diloolie: poveglia: thoughtlessarse: If it looks like a male lion and is perceived as a male lion—well, sometimes it isn’t. That’s the case of Africa’s unusual maned lionesses, which sport a male’s luxurious locks and may even fool competitors. Though uncommon, maned lionesses have been regularly sighted in the Momba area of Botswana‘s Okavango Delta (including the individual pictured below), where the lion population may carry a genetic disposition toward the phenomenon, according to Luke Hunter, president of the big-cat conservation group Panthera, which collaborates with National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative. (The Society owns National Geographic News.) (Click pic to continue.) omg yes But the gender binary is MADE BY NATUUUURREEE, guiz!!  This is freaking awesome. I’d love to get more info on these lionesses once more people have studied how their families work.  
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diloolie:

poveglia:

thoughtlessarse:

If it looks like a male lion and is perceived as a male lion—well, sometimes it isn’t. That’s the case of Africa’s unusual maned lionesses, which sport a male’s luxurious locks and may even fool competitors.

Though uncommon, maned lionesses have been regularly sighted in the Momba area of Botswana‘s Okavango Delta (including the individual pictured below), where the lion population may carry a genetic disposition toward the phenomenon, according to Luke Hunter, president of the big-cat conservation group Panthera, which collaborates with National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative. (The Society owns National Geographic News.) (Click pic to continue.)

omg yes

But the gender binary is MADE BY NATUUUURREEE, guiz!! 

This is freaking awesome. I’d love to get more info on these lionesses once more people have studied how their families work.  

(via crunkfeministcollective)

Source: National Geographic

The media is only perpetuating ignorance and inciting...

alltheblacksheep:

rashadsays:

The media is only perpetuating ignorance and inciting false hope by blowing up with articles and stories regarding the first person being “cured” of HIV.

Here are the facts:

  1. The person in question is a toddler. A baby girl. She was infected by her HIV-positive mother, who didn’t receive the proper, recommended care for her condition during gestation. 
  2. She wasn’t cured. She was functionally cured. And that, in itself, was a medical fluke — not a marvel. More on that below.
  3. She was administered a highly concentrated cocktail of three antiretroviral drugs within her first 30 hours outside of the womb. Before the HIV lab test results even came back. 
  4. Two tests were done an hour apart from each other shortly after birth, and the baby was positive, but with a fairly low reading of 20,000 copies per milliliter (c/mL) of HIV RNA. But the fact that she tested positive so early in life was indicative of the time of her infection: likely to have been in the womb, rather than during delivery.
  5. Her atypical treatment regimen was prescribed in an effort to suppress the virus before it progressed to tissue/cells colloquially referred to as viral reservoirs…anatomical areas where latent viral infections are at the peak of their persistence. 
  6. 2.5 years later, the anonymous baby girl tested HIV “negative” — due the fact that her viral traces are so low, they can’t be picked up by standard clinical tests. She’s been off treatment for over eight months. This is the definition of a functional cure. 
  7. Researchers as well as the virologist who treated her made it a point to stress that her current state is largely attributed to the intensity and the timing of the treatment — in absence of prophylactic measures.
  8. This is the second reported case of an HIV “cure.” In 2007 a man famously known as the “Berlin patient,” Mr. Timothy Brown garnered the media’s attention. He was battling both Leukemia and HIV, when he received a bone marrow transplant to treat the latter. The bone marrow he received was from a person with an HIV-resistent mutation, one only found in 1% of the caucasian population. And thus, he is now HIV-free.  

What does this all mean? There still isn’t a medical cure for HIV. And that girl, as well as Mr. Brown are no more than fortunate and blessed. 

guys, please. signal boost this. i already knew some of the facts when i first saw the reports on tumblr but i wasn’t sure about the whole story.

this is the kind of shit that needs to make it onto the tumblr radar, not nonsensical drawings that pass as “abstract art”.

science-y. a lot of medical science gets distorted by media reporting (e.g. ingestion of cholesterol and sodium as bad for everyone), and that’s on top of questionable methods.

Source: rashadsays

random obs

dagseoul:

lot of anarchists in the cultural and earth sciences. lot of capitalist biologists and physicists.

not surprising since biology and physics are getting and making the big bucks, and are considered “valuable” fields of study and knowledge by Western education schooling systems, whereas the cultural and earth sciences continue to get shat on, left and right…

1ucasvb: The familiar trigonometric functions can be geometrically derived from a circle. But what if, instead of the circle, we used a regular polygon? In this animation, we see what the “polygonal sine” looks like for the square and the hexagon. The polygon is such that the inscribed circle has radius 1. We still want to keep using the angle from the x-axis as the function’s input, instead of the distance along the polygon’s boundary. (These are only the same value for the circle!) This is why the square does not trace a straight diagonal line, as you may expect, but a segment of the tangent function. In other words, the speed of the dot around the polygon is not constant anymore. Since these polygons are not perfectly symmetrical like the circle, the function will depend on the orientation of the polygon. More on this subject and derivations of the functions can be found in this other post Now you can also listen to what these waves sound like. This technique is general for any polar curve. Here’s a heart’s sine function, for instance OMFG this reminds me of my neuro classes. it blew my mind when one of my profs showed this to us. 
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1ucasvb:

The familiar trigonometric functions can be geometrically derived from a circle.

But what if, instead of the circle, we used a regular polygon?

In this animation, we see what the “polygonal sine” looks like for the square and the hexagon. The polygon is such that the inscribed circle has radius 1.

We still want to keep using the angle from the x-axis as the function’s input, instead of the distance along the polygon’s boundary. (These are only the same value for the circle!) This is why the square does not trace a straight diagonal line, as you may expect, but a segment of the tangent function. In other words, the speed of the dot around the polygon is not constant anymore.

Since these polygons are not perfectly symmetrical like the circle, the function will depend on the orientation of the polygon.

More on this subject and derivations of the functions can be found in this other post

Now you can also listen to what these waves sound like.

This technique is general for any polar curve. Here’s a heart’s sine function, for instance

OMFG this reminds me of my neuro classes. it blew my mind when one of my profs showed this to us. 

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