Mental Junk Drawer
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Constructs Laura Kicey
Construct is a series of images of places that do not exist. Their composite parts are the culmination of the ongoing photo-explorations of the artist. Using these photographic pieces, collected over three years, the artist blends together the intricate details of doors, bricks, peeling paint and mortar and gives them a new color and place of their own.
(via exhibition-ism)
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22 April 2014
Nobel Nerves
Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini – born on this day in 1909 – received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, along with Stanley Cohen, for their discovery that a protein called nerve growth factor plays a key role in the development of the nervous system. But particularly remarkable is how Levi-Montalcini managed to conduct her research at a time when Mussolini prevented non-Aryan Italian citizens from having academic careers. This impelled Levi-Montalcini to set up a laboratory in her bedroom at her family home in Turin. Following heavy bombing by English and American forces, she left Turin to rebuild her mini-laboratory in a cottage in the country. When the German army invaded Italy, she fled to Florence to work as a doctor for war refugees. After the war, she went to Washington University, St. Louis, USA, and remained there for thirty years. She died in December 2012 aged 103.
Written by Nick Kennedy
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Image courtesy of audrey_sel on Flickr
Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence—
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“Strong is the New Pretty” is a new photo series by Kate Parker which shows her two daughters and their friends “just as they are: loud, athletic, fearless, messy, joyous, frustrated. I wanted to celebrate them, just as they are, and show them that is enough. Being pretty or perfect is not important. Being who they are is.”
Photos by Kate T. Parker.
(via npr)
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20 March 2014
Plague Particulars
The fall of the Romans is usually attributed to the 6th century Justinian Plague that killed a quarter of the earth’s population and struck a final blow to the ailing empire. Although Yersinia pestis – the bacterium causing the later ‘Black Death’ – was known to be responsible, our understanding of this pandemic was scant. But recently scientists obtained the DNA profile of the Y. pestis strain from the teeth of two skeletons found buried with beads dating them to 525–550AD. Using the DNA sequence, this strain could be positioned on the family tree of all Y. pestis taken from human infections. It was found to merit its own branch on the tree, with no descendants. In contrast, the strain that caused the 1348 European plague is the grandparent of all modern plague infections worldwide. This suggests that different plague strains emerged from their rodent hosts separately and repeatedly.
Written by Rhiannon Grant
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Image courtesy of Michaela Harbeck
University of Munich, Germany
Reprinted with permission from Elsevier (The Lancet)
Research published in the Lancet, January 2014—
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February 6, 1945: Bob Marley Is Born
On this day in 1945, Nesta Robert Marley was born in Jamaica. Bob Marley became famous for infusing social issues into his lyrics. Although his life was cut short by cancer at the age of 36, Marley is considered to be one of the most influential musicians of the 20th Century.
Remember Bob Marley with PBS NewsHour’s commemorative photo gallery.
Photo: Bob Marley live in concert in Dalymount Park on July 6th, 1980 (Wikimedia Commons).(via npr)
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(via nysci)
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#Texas in my breakfast.
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February 4, 1861: The Confederate States of America is formed.
In November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln, a one-term U.S. representative and candidate for the newly-formed Republican Party, was elected President of the United States with just under 40% of the popular vote. Rather than remain in a union whose president had won the election with a party promising “free labor, free land, free men”, seven southern slaveholding states seceded. The first was South Carolina, birthplace of John C. Calhoun and historical hotbed of states’ rights sentiment, and the last of the original seven was Texas, which seceded in February, a little over a month before Lincoln took office.
Six delegates convened in Montgomery, Alabama in the chambers of the state senate on February 4, 1861. Their first meeting marked the founding of the Confederate States of America, and in the coming months the Montgomery Convention drafted a Constitution and appointed former Secretary of War and veteran congressman Jefferson Davis president opposite the comparatively inexperienced Abraham Lincoln. In his Cornerstone Speech (March 21, 1861), the Confederate States’ vice president Alexander Stephens asserted that “our peculiar institution African slavery“ was the "immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution”. He also declared that the founding principle of the new Confederate state, for which hundreds of thousands of lives would soon be spent, should be the principle of black racial inferiority:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
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