(Source: acolorfulquiet, via dontsaytoomuch)
(Source: acolorfulquiet, via dontsaytoomuch)
A Lenticular Cloud Over New Zealand
Credit & Copyright: Chris Picking
Retrograde Mars
Credit & Copyright: Tunç Tezel (TWAN)
Explanation: Why would Mars appear to move backwards? Most of the time, the apparent motion of Mars in Earth’s sky is in one direction, slow but steady in front of the far distant stars. About every two years, however, the Earth passes Mars as they orbit around the Sun. During the most recent such pass over the last year, the proximity of Mars made the red planet appear larger and brighter than usual. Also during this time, Mars appeared to move backwards in the sky, a phenomenon called retrograde motion. Pictured above is a series of images digitally stacked so that all of the stars images coincide.
Residenz, one of the largest and most beautiful baroque palaces in Wurzburg, Bavaria . This magnificent Baroque palace was created under the patronage of the prince-bishops Lothar Franz and Friedrich Carl von Schonborn in the 18th century. It took sixty years to complete; the palace was built from 1720 to 1744 and the interior finished in 1780.
(via whitewoood)
(Source: 2headedsnake, via girlwitharock)
cwnl:
Science Back In Lucid Dreaming
Photo: “Paul McCartney - Dream” by Amy Lehrman
The contents of a person’s dream have been revealed by brain scan for the first time, scientists report in the Nov. 8 Current Biology. By monitoring the brain of a man who has unusual control over his dreaming, the accomplishment brings researchers closer to understanding how the brain spins its nightly yarns.
“It’s really exciting that people have done this,” says sleep researcher Edward Pace-Schott at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And it also brings back lucid dreaming as a very powerful scientific tool.”
Lucid dreaming is the rare ability to direct behaviors while in a deep sleep. By all objective measures, the person is dead to the world: Most muscles are paralyzed and the eyes are doing the quick jitters that characterize REM, the main dreaming phase of sleep. But at the same time, the lucid dreamer knows that he is dreaming and can control the scenes, says study coauthor Michael Czisch of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. “The world is open to do everything.”
Czisch and his team set out to catch a lucid dreamer’s brain activity with an fMRI machine. Instead of creating complex fantasias of flying over the Alps, scaling buildings or slaying dragons, six experienced lucid dreamers were asked to squeeze their left hands and then their right hands repeatedly in a dream. “It’s a rather easy thing to do,” Czisch says. “If it’s a random dream, things would be much more complicated.”
Full Article: Feat opens the door to probing the stuff of nocturnal dramas
(via mothernaturenetwork)
a very happy 30th birthday to my sweet husband! (by weaver_brown)
Grouchy, antagonistic, and brilliant, according to those who knew him, Marvin Israel was a relatively unknown man of great cultural power, not least in the world of photography. As art director for Harper’s Bazaar in the sixties, Israel published the work of Richard Avedon and Walker Evans alongside that of less established photographers such as Bill Brandt and Lee Friedlander.
In a one-night event on December 15th, Aperture Foundation will be screening the documentary “Who Is Marvin Israel?” along with a slide show and talk by Diane Arbus. Click through for a selection of Israel’s magazine, book, and personal work: http://nyr.kr/rCZerA
