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LITERATURE : WHERE TO START ? | MASTERPOST

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Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana Nikolaevna wearing court dresses in 1904 and 1913.

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If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

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“One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) dir. Chris Columbus

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Sorbonne University, Paris, France

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A sample of haunting and troubling gifs of famous paintings. (Via giphy.com) From the artwork Beauty, by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro.

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An asteroid will get closer to Earth than the Moon this Thursday, but don't panic

https://sciencespies.com/space/an-asteroid-will-get-closer-to-earth-than-the-moon-this-thursday-but-dont-panic/

An asteroid will get closer to Earth than the Moon this Thursday, but don’t panic

An asteroid will get awfully close to Earth this Thursday (September 24), when it whizzes by our planet closer than the Moon orbits.

The asteroid – known as 2020 SW – isn’t expected to collide with Earth, according to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But it will get close, passing about 16,700 miles (27,000 kilometers) away from Earth, according to the Virtual Telescope Project.

To put this in perspective, the moon hangs out at an average of 238,900 miles (384,000 km) from us, or about 30 Earths away. This asteroid will pass at a distance of about 2.1 Earths.

This means that asteroid 2020 SW will pass even closer than TV and weather satellites, which orbit at about 22,300 miles (35,888 km) away from Earth, according to EarthSky.

Scientists have yet to pin down the asteroid’s exact size, but it’s not that large, likely between 14 feet and 32 feet (4.4 and 9.9 meters) long, according to CNEOS.

This potentially RV-size asteroid was discovered only last week, on September 18, by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona, and announced the next day by the Minor Planet Center, a NASA-funded group that monitors minor planets, comets and natural satellites. (It’s not unusual to find unknown asteroids; in September alone, the Minor Planet Center has announced the discovery of 244 near-Earth objects.)

The orbit of asteroid 2020 SW is seen here in gray. (JPL/NASA)

Passing by Earth will actually be a life-changing event for asteroid 2020 SW. It’s such a small asteroid that Earth’s gravity is expected to change the space rock’s course when it zooms by our planet at 7:18 am EDT (11:18 UTC), according to EarthSky. 

After asteroid 2020 SW’s close shave with Earth, it won’t pay our planet another visit until 3 June 2029, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

That said, the asteroid is certainly rushing to see us this Thursday (we hope it has a face mask), traveling at a velocity of about 17,200 mph (27,720 km/h, or 7.7 km/second) relative to Earth, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.

The asteroid will appear brighter as it nears Earth, but it won’t be visible to the naked eye.

If you want a clear view of the space rock, visit The Virtual Telescope website, which is showing a live feed starting at 6 pm EDT (22:00 UTC) on Wednesday, September 23.

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

#Space

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Harry Potter Ambient Noise Masterlist

Some Harry Potter inspired background noises for you all!

Getting to Hogwarts

Platform 9 ¾

Hogwarts Express

Storm On The Hogwarts Express

Hogwarts Express Compartment 

Death Eaters - Hogwarts Express

At Hogwarts

Rainy Hogwarts 

Hogwarts After Dark 

The Great Hall At Hogwarts

Halloween At Hogwarts

Christmas Cheer At Hogwarts

Hogwarts Grounds In Summer

Snape’s Office 

McGonagall’s Office 

Regan Ravenclaw’s Study

Owlery

Under The Hogwarts Lake

Hogwarts Grounds

The Black Lake 

The Forbidden Forest

Working By The Great Lake

These Halls Are No Longer Safe

Quidditch

The Four Houses

Gryffindor

Gryffindor Tower Sounds 

Gryffindor Fireplace

Gryffindor Dormitory

Gryffindor Common Room - Rainy

Gryffindor Common Room With Pets

Slytherin

Slytherin Common Room

Slytherin Dormitory

Study Like A Slytherin!

Slytherin Evening

Slytherin Study Room

Hufflepuff

Hufflepuff Dormitory

Evening In The Hufflepuff Common Room

Cozy Hufflepuff Common Room

Hufflepuff Common Room w/ Harp

Ravenclaw

Ravenclaw Common Room

Ravenclaw Dormitory

Ravenclaw Window Sill

Ravenclaw Study

Ravenclaw’s Lazy Sunday

Study and Learn

The Perfect Hogwarts Library

Hogwarts Library Realistic

Transfiguration Classroom

Classroom 11

Potions Class

Hogsmeade

Hogsmeade

Rainy Hogsmeade Afternoon

Three Broomsticks Inn 

Madame Puddifoot’s Tea Shop

Hogsmeade Before Christmas

Outside Hogwarts

Malfoy Manor

Breakfast At The Burrow

Shell Cottage

Diagon Alley Shops

Weasley And Weasley

Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes

Leaky Cauldron

The Quidditch World Cup

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Malignant bone cancer has been diagnosed in a dinosaur for the first time ever

https://sciencespies.com/nature/malignant-bone-cancer-has-been-diagnosed-in-a-dinosaur-for-the-first-time-ever/

Malignant bone cancer has been diagnosed in a dinosaur for the first time ever

A palaeontologist, a medical pathologist, and an orthopaedic surgeon walk into a museum. No, it’s not the start of a joke, but the research team that has now diagnosed the first confirmed case of aggressive bone cancer in a dinosaur.

The specimen in question is a fossilised shin bone from Centrosaurus apertus, a plant-eating horned dinosaur that lived and died roughly 76 million years ago.

What looked – at least on first impression – like a poorly healed fracture turned out to be a tumour engrossing the upper half of the animal’s shin bone, or fibula. The centrosaurus was diagnosed with an osteosarcoma; it’s the most common type of bone cancer in humans, but marks the first confirmed case of any malignant cancer we’ve found in a dinosaur.

“Here, we show the unmistakable signature of advanced bone cancer in [a] 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur – the first of its kind,” said pathologist Mark Crowther. “It’s very exciting.”

The shin bone, with the main tumour mass in yellow. (Danielle Dufault/Royal Ontario Museum/McMaster University)

In humans, osteosarcomas often affect growth-spurting teenagers and young adults. If an osteosarcoma metastasises – grows beyond the bone – it most often spreads to the lungs, but can also form tumours in other bones, and even the brain.

However curious we are about the evolution of diseases such as cancer, soft tissues like tendons, ligaments, bone marrow and tumours, are rarely preserved in fossils. Given a few years – let alone a million – these tissues would decay. So even if dinosaurs were regularly struck down by cancer, any diagnostic samples are going to be hard to find.

Scientists have come across similar cancer-like symptoms on dinosaur fossils before. Unusual lesions in the tail vertebrae of a young hadrosaur resembled a condition called Langerhans cell histiocytosis, a complex cancer which leaves room for debate over its manifestation. In the case of this most recent discovery, the malignancy is far more clear.

The cancer-stricken fossilised shin bone of C. apertus was unearthed in Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada back in 1989, and had been stored at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, outside of Calgary, until its recent reanalysis.

Cross sections of the C. apertus bone were taken first with a CT scanner, the same machine used to identify bone fractures and tumours in people. The X-ray image ‘slices’ were reconstructed to see how the tumour grew through the fossilised bone.

In fact, it had spread through the bone quite extensively, which the team of medical specialists took as a sign that this centrosaur lived with its cancer for quite some time.

Artist’s impression of Centrosaurus apertus. (Royal Ontario Museum/McMaster University)

“This discovery reminds us of the common biological links throughout the animal kingdom and reinforces the theory that osteosarcoma tends to affect bones when and where they are growing most rapidly,” said Seper Ekhtiari, an orthopaedic surgeon-in-training at McMaster University in Toronto, who examined the fossil.

As the cancer was so advanced, the researchers think it might have spread to other parts of the dinosaur’s body, but we don’t have any of those tissue samples – such as the spongy lungs – from this ancient animal to make sure.

“The shin bone shows aggressive cancer at an advanced stage,” said paleontologist David Evans. “The cancer would have had crippling effects on the individual and made it very vulnerable to the formidable tyrannosaur predators of the time.”

After imaging the cancerous shin bone, thin sections were carefully sliced off the fossil and compared to a normal C. apertus fibula, along with one case of human osteosarcoma, from a 19-year-old man who had it in his lower leg.

In their paper, the authors note that ”a similarly advanced osteosarcoma in a human patient, left untreated, would certainly be fatal.”

But they suspect the dinosaur died with its herd mates, possibly in a sudden flood event, because the fossil was found in a massive bed of Centrosaurus bones.

“The fact that this plant-eating dinosaur lived in a large, protective herd may have allowed it to survive longer than it normally would have with such a devastating disease,” Evans said.

And when we often marvel at the age of dinosaurs and their size, big and small, this latest medical discovery brings the plight of the dinosaurs a little closer to home.  

“Evidence suggests that malignancies, including bone cancers, are rooted quite deeply in the evolutionary history of organisms,” the authors concluded. Yes, even dinosaurs.

The study is published in medical journal The Lancet Oncology.

#Nature

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Wednesday 13 March 2019

The Taylorian is such a beauty.

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Things You’ve Heard About Grad School (Esp. A PhD) But Need Repeating

It is, by nature, lonely. Most of your cohort are usually married or have pets or some sort of life outside school, which means that, unlike your undergrad, you might find it difficult to find people to hang out with after school hours. If you’re in a PhD program, this is even worse because everyone does their own thing, most of the time, and apparently year 3 and on is a little more lonely than before (because a lot of us don’t do classes after year 2). Summers, if you choose to stay on campus or your advisor asks you to, are a little lonelier than the academic school cycle as well.

Everyone has their own flow of creative academia, and you cannot be expected to reproduce what worked for other people. As my wonderful coordinator told me, looking me straight in the eyes, as he ignored the other students- Don’t try to reverse engineer the process, that’s not how it works

Time Management, What’s that? The first thing you will notice once you get into classes and research papers is that you no longer know how to manage your time. Years of conditioning has made you work extra hard for your classes and now all your professors are telling you that your classes don’t matter and that you should focus all you time on your research. BUT HOW. Well, that’s a question apparently no one quite knows how to handle. The apps help you keep track of things, but prioritization is an art that can apparently only be learnt through anxiety inducing breakdowns.

If you already knew everything, you wouldn’t be here- This is really easy to forget and I have to constantly catch myself and remind myself that it is expected that I find things hard in my first year. You will find things hard regardless of which year you are in AND THAT IS OKAY. 

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Snapshots of my weekend! We had Easter celebrations so I did not study at all but was productive, planning my week and reading "The 7 Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle" which i completed! So happy to take some days off it was much needed!

IG : @abookishdemon

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Portrait of a Man in Armor (details). By Anthonis Mor, 1558

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The brutal honesty that no one asked for

Herein lies an all encompassing description of what undergraduate research is like for me right now with all the feelings and perspectives that accompany it.

So far my semester has been going very well and I am getting better grades than I have in the past. [if it’s any consolation, the first two years of my degree, the classes I always got the worst grades in were my math and science courses]

I spent most of my freetime, and time I honestly should have been studying, the past few days compiling all of the data for the project I’m working on. Right now we have 24 samples with optical and room temperature electrical transport measurements to compare. 

I spent almost the entire day delving into a 50 page excerpt from a textbook that my research advisor suggested I read, and then spent three hours discussing what I have compiled so far. I feel excited and interested in all that is going on, but it feels a little insane that I am doing this at the same time. I haven’t taken a solid state physics class, and the majority of my knowledge of things thus far has been hastily picked up here and there between this research and the REU I did over the summer. It feels more like word association than true knowledge, but I’m pushing through. 

We have a new research student that started doing work in the lab this semester that I am in charge of training. As if my imposter syndrome wasn’t real enough already, I now feel harshly unqualified to be teaching someone else. She has a cheerful and ambitious spirit that I appreciate more than she could ever know. It’s so so weird to me though, because we are actually the same age, and she is only a year below me in school. Today I was trying to explain the difference between n-type and p-type semiconductors, and I finally stumbled to a conclusion for her with help from a lovely cartoon on youtube. I sat back down at my article and she expressed how she was just so thankful that I would take time away from my work to explain things to her. 

She says things of this nature daily, and it has put so much in perspective to me. I love the opportunity to help her understand a concept or learn how to change samples and plot data, and it helps me to solidify my own understanding as well. 

While I was sitting going over data and the national American Physics Society meeting I am hoping to submit an abstract for she mentioned that she thought I should present a powerpoint instead of doing a poster. I immediatley asked if I was even eligible, since the only people I’ve ever seen give oral presentations were post-docs and grad students. She quite passionately reminded me that what I am doing with her would be considered graduate level work by anyone’s definition, and there would be no issue in me applying. 

This just feels unreal to me. I don’t see my work this way, and I am constantly reminded of all of the fundamentals in Physics I still need to learn through my courses. I know this experience is completely invaluable for my future career, and I love it more than just about anything. [Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to spend hours upon hours dedicated to it every week]. 

As much as I love and adore what I’m doing, I feel kind of alone in it as well. Regardless of what level of work I’m doing, I’m still just a Junior in undergrad. If I were in graduate school right now I would have other people to talk to and relate to in the struggles and tribulations that accompany the research. I feel kind of secluded and I’m always very hesitant to discuss the good or bad parts of research with other students. The conversations seem to have an odd feeling [which I am definitley percieving as such in my mind]. 

The conversations usually make me uncomforably aware of how, from the outside, I just seem to be doing so well. From the outside no one sees the struggle and grind that I have to put in to scrape by with all of this. I hate that about academia. The results of the research that are actually presented are so far disconnected from the day to day reality of the situation. It feels so weird and I don’t think I am mentally or emotionally mature enough to fully understand what’s going on myself. 

That’s what ranting about it on tumblr is for I suppose! Regardless, if you made it this far, I want you to know that comparison is the root of all pain in academia. You are doing amazing work and growing as an individual through your experiences, triumphs, and mistakes! I am so freaking proud of you! I hope that my experience has not come across in the wrong tone, as written text sometimes will. 

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My Messy, Unproductive Studying Sanctuary.

This is where I am held up tonight. Typing, deleting, and retyping something about muon decay for a lab report that is not due until Friday. I’m not sure how I feel about this semester. I have finished seven weeks and done so much, but it feels like no time has passed at all. I feel trapped in a viscious inbetween place where I am close to graduate school, but have done nothing concrete to apply. I have started my upperlevel course work, which I feared I would fail or be crushed under the unfamiliar mathematics, but I have been doing better than I have ever done in previous semesters. 

It does feel nice to have a semester filled with Physics courses, but I still feel a bit lost as far as where my place is. I keep reminding myself that I can’t let research take over all of my time, but it’s easy to get sucked in. 

I was attempting to analyze data I did not collect for an abstract I am submitting later this month. I began in an organized way, but I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of wikipedia desperation. The truth is I am lacking in the deep foundational background necessary to form opinions on how my measurements relate to eachother when the material has never been published on before. It is exciting and fun to be on a project studying something so novel, but it can be mentally exhausting trying to keep myself up to pace. I will reach a point where I don’t understand why a certain interaction is happening, open a new tab to try and understand, and within that new tab I find something else I don’t completely understand. 

I feel unbalanced in trying to do legitimate science and understand what I am doing, while also not spending all of my time looking up background for a project I am barely getting a few class credits for. 

I feel uncertain for the future but by golly am I so grateful to be doing what I am. I often self reflect before sharing how I am feeling towards a particular problem because I never want it to come across as spoiled or ungrateful. A professor outside of my research was discussing my analysis with me and he quite simply stated “Sara this is graduate level work, stop discouraging yourself”. To which I almost laughed because it was so shocking to hear. I expect so much from myself, and forget to realize that what I am doing is nothing I am expected to already know. For now I am enjoying the process and trying to not be too hard on myself. 

Is any of this coherent? Doubtful, but I needed a quick brain dump so I can go on spending far too long writing this lab report. 

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✧･ﾟplaylists to help pass the time *:･✧

hi everyone! it’s been a while since i made a huge playlist masterpost, but i thought that right now when we’re all stuck inside wondering what to do with our time i would make a list of all my playlists. listening to music is so calming and definitely helps me pass the time…so enjoy! - cam

songs that remind me of a fashion show 

a mix of songs that remind me of driving down the coast 

a playlist dedicated to paris 

songs that inspire me 

a dreamy mix

songs to listen to when you feel carefree

a super fun workout/running playlist to keep you pumped up 

songs to listen to during golden hour 

a mix of songs to listen to on a sunny day 

a playlist full of songs that make me feel alive 

songs that remind me of my teenage years 

a study/coffee shop playlist to keep you calm 

songs to listen to on the weekend 

songs that make me feel like living in the moment 

a friday kinda mix !

songs that remind me of a warm spring evening 

a mix dedicated to nature 

my all-time favorite songs all in one playlist 

songs that remind me of flowers and sunshine 

a 12-hour long playlist of songs that make me feel nostalgic 

songs that remind me of going back to school 

my ultimate summertime playlist 

songs that make me feel like i’m in a movie 

upbeat songs to get ready to in the morning 

songs i’m currently loving & listening to right now

a playlist dedicated to italy and all its wonders 

songs that are soft and delicate 

a mix to listen to while watching the sunrise / sunset 

a playlist for a rainy and stormy day 

songs to listen to when you wake up ! 

another nature playlist because why not?! 

a monday playlist to make your monday more enjoyable 

my springtime playlist 

songs that are bittersweet 

my girl power anthems playlist 

for the daydreamers 

songs that remind me of the spirit of traveling & exploring 

a mix to listen to before bed 

songs to listen and dance to in your kitchen 

a super fun 70s playlist 

relaxing songs for a sunday 

songs that remind me of wintertime 

for people who love the east coast 

for people who love the west coast 

a mix of lo fi beats 

songs to listen to in your car at night 

fresh finds (new songs every monday!)

the ultimate sing along playlist 

an indie playlist 

the perfect road trip / daily commute mix 

a super studious playlist to keep you extra focused 

songs that remind me of the beach 

a mix of songs to listen to when you’re j chillin

songs that remind me of a trip to outer space !

listen to this when you’re in love 

songs for stargazing…

the perfect autumn playlist 

songs that make my heart flutter 

a mix of carefree & happy tunes 

the grooviest 80s playlist around 

a mix of golden oldies 

listen to this if you like rap / r&b 

another workout playlist !

a mix of fun, upbeat songs to dance to 

a playlist inspired by call me by your name

a coming of age playlist 

a mix of songs that deserve more hype