ry inter­act, that “a solu­tion to this and many oth­er para­dox­es will come nat­u­ral­ly with a ‘uni­fied the­o­ry of every­thing,’ ” and most bold­ly that, because “the 2D sur­face of an event hori­zon” — the inescapable edge of a black hole — “can store quan­tum infor­ma­tion,” the bound­ary of the observ­able uni­verse “is also a 2D sur­face encod­ed with infor­ma­tion about real, 3D objects,” imply­ing that “real­i­ty as we know it is just a holo­graph­ic pro­jec­tion of that infor­ma­tion.” Big if true, as they say, but as Hawk­ing seems to have known, the truth about our real­i­ty is sure­ly big­ger than any of us can yet imag­ine.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawking’s Final Book and Sci­en­tif­ic Paper Just Got Pub­lished: Brief Answers to the Big Ques­tions and “Infor­ma­tion Para­dox”

Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

Stephen Hawking’s Uplift­ing Mes­sage: You Can Get Your­self Out of Any Hole, No Mat­ter What Their Size

The Largest Black Holes in the Uni­verse: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion

Watch a Star Get Devoured by a Super­mas­sive Black Hole

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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David Lynch Visualizes How Transcendental Meditation Works, Using a Sharpie & Big Pad of Paper

in Science | November 18th, 2019

Sec­ond only to the Bea­t­les, David Lynch has become syn­ony­mous with the prac­tice of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion. And while the results were cer­tain­ly mixed for the Fab Four, Lynch, in all his idio­syn­crasies, has become the face of TM. He didn’t dab­ble with it mid-career. Instead, med­i­ta­tion helped cre­ate his career, as both his prac­tice and the film­ing of Eraser­head start­ed around 1972.

“…[L]ooking back,” he said in a Dai­ly Beast inter­view in 2014, “I was filled with anger and took it out on my first wife and made her life mis­er­able. I had a low-grade depres­sion, and wasn’t real­ly self-assured. If I’d gone for­ward with­out the abil­i­ty to tran­scend every day, I think the pres­sures of the busi­ness could’ve got­ten me.”

His career has been tran­scen­dent for sure, and as head of his epony­mous foun­da­tion, he’s spread­ing the word, bring­ing TM to schools and call­ing in fel­low cre­atives to extol its virtues.

But how does Lynch him­self explain Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion? In this video, Lynch, armed with a pad of paper and a Sharpie, takes us on a sci­en­tif­ic jour­ney down past atoms and pro­tons, and down to the uni­fied field the­o­ry of quan­tum physics. A “no-thing” out of which all mat­ter emerges. Sci­en­tists can’t take us into the uni­fied field…but the mind can. Hence, med­i­ta­tion.

“The mantra is the key that opens the door,” he explains. (What is that mantra? It’s a per­son­al one that the Mahar­ishi, or some­one high on the TM chain will give you after training…if you believe the TM pitch. Not every­body believes it needs be so pro­pri­etary, or expen­sive.)

With a mantra the mind can dive deep and then deep­er: “Each deep­er lev­el of mind and each deep­er lev­el of intel­lect has more hap­pi­ness,” he says. Go deep enough and the mind hits the equiv­a­lent of the uni­fied field, and there…transcendence.

“Pure, unbound­ed, infi­nite con­scious­ness…” he promis­es. “Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion is just the vehi­cle to get you here.”

This can’t be the first time Lynch has drawn this dia­gram, but it real­ly is one of the best visu­al­iza­tions of how sci­ence and med­i­ta­tion have arrived at the same con­clu­sion. And it’s also why sci­ence is now study­ing the effects of med­i­ta­tion on the brain. For those look­ing for more on Lynch and med­i­ta­tion, we have you cov­ered.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Mus­es About the Mag­ic of Cin­e­ma & Med­i­ta­tion in a New Abstract Short Film

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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What to Wear to a Successful PhD Thesis Defense? A Skirt’s Worth of Academic Rejection Letters

in Creativity, Education, Fashion, Life, Science | November 8th, 2019

Some peo­ple are par­a­lyzed by rejec­tion.

Oth­ers, like Michi­gan State University’s Earth and Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences PhD can­di­date, Caitlin Kir­by, sport rejec­tion like a man­tle of hon­or… or more accu­rate­ly, a pleat­ed skirt falling to just below mid-thigh.

“Suc­cess­ful­ly defend­ed my PhD dis­ser­ta­tion today!” Kir­by wrote in a Tweet that has since gar­nered over 25,000 likes. “In the spir­it of acknowl­edg­ing & nor­mal­iz­ing fail­ure in the process, I defend­ed in a skirt made of rejec­tion let­ters from the course of my PhD.”

The cus­tom gar­ment, which Kir­by teamed with a dark blaz­er and red waist­band, was orga­nized in two tiers, with a tulle ruf­fle peep­ing out beneath.

MSU’s Career Ser­vices Network’s Direc­tor of Employ­er Rela­tions, Karin Han­son, told the Lans­ing State Jour­nal that rejec­tion comes as a shock to many high achiev­ing MSU stu­dents.

Kirby’s deci­sion to upcy­cle 17 dis­ap­point­ing let­ters received over the course of her aca­d­e­m­ic career was par­tial­ly inspired by a Parks and Recre­ation episode in which the skirt of Leslie Knope’s wed­ding dress is a wear­able col­lage of news­pa­per arti­cles about the char­ac­ter, drawn from ear­li­er episodes

More to the point, Kirby’s skirt is part of an ongo­ing cam­paign to acknowl­edge rejec­tion as a nec­es­sary, if painful, part of aca­d­e­m­ic growth.

The whole process of revis­it­ing those old let­ters and mak­ing that skirt sort of remind­ed me that you have to apply to a lot of things to suc­ceed. It seems coun­ter­in­tu­itive to wear your rejec­tions to your last test in your Ph.D, but we talked about our rejec­tions every week and I want­ed them to be a part of it.

And, as she lat­er not­ed in a tweet:

Accep­tances and rejec­tions are often based on the tra­di­tion­al val­ues of acad­e­mia, which excludes POC by not valu­ing the approach­es, research ques­tions, and expe­ri­ences that POC tend to bring to their work.

Kirby’s let­ters were culled from a vari­ety of sources—scholarship appli­ca­tions, sub­mis­sions to aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals, and pro­pos­als for con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tions.  Unfor­tu­nate­ly and We regret to inform you are recur­rent motifs. About 8 let­ters were left on the cut­ting room floor.

But she is pre­pared to low­er her hem­line, when she starts apply­ing for jobs, fol­low­ing a stint at the Research Insti­tute for Urban and Region­al Devel­op­ment in Dort­mund, Ger­many, the result of a suc­cess­ful Ful­bright appli­ca­tion.

Fol­low Kirby’s exam­ple and turn your tem­po­rary set­backs into a pow­er skirt, using the tuto­r­i­al above.

via Boing Boing 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Rejec­tion Let­ters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Von­negut & Andy Warhol

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Edi­tor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trot­skyite” Nov­el Ani­mal Farm (1944)

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejec­tion Let­ter from Pub­lish­er (1912)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, res­ur­rects Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Women Scientists Launch a Database Featuring the Work of 9,000 Women Working in the Sciences

in Gender, Science | November 5th, 2019

“Why are there so few women in sci­ence?” has almost become a tire­some refrain over the years, giv­en how lit­tle the answers engage with the thou­sands of female sci­en­tists work­ing all over the world. “Too often,” writes the project 500 Women Sci­en­tists, “high-pro­file arti­cles, con­fer­ence pan­els, and boards are filled with a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of male voic­es. News sto­ries are report­ed by more men by a huge mar­gin, and this imbal­ance is reflect­ed in how fre­quent­ly women are quot­ed in news sto­ries unless jour­nal­ists make a con­scious effort to reach out.

“Most keynote speak­ers at con­fer­ences are men. Pan­els are so fre­quent­ly all-male that a new word evolved to describe the phe­nom­e­non: manels. These imbal­ances add up and rein­force the inac­cu­rate per­cep­tion that sci­ence is stale, pale and male.” The next time the ques­tion arises—“why are there so few women in science?”—or any oth­er ques­tion need­ing sci­en­tif­ic exper­tise, one need only ges­ture silent­ly to 500 Women Sci­en­tists, a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion con­sist­ing of far more sci­en­tists than its title sug­gests.

Described as “a resource for jour­nal­ists, edu­ca­tors, pol­i­cy mak­ers, sci­en­tists and any­one need­ing sci­en­tif­ic exper­tise,” the project began in 2016 as an open let­ter penned by its founders, then grad­u­ate stu­dents at Col­orado Uni­ver­si­ty, Boul­der, who decid­ed to re-affirm their val­ues against reac­tionary attacks by amass­ing 500 sig­na­tures on an open let­ter. They’ve since built a search­able data­base of over 9,000 women researchers from around the world, and a resource that helps build local sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ties.

Since launch­ing last year, their Request a Sci­en­tist data­base has shown “the excuse that you can’t find a qual­i­fied woman just does­n’t hold,” says co-founder and micro­bial ecol­o­gist Dr. Kel­ly Ramirez-Don­ders. It has also pro­vid­ed much more detailed data on women in sci­ence, which was pub­lished in a paper at PLOS Biol­o­gy in April. “The group has ambi­tious plans to keep expand­ing its reach,” writes STAT. “They’re rais­ing mon­ey to start a fel­low­ship for women of col­or… and they have already launched an affil­i­ate group, 500 Women in Med­i­cine.”

“We’re sci­en­tists. We’re lovers of evi­dence and data points,” says co-founder Maryam Zaring­ha­lam, a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist. “And so now any­time some­body tells us they couldn’t find some­one or there just aren’t enough women in STEM fields, we can point them to [the data­base] and say, ‘Well, actu­al­ly, this is the tip of the ice­berg, and there’s over 8,000.’… ensur­ing that women’s voic­es are rep­re­sent­ed in the media nar­ra­tives is real­ly essen­tial for show­ing that, ‘No, we are here, it’s just that peo­ple haven’t nec­es­sar­i­ly been aware of us or done the work to find us.’”

Cor­rect­ing mis­per­cep­tions not only helps reduce bias­es with­in sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ties; it also encour­ages bud­ding sci­en­tists who might oth­er­wise be dis­cour­aged from the pur­suit. “It’s not that girls are not inter­est­ed in sci­ence,” co-founder Jane Zeliko­va tells Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca. “Some­thing hap­pens where they don’t see women or girls rep­re­sent­ed as sci­en­tists and they don’t think it’s for them.” 500 Women in Sci­ence proves that notion wrong—science is for them, and for every­one who wants to devote their lives to sci­en­tif­ic research. Just look at the data.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Sci­ence

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover the Persian 11th Century Canon of Medicine, “The Most Famous Medical Textbook Ever Written”

in History, Science | October 24th, 2019

It may nev­er lend a catchy title to a steamy TV hos­pi­tal dra­ma, but Avicenna’s 11th-cen­tu­ry Canon of Med­i­cine has the dis­tinc­tion of being “the most famous med­ical text­book ever writ­ten.” It has remained, as William Osler wrote in a 1918 Yale lec­ture, “a med­ical bible for a longer time than any oth­er work.” Com­plet­ed in 1025, the com­pendi­um drew Greek, Roman, Ara­bic, Indi­an, and Chi­nese med­ical sci­ence togeth­er in five dense vol­umes of mate­r­i­al informed by the the­o­ries of Galen and struc­tured by the sys­tem­at­ic phi­los­o­phy of Aris­to­tle, whom Avi­cen­na (Abū-ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn-ʿAb­dal­lāh Ibn-Sīnā) called “The First Teacher.”

Trans­lat­ed into Latin in the 12th cen­tu­ry and “often revised,” the Canon, notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, “formed the basis of med­ical instruc­tion in Euro­pean Uni­ver­si­ties until the 17th cen­tu­ry.” A copy of excerpts from the text has even been found trans­lat­ed into 15th-cen­tu­ry Irish, demon­strat­ing a link between medieval Ire­land and the Islam­ic world. Avicenna’s influ­ence gen­er­al­ly on the intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture of medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Europe and the Arab-speak­ing world can hard­ly be over­stat­ed.

Born in 980 A.D., the Per­sian philoso­pher and physi­cian was instru­men­tal in the recov­ery of Hel­lenic thought, first in the Islam­ic world, then lat­er in Europe. He took to the study of med­i­cine very ear­ly in his extra­or­di­nary career. “I became pro­fi­cient in it in the short­est time,” he says, “until the excel­lent schol­ars of med­i­cine began to study under me.” He also became a prac­tic­ing physi­cian, inspired by a desire to put his learn­ing to the test. “Through my expe­ri­ences I acquired an amaz­ing prac­ti­cal knowl­edge and abil­i­ty in meth­ods of treat­ment.”

The prac­ti­cal knowl­edge in The Canon of Med­i­cine was large­ly the basis for its con­tin­ued use for cen­turies. It lays out rules for drug test­ing, which include an insis­tence on human tri­als and the impor­tance of con­duct­ing mul­ti­ple exper­i­ments and show­ing con­sis­tent results across cas­es. Like most clas­si­cal sci­en­tif­ic texts, it weaves empir­i­cal obser­va­tion with meta­physics, the­ol­o­gy, scholas­tic spec­u­la­tion, and cul­tur­al bias­es par­tic­u­lar to its time and place. But the prac­ti­cal out­lines of its med­ical knowl­edge tran­scend its archaisms.

The work presents “an inte­grat­ed view of surgery and med­i­cine,” notes the Jour­nal of the Roy­al Soci­ety of Med­i­cine. In addi­tion to his immi­nent­ly use­ful guide for assess­ing the effects of drugs, Ibn Sina tells his read­ers “how to judge the mar­gin of healthy tis­sue to remove with an ampu­ta­tion,” an inter­ven­tion that has saved count­less num­bers of lives. “The endur­ing respect in the 21st cen­tu­ry for a book writ­ten a mil­len­ni­um ear­li­er is tes­ti­mo­ny to Ibn Sina’s achieve­ment.”

One of the defin­ing fea­tures of the text is its insis­tence on the prac­tice of med­i­cine as a sys­tem­at­ic sci­en­tif­ic pur­suit of equal mer­it to the the­o­riz­ing of it:

Some­one might say to us that med­i­cine is divid­ed into the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal parts and that, by call­ing it a sci­ence, we have con­sid­ered it as being all the­o­ret­i­cal. To this we respond by say­ing that some arts and phi­los­o­phy have the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal parts, and med­i­cine, too, has its the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal parts. The divi­sion into the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal parts dif­fers from case to case, but we need not dis­cuss these divi­sions in dis­ci­plines oth­er than med­i­cine. If it is said that some parts of med­i­cine are the­o­ret­i­cal and oth­er parts are prac­ti­cal, this does not mean that one part teach­es med­i­cine and the oth­er puts it into prac­tice – as many researchers in this sub­ject believe. One should be aware that the inten­tion is some­thing else: it is that both parts of med­i­cine are sci­ence, but one part is the sci­ence deal­ing with the prin­ci­ples of med­i­cine, and the oth­er with how to put those prin­ci­ples into prac­tice.

Of course, much of the med­ical the­o­ry in the Canon has been dis­proven, but it remains of keen inter­est to stu­dents of the his­to­ry of med­i­cine and of Euro­pean and Islam­ic intel­lec­tu­al cul­tur­al his­to­ry more gen­er­al­ly. Avi­cen­na tow­ers above his con­tem­po­raries, yet his work also bears wit­ness to the larg­er “intel­lec­tu­al cli­mate of his time,” as the site Med­ical His­to­ry Tour points out. He emerged from a milieu “shaped by cen­turies of trans­la­tion and cross-cul­tur­al schol­ar­ship” of Greek, Roman, Indi­an, Chi­nese, Per­sian, and Ara­bic lit­er­a­ture. “A rich Per­sian med­ical tra­di­tion began 200 years before Avi­cen­na.”

Nonethe­less, “how­ev­er the world came by the genius of Avi­cen­na, his influ­ence was last­ing,” with The Canon of Med­i­cine remain­ing a defin­i­tive “best prac­tices” guide to med­i­cine for cen­turies after its com­po­si­tion. See full scans of sev­er­al Ara­bic copies of the text at the Library of Congress’s World Dig­i­tal Library and read a full Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the mas­sive 5‑volume work, with its exten­sive chap­ters on def­i­n­i­tions, anato­my, eti­ol­o­gy, and treat­ments, at the Inter­net Archive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Chill Out to 70 Hours of Oceanscape Nature Videos Filmed by BBC Earth

in Biology, Environment, Life, Nature, Science, Television | October 18th, 2019

Those who har­bor a deep-seat­ed fear of the water may want to look for oth­er meth­ods of stress relief than BBC Earth’s relax­ing 10-hour video loops, but every­one else is encour­aged to take a dip in these stun­ning nat­ur­al worlds, pre­sent­ed with­out com­men­tary or back­ground music.

All sev­en 10-hour playlists are salt-water based: coral reefs, coast­lines, deep ocean, open ocean, frozen seas, ocean sur­faces, and sea forests.

As in most com­pelling nature doc­u­men­taries, non-human crea­tures loom large, but unlike such BBC Earth offer­ings as Creepi­est Insect Moments or Ants Attack Ter­mite Mounds, there’s a benign, live-and-let-live vibe to the pro­ceed­ings.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the pho­tog­ra­phy is breath­tak­ing, and the uses of these marathon-length por­traits are man­i­fold: med­i­ta­tion tool, sleep aid, child soother, social media decom­pres­sor, trav­el­ogue, and—less calmingly—call to action.

Sci­ence tells us that many of these life forms, and the ocean in which they dwell, are in seri­ous dan­ger, thanks to decades of human dis­re­gard for the envi­ron­ment. This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to immerse our­selves in what we stand to lose while it’s still pos­si­ble to do some­thing about it.

If that thought seems too depress­ing, there’s also strong sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence that nature doc­u­men­taries such as these pro­mote increased feel­ings of well­be­ing

What are you wait­ing for?

Click here to trav­el the oceans with polar bears, jel­ly­fish, dol­phins, sea­hors­es, bright­ly col­ored trop­i­cal fish and oth­er crea­tures of the deep, com­pli­ments of BBC’s Earth’s Ocean­scapes playlists.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch­ing Nature Doc­u­men­taries Can Pro­duce “Real Hap­pi­ness,” Finds a Study from the BBC and UC-Berke­ley

Bob Odenkirk & Errol Mor­ris Cre­ate Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Glob­al Warm­ing: Watch Them Online

Do Octopi Dream? An Aston­ish­ing Nature Doc­u­men­tary Sug­gests They Do

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 4 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Louise Jor­dan Miln’s “Woo­ings and Wed­dings in Many Climes (1900). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watching Nature Documentaries Can Produce “Real Happiness,” Finds a Study from the BBC and UC-Berkeley

in Environment, Nature, Science, Television | October 15th, 2019

Hol­ly­wood sci­ence fic­tion films imag­ine future humans in worlds that are no longer green, or nev­er were—from Soy­lent Green’s dying Earth to that of Inter­stel­lar. And from Soy­lent Green to Ad Astra, humans in the future expe­ri­ence plant and ani­mal life as sim­u­la­tions on a screen, in hyper­re­al pho­tog­ra­phy and video meant to paci­fy and com­fort. Maybe we live in that world already, to some extent, with apoc­a­lyp­tic films and sci­ence fic­tion express­ing a col­lec­tive mourn­ing for the extinc­tions brought on by cli­mate change.

“Over the course of my lifetime—I’m 46,” writes Wash­ing­ton Post art crit­ic Sebas­t­ian Smee, “the plan­et has lost more than half of its wildlife pop­u­la­tions, accord­ing to the World Wildlife Fund.” Sure­ly this brute fact explains the immense pop­u­lar­i­ty of high pro­duc­tion-val­ue nature doc­u­men­taries, the anti­dote to apoc­a­lyp­tic futur­ism. They have become “block­buster events,” argues Ed Yong at The Atlantic, with fan­doms as fierce as any.

Viewed “from the per­spec­tive of the future,” writes Smee, nature doc­u­men­taries “are great art. Maybe the great­est of our time.” But can view­ing film and pho­tographs of nature pro­duce in us the feel­ings of awe and won­der that poets, artists, and philoso­phers have described feel­ing in actu­al nature for cen­turies? BBC Earth, pro­duc­er of sev­er­al major block­buster nature doc­u­men­tary series, under­took some psy­cho­log­i­cal research to find out, part­ner­ing with researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley.

The team exam­ined the effects of watch­ing the BBC’s Plan­et Earth II doc­u­men­tary series rel­a­tive to oth­er kinds of pro­grams. “It is a deep human intu­ition that view­ing nature and being in nature is good for the mind and body,” they write in the study, titled “Explor­ing the Emo­tion­al State of ‘Real Hap­pi­ness.’” (Socio­bi­ol­o­gist E.O. Wil­son coined the term “bio­phil­ia” to describe the evolved pref­er­ence for nat­ur­al beau­ty.) Does screen­time equal phys­i­cal time spent out­doors? Not exact­ly, but nature doc­u­men­taries can low­er stress lev­els and, yes, pro­duce feel­ings of “real hap­pi­ness.”

There have been sev­er­al pre­vi­ous such stud­ies. The authors cite one in which a few min­utes of the orig­i­nal series Plan­et Earth “led peo­ple, com­pared to con­trol par­tic­i­pants, to feel 45.6% more awe and 31.4% more grat­i­tude, but no shifts in feel­ings of neg­a­tive emo­tions such as fear and sad­ness.” The Plan­et Earth II study may be the largest of its kind, with almost 3,500 par­tic­i­pants in the U.S., around a thou­sand in the U.K., India, and Aus­tralia, each, and around 500 in both South Africa and Sin­ga­pore for a total of approx­i­mate­ly 7,500 view­ers.

Par­tic­i­pants across a range of age groups, from 16 to 55 and over, were shown short clips of a vari­ety of TV pro­grams, includ­ing clips from Plan­et Earth II. They were sur­veyed on an array of emo­tion­al respons­es before and after each view­ing. The study also mea­sured stress lev­els using the Per­ceived Stress Scale (PSS), and used a facial map­ping tech­nol­o­gy called CrowdE­mo­tion to track phys­i­cal respons­es. The researchers aggre­gat­ed the data and con­trolled for pop­u­la­tion size in each coun­try.

The find­ings are fas­ci­nat­ing. Across the scale, Plan­et Earth II clips gen­er­at­ed more feel­ings of hap­pi­ness and awe, with clips from news and enter­tain­ment shows caus­ing more fear. In most of the study’s mea­sures, these good feel­ings peaked high­est at the low­er demo­graph­ic age range of 16–24. Younger view­ers showed greater pos­i­tive emo­tion­al respons­es in facial map­ping and sur­vey data, a fact con­sis­tent with BBC rat­ings data show­ing that 16–34 year-olds make up around 41% of the audi­ence share for Plan­et Earth II.

“This younger group,” note the authors, “was more like­ly to expe­ri­ence sig­nif­i­cant pos­i­tive shifts in emo­tion.” They also start­ed out, before view­ing the clips, with sig­nif­i­cant­ly more envi­ron­men­tal anx­i­ety, scor­ing high­ly on the stress scale. 71% described them­selves as “extreme­ly wor­ried about the state of the world’s envi­ron­ment and what it will mean for my future.” A small­er per­cent­age showed the low­est lev­el of agree­ment with the state­ment “I reg­u­lar­ly get out­side and enjoy spend­ing time with nature.”

For near­ly all of the study’s view­ers, nature doc­u­men­taries seemed to pro­duce at least fleet­ing feel­ings of “real hap­pi­ness.” For many, they may also be a way of coun­ter­ing fears of the future, and com­pen­sat­ing in advance for a loss of the nat­ur­al beau­ty that remains. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the study did not mea­sure the num­ber of par­tic­i­pants who viewed Plan­et Earth II and oth­er “block­buster” nature doc­u­men­taries as a call to action against envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion. Maybe that’s a sub­ject for anoth­er study. Read the full Plan­et Earth II study results here. And if you’re feel­ing stressed, watch thir­ty min­utes of “Visu­al Sound­scapes,” pre­sent­ed by Plan­et Earth II, above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

Becom­ing: A Short Time­lapse Film Shows a Sin­gle Cell Mor­ph­ing Into a Com­plete, Com­plex Liv­ing Organ­ism

Do Octopi Dream? An Aston­ish­ing Nature Doc­u­men­tary Sug­gests They Do

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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