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wow so many emotions just came rushing back, old school aim :’(

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Oxytocin, chemical addiction and the science of love

Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people

OVER the course of history it has been artists, poets and playwrights who have made the greatest progress in humanity’s understanding of love. Romance has seemed as inexplicable as the beauty of a rainbow. But these days scientists are challenging that notion, and they have rather a lot to say about how and why people love each other.

Is this useful? The scientists think so. For a start, understanding the neurochemical pathways that regulate social attachments may help to deal with defects in people’s ability to form relationships. All relationships, whether they are those of parents with their children, spouses with their partners, or workers with their colleagues, rely on an ability to create and maintain social ties. Defects can be disabling, and become apparent as disorders such as autism and schizophrenia — and, indeed, as the serious depression that can result from rejection in love. Research is also shedding light on some of the more extreme forms of sexual behaviour. And, controversially, some utopian fringe groups see such work as the doorway to a future where love is guaranteed because it will be provided chemically, or even genetically engineered from conception.

The scientific tale of love begins innocently enough, with voles. The prairie vole is a sociable creature, one of the only 3% of mammal species that appear to form monogamous relationships. Mating between prairie voles is a tremendous 24-hour effort. After this, they bond for life. They prefer to spend time with each other, groom each other for hours on end and nest together. They avoid meeting other potential mates. The male becomes an aggressive guard of the female. And when their pups are born, they become affectionate and attentive parents. However, another vole, a close relative called the montane vole, has no interest in partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing is that these vast differences in behaviour are the result of a mere handful of genes. The two vole species are more than 99% alike, genetically.

piestorm:

hugs

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“Are you anybody else’s missing piece?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, maybe you want to be your own piece?”

“I can be someone’s and still my own.”

Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece

(Source: leslieleslie, via purpleishboots)

wildinwoods:

Learn how to relax.

macaca fuscata!

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emergentfutures:

Scientists Create World’s Tiniest Ear

“Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world’s tiniest ear. The “nano-ear,” a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing. Researchers suggest the work could open up a whole new field of “acoustic microscopy,” in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.”

Full Story: Sciencemag

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

The badass you see before you none other than Nellie Bly — the woman who pioneered investigative journalism and my hero. 

To fully appreciate this woman for everything she was, you have to understand that there were like maybe two female reporters in the whole country in the late 1800s, and both of them were writing about flowers and cotillions. 

Nellie Bly got her first job when she wrote The Pittsburgh Dispatch an angry letter to the editor because some asshole columnist was super sexist. The editor, Erasmus Wilson, who was also the columnist, read the letter, thought it was fiesty, and decided to hire her.

The editors gave her a few real stories at first but then put her on the women’s beat — you know, flowers and cotillions.  She tried a couple of times to get off it and do real journalism, even went to Mexico and did some culture reporting, but to no avail. 

So she sent quite a scathing two weeks notice to Wilson and went up to New York City, where, wouldn’t you know it, people still weren’t too keen on the idea of a female reporter. She spent six months knocking on every newsroom door in the city before finally The New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer, gave her a chance. 

The editor there, probably trying to give her some impossible task, told her to go write a feature story about conditions inside the local insane asylum. But the only way to do that would be to get yourself committed.

So that’s just what she did, before any other reporter ever thought to go undercover to get the story.

Nellie came up with a fake identity, fooled a bunch of psychiatrists, and spent ten days inside Blackwell’s Island. And while conditions in asylums and health care homes are still often abusive, back then it was a guarantee. People use to send their family members there if they acted weird of if they just got sick of them, and often you didn’t get fed properly, you were beaten, sexually abused, and subjected to all kinds of pioneering psychological tests. Once you went in, it was doubtful that you’d ever come out. 

Not only did Nellie manage to make her way out after ten days, with the help of her editor, who was afraid he had accidentally stuck Nellie with spending the rest of her life in that awful place. She wrote a series of articles about Blackwell that absolutely shocked New York and forced psychiatrists and care facilitators to start treating their patients with a little more humanity. And then Nellie moved on and continued to go undercover on important social issues and later decided to see if she could go around the world in less than 80 days. 

In other words, Nellie Bly was a star reporter despite the limitations on her sex, and if someone told her she couldn’t do something, she’d go out of her way to prove them wrong. Making her my ultimate historical journalism crush.

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