Ornithorhynchus Anatinus - Detail Of Bill

(Image caption: Measurement of brain activity in a patient with phantom limb pain. Credit: Osaka University)

Cause of phantom limb pain in amputees, and potential treatment, identified

Researchers have discovered that a ‘reorganisation’ of the wiring of the brain is the underlying cause of phantom limb pain, which occurs in the vast majority of individuals who have had limbs amputated, and a potential method of treating it which uses artificial intelligence techniques.

The researchers, led by a group from Osaka University in Japan in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, used a brain-machine interface to train a group of ten individuals to control a robotic arm with their brains. They found that if a patient tried to control the prosthetic by associating the movement with their missing arm, it increased their pain, but training them to associate the movement of the prosthetic with the unaffected hand decreased their pain.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrate that in patients with chronic pain associated with amputation or nerve injury, there are ‘crossed wires’ in the part of the brain associated with sensation and movement, and that by mending that disruption, the pain can be treated. The findings could also be applied to those with other forms of chronic pain, including pain due to arthritis.

Approximately 5,000 amputations are carried out in the UK every year, and those with type 1 or type 2 diabetes are at particular risk of needing an amputation. In most cases, individuals who have had a hand or arm amputated, or who have had severe nerve injuries which result in a loss of sensation in their hand, continue to feel the existence of the affected hand as if it were still there. Between 50 and 80 percent of these patients suffer with chronic pain in the ‘phantom’ hand, known as phantom limb pain.

“Even though the hand is gone, people with phantom limb pain still feel like there’s a hand there – it basically feels painful, like a burning or hypersensitive type of pain, and conventional painkillers are ineffective in treating it,” said study co-author Dr Ben Seymour, a neuroscientist based in Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “We wanted to see if we could come up with an engineering-based treatment as opposed to a drug-based treatment.”

A popular theory of the cause of phantom limb pain is faulty ‘wiring’ of the sensorimotor cortex, the part of the brain that is responsible for processing sensory inputs and executing movements. In other words, there is a mismatch between a movement and the perception of that movement.

In the study, Seymour and his colleagues, led by Takufumi Yanagisawa from Osaka University, used a brain-machine interface to decode the neural activity of the mental action needed for a patient to move their ‘phantom’ hand, and then converted the decoded phantom hand movement into that of a robotic neuroprosthetic using artificial intelligence techniques.

“We found that the better their affected side of the brain got at using the robotic arm, the worse their pain got,” said Yanagisawa. “The movement part of the brain is working fine, but they are not getting sensory feedback – there’s a discrepancy there.”

The researchers then altered their technique to train the ‘wrong’ side of the brain: for example, a patient who was missing their left arm was trained to move the prosthetic arm by decoding movements associated with their right arm, or vice versa. When they were trained in this counter-intuitive technique, the patients found that their pain significantly decreased. As they learned to control the arm in this way, it takes advantage of the plasticity – the ability of the brain to restructure and learn new things – of the sensorimotor cortex, showing a clear link between plasticity and pain.

Although the results are promising, Seymour warns that the effects are temporary, and require a large, expensive piece of medical equipment to be effective. However, he believes that a treatment based on their technique could be available within five to ten years. “Ideally, we’d like to see something that people could have at home, or that they could incorporate with physio treatments,” he said. “But the results demonstrate that combining AI techniques with new technologies is a promising avenue for treating pain, and an important area for future UK-Japan research collaboration.”

Corregidor Island, a small island at the entrance to Manila Bay. It is an important strategic point – whoever controls the island, controls Manila. And with it the Philippines. Since the Spanish first built a base on the island in 1570, Corregidor has been captured, and held, by the Dutch, the British, the Americans, the Japanese, and the Americans again.

It was taken in May 1942 by Japanese forces after months of near-constant bombardment. Corregidor marked the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese Empire. When American forces retook Corregidor in February 1945, it was another marker of the long, slow, and inexorable island-hopping campaign to push the Japanese back into Japan. That 1945 battle was the last action that Corregidor saw.

Today, it is an open-air museum. All across Corregidor are the ruins of the World War II military base, with bomb-ravaged buildings left as they were and many large guns still in place.

Sasando

pic: wikipedia

The sasando is a harp-like musical instrument from East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, specifically in the island of Rote. The name is derived from the Rote dialect word “sasandu” meaning “vibrating or sounded instrument.” It can have 28 or 56 strings.

There’s a folktale that explained the origins of the sasando. Once, there was a boy called Sangguana who lived in Rote. One day, he was tired and fell asleep under a palmyra tree, and dreamt that he played beautiful music with a unique instrument that made an enchanting sound. When he woke up, Sangguana was able to vividly remember the melody he played in the dream. He wanted to hear it once more, so he slept again, and dreamt of the same song and the same instrument. Sangguana had to wake up, eventually, but, not wanting to lose the instrument from his dream, he made an instrument out of palmyra leaves based on the one he saw in his dream, which became the basis for the sasando.

if you want to see how it sounds: (start 0:30)

When We Were Very Young A A Milne decorations by Ernest H Shepherd London Methuen & Co Ltd. Thirty Second Edition 1941 (Cheap Form) [First Published 1924]

The 38th poem in the book, “Teddy Bear”, that originally appeared in Punch magazine in February 1924, was the first appearance of the famous character Winnie-the-Pooh.

Is Polygamy a Natural Impulse?

A conversation with biologist David P. Barash on the biological underpinnings of human polygamy.

How hard-wired are human beings for polygamy?

Aristotle’s Wheel Paradox. Can you figure out what the paradox is? (What doesn’t make sense?) More info at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AristotlesWheelParadox.html

Do you any tips about using ms paint?

I think I have few tips

#1Use 500x500 px or bigger canvas size. Any smaller size will make a brush look messy and shit.Here look:

Can you see the difference?? Lineart in 600x600 px is so much smoother

#2

#3

#4 RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON YOU NEED IT

#5

*:・ﾟ✧it’s like manga : *✧・ﾟ

that’s all tbh

i hope this was somewhat helpful 

MALANG, INDONESIA

Kampung Warna-Warni (Village of Color)

This Indonesian village was revitalized by a vibrant rainbow paint job.

South of the city center in Malang, Indonesia, rows upon rows of monotonous white houses with brown roofs suddenly transform into a rainbow of vibrant colors bursting at every corner. What was formerly an impoverished village was transformed into an oasis of color and art, a project that has delighted visitors and revitalized the local community.

The village of Kampung Warna-Warni (Indonesian for “Village of Color”) was once drab and polluted, lacking the economic resources required to build a healthy community. But eight event management students from a nearby university lent a helping hand by applying their class skills to the real world. The students partnered with a local paint company looking to do a social responsibility project, which donated over 6,000 pounds of colorful paint, and voila, a hueless city got a brilliant new paint job.

Inspired by the favelas of Rio, every square inch of the rainbow village is coated in color, ranging from pastels of green and orange to pink and yellow. The bridge nearby the village is also painted, its beams erupting in magnificent blues and purples.

Although it may seem like the paint job would benefit visitors more than those actually living in the village, the makeover has revitalized the community. The beautiful colors improved the village’s standard of living by drawing in new tourist dollars, and the beauty of the colorful houses has inspired many community members to improve the sanitation of their river.

Everyday Phenomena: The Maillard Reaction

At first glance, steak, French fries, bread, milk caramel, and soy sauce don’t have very many similarities. However, the preparation of these foods all have one thing in common: browning that occurs via the Maillard (my-YAR) reaction.

The Maillard reaction was first discovered in 1912 by Louis-Camille Maillard, and refers to a long chain of reactions that ultimately leads to browning of food. This chain typically begins with the condensation of an amine (often the amino acid lysine) with a reducing sugar (containing an aldehyde); one example of this Amadori rearrangement is shown above with lysine and glucose.

This Amadori product can react in a variety of different ways, including dehydration and deamination to produce a diverse array of molecules that give browned food a distinctive flavor; a few of these compounds are shown above. At the end of the sequence of reactions that occur during browning is a class of polymeric compounds known as melanoidins, which lend a brown color to the food.

Below about 140°C (280°F), the Maillard reaction does not proceed at an appreciable rate, although alkaline conditions (such as the lye used to make pretzels) can accelerate the process. Without this reaction, many foods we enjoy now wouldn’t be nearly as tasty!

Further Reading: Hodge, J. E., J. Agric. Food Chem. 1953, 1 (15), 928-943 (Full text)

Ayasono, Ways to Tie an Obi, A New Publication (Shimpan obi musubisama kusagusa) 1920