Category: Uncategorized

Ancient mentally ill community

Geel strikes the visitor as a quiet, tidy but otherwise unremarkable Belgian market town. Yet its story is unique. For more than 700 years its inhabitants have taken the mentally ill and disabled into their homes as guests or ‘boarders’. At times, these guests have numbered in the 1000s, and arrived from all over Europe. There are several 100 in residence today, sharing their lives with their host families for years, decades or even a lifetime.

Cheapium

In the search for cheaper materials that mimic their purer, more expensive counterparts, researchers are abandoning hunches and intuition for theoretical models and pure computing power.In a new study, researchers used computational methods to identify 10s of platinum-group alloys that were previously unknown to science but could prove beneficial in a wide range of applications.

i hadn’t thought beyond proteins, but computational chemistry can be used to find radically cheaper catalysts than platinum, and in general, revolutionize materials science. this is potentially a very big deal, as advances in materials science are one of the few areas that tend to benefit all of mankind equally.

Roman mummies


this egyptian mummy from the roman period reminds me of a certain lady from spain who “there, i fixed it” a painting. seen at the brooklyn museum, which has an amazing egyptian collection. mostly new kingdom, but also some middle and even some old kingdrom artifacts.