All we ever see of stars...

xombiedirge: Madness is the Emergency Exit by Alex...

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:15:19 -0700

Close Up Detail

Madness is the Emergency Exit by Alex Kirzhner / Tumblr / Store

Part of the Arch Nemesis art show at the Hero Complex Gallery / Facebook.

xombiedirge: Evil Dead by Matt...

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:33:41 -0700

Close Up Detail

xombiedirge:

Evil Dead by Matt Ferguson / Tumblr / Website / Twitter

Photo

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:02:39 -0700

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Sat, 11 May 2013 22:21:39 -0700

xombiedirge: Alucard by Mindy Lee

Wed, 08 May 2013 07:27:36 -0700

xombiedirge:

Alucard by Mindy Lee

the-absolute-funniest-posts: This post has been featured on a...

Wed, 08 May 2013 07:27:19 -0700

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

This post has been featured on a 1000notes.com blog.

beautilation: “I’ll never forget the day Marilyn and I were...

Tue, 07 May 2013 23:01:08 -0700

beautilation:

“I’ll never forget the day Marilyn and I were walking around New York City, just having a stroll on a nice day. She loved New York because no one bothered her there like they did in Hollywood, she could put on her plain-jane clothes and no one would notice her. She loved that. So as we we’re walking down Broadway, she turns to me and says ‘Do you want to see me become her?’ I didn’t know what she meant but I just said ‘Yes’- and then I saw it. I don’t know how to explain what she did because it was so very subtle, but she turned something on within herself that was almost like magic. And suddenly cars were slowing and people were turning their heads and stopping to stare. They were recognizing that this was Marilyn Monroe as if she pulled off a mask or something, even though a second ago nobody noticed her. I had never seen anything like it before.” - Amy Greene, wife of Marilyn’s personal photographer Milton Greene

Neuroscience: Mind-body Genomics

Tue, 07 May 2013 06:27:21 -0700

Neuroscience: Mind-body Genomics:

neurosciencestuff:

A new study from investigators at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center finds that eliciting the relaxation response—a physiologic state of deep rest induced by practices such as meditation, yoga, deep breathing and prayer—produces immediate changes in the expression of genes involved in immune function, energy metabolism and insulin secretion.

“Many studies have shown that mind/body interventions like the relaxation response can reduce stress and enhance wellness in healthy individuals and counteract the adverse clinical effects of stress in conditions like hypertension, anxiety, diabetes and aging,” said Herbert Benson, HMS professor of medicine at Mass General and co-senior author of thereport.

Benson is director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute.

“Now for the first time we’ve identified the key physiological hubs through which these benefits might be induced,” he said.

Published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the study combined advanced expression profiling and systems biology analysis to both identify genes affected by relaxation response practice and to determine the potential biological relevance of those changes.

“Some of the biological pathways we identify as being regulated by relaxation response practice are already known to play specific roles in stress, inflammation and human disease. For others, the connections are still speculative, but this study is generating new hypotheses for further investigation,” said Towia Libermann, HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess and co-senior author of the study.

Benson first described the relaxation response—the physiologic opposite of the fight-or-flight response—almost 40 years ago, and his team has pioneered the application of mind/body techniques to a wide range of health problems. Studies in many peer-reviewed journals have documented how the relaxation response both alleviates symptoms of anxiety and many other disorders and also affects factors such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen consumption and brain activity.

In 2008, Benson and Libermann led a study finding that long-term practice of the relaxation response changed the expression of genes involved with the body’s response to stress. The current study examined changes produced during a single session of relaxation response practice, as well as those taking place over longer periods of time.

The study enrolled a group of 26 healthy adults with no experience in relaxation response practice, who then completed an 8-week relaxation-response training course.

Before they started their training, they went through what was essentially a control group session: Blood samples were taken before and immediately after the participants listened to a 20-minute health education CD and again 15 minutes later. After completing the training course, a similar set of blood tests was taken before and after participants listened to a 20-minute CD used to elicit the relaxation response as part of daily practice.

The sets of blood tests taken before the training program were designated “novice,” and those taken after training completion were called “short-term practitioners.” For further comparison, a similar set of blood samples was taken from a group of 25 individuals with 4 to 25 years’ experience regularly eliciting the relaxation response through many different techniques before and after they listened to the same relaxation response CD.

Blood samples from all participants were analyzed to determine the expression of more than 22,000 genes at the different time points.

The results revealed significant changes in the expression of several important groups of genes between the novice samples and those from both the short- and long-term sets. Even more pronounced changes were shown in the long-term practitioners.

A systems biology analysis of known interactions among the proteins produced by the affected genes revealed that pathways involved with energy metabolism, particularly the function of mitochondria, were upregulated during the relaxation response. Pathways controlled by activation of a protein called NF-κB—known to have a prominent role in inflammation, stress, trauma and cancer—were suppressed after relaxation response elicitation. The expression of genes involved in insulin pathways was also significantly altered.

“The combination of genomics and systems biology in this study provided great insight into the key molecules and physiological gene interaction networks that might be involved in relaying beneficial effects of relaxation response in healthy subjects,” said Manoj Bhasin, HMS assistant professor of medicine, co-lead author of the study, and co-director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Center.

Bhasin noted that these insights should provide a framework for determining, on a genomic basis, whether the relaxation response will help alleviate symptoms of diseases triggered by stress. The work could also lead to developing biomarkers that may suggest how individual patients will respond to interventions.

Benson stressed that the long-term practitioners in this study elicited the relaxation response through many different techniques—various forms of meditation, yoga or prayer—but those differences were not reflected in the gene expression patterns.

“People have been engaging in these practices for thousands of years, and our finding of this unity of function on a basic-science, genomic level gives greater credibility to what some have called ‘new age medicine,’ ” he said.

“While this and our previous studies focused on healthy participants, we currently are studying how the genomic changes induced by mind/body interventions affect pathways involved in hypertension, inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. We have also started a study—a collaborative undertaking between Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Mass General and Beth Israel Deaconess—in patients with precursor forms of multiple myeloma, a condition known to involve activation of NF-κB pathways,” said Libermann, who is the director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Center.

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 06:19:59 -0700

fuckyeahnerdpr0n: source?

Mon, 06 May 2013 22:14:22 -0700

Girl Flash

Emerald Arrow

Nightingale

Cygirl

Lady Aqua

fuckyeahnerdpr0n:

source?

misterjuantastic: Adam Thompson’s “Heroic Words Of Wisdom”

Mon, 06 May 2013 21:56:30 -0700

misterjuantastic:

Adam Thompson’s “Heroic Words Of Wisdom”

mcchrisforeverrr: may the fourth be with you!

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:47:52 -0700

mcchrisforeverrr:

may the fourth be with you!

thespacegoat: • Accidentally close a tab? Ctrl+Shift+T reopens...

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:21:22 -0700

thespacegoat:

• Accidentally close a tab? Ctrl+Shift+T reopens it.
• Bananas release dopamine, eat them when you’re sad.
• CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is the one handed version of CTRL+ALT+DEL
• Don’t brush your teeth hard, it makes them sensitive and removes enamel.
• Don’t like spiders? Put citronella oil on your walls and they will not go there.
• Drink one glass of water for every alcoholic drink you have, you’ll get drunk without getting a hangover.
• Get clear ice cubes by boiling water before freezing it
• Heal paper cuts and immediately stop the pain with chapstick.
• If you accidentally write on your dry erase board with a permanent marker, scribble over it with a dry eraser marker to remove it.
• If your shoes smell, put them in the freezer overnight, it will kill the bacteria.
• Make bug bites stop itching with a banana peel.
• Make a paper longer with 12-point text, but 14-point periods and commas.
• Need to get around a blocked website at work? Try replacing the http:// with https://
• Never send your resume as a word file (unless asked) Instead, print it to a pdf file, it’s much cleaner and professional looking.
• Pick a flavor of gum you don’t normally chew, and chew it while studying during a test.
• Place a piece of bread in a container with your homemade cookies and they will stay soft.
• Put a dry towel into a dryer with wet clothes, they will dry faster.
• Put toothpaste on a pimple and it will dry out.
• Practise fake smiling in the mirror every day before going to work/school, you’ll genuinely start to feel happier.
• Rub canola/olive oil on knives before cutting onions, you won’t cry, alternatively chew gum and you won’t either.
• Short on time with a wrinkled dress shirt? Hang it up in the bathroom to steam it flat.
• The night before, place things you don’t want to forget the next morning on top of your shoes.
• Use hydrogen peroxide to remove blood stains from clothing.
• When cleaning windows use newspapers or coffee filters instead of paper towels, they will not leave streaks.
• When microwaving bread products/pizza put a glass of water in with it, it will keep your bread for going spongy.
• When you move into a new place you’re renting, take pictures of any and all damage, then post them on facebook (privately if preferred) so you can use the reference date as proof you didn’t do it.
• When searching plane tickets online delete your cookies prior, prices go up when you visit a site multiple times.

theclearlydope: Friday is brought to you by Queen Amy.

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:56:53 -0700

theclearlydope:

Friday is brought to you by Queen Amy.

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Wed, 01 May 2013 11:54:06 -0700

novocainelipstick: Tura Satana was a...

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:23:09 -0700

novocainelipstick:

Tura Satana was a Japanese-Scots-Irish-Native American actress and former dancer. At school she was constantly harassed for her large breasts and asian appearance, and at the age of 9 she was gang raped by 5 men walking home from school. None of her attackers were prosecuted (the judge was reportedly paid off) so Tura took it in her stride to take up martial arts and learnt Aikido and Karate and over the next 15 years tracked down each rapist and extracted her own revenge.

Not even a stint in reform school could stop this woman, she became the leader of a gang she started with the other students and in her words they “had leather motorcycle jackets, jeans and boots and kicked butt.”

She played Varla in Russ Meyer’s “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” in which she did all her own stunts and improvised most of the films best lines including a scene when a gas attendant stares at her breasts and says how he’d like to travel America to which Varla replies “You wont find it down there Columbus.”

Bad Bitch Ambitions

“You could fix jukeboxes with that hair”

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:02:22 -0700

“You could fix jukeboxes with that hair”

Photo

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:41:20 -0700

Post it notes from a stay-at-home dad (part 1)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:05:58 -0700

Post it notes from a stay-at-home dad

(part 1)

thebadkidblog: So let me tell you about the shittiest parent...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:29:25 -0700

thebadkidblog:

So let me tell you about the shittiest parent on the motherfucking planet.

I work at a grocery store and this man comes in with his 11 year old son. He buys a pack a cigarettes and a two cases of beer. The son was holding a two dollar drawing pad and placed it on the belt and I guess the dad didn’t notice it at first but when I was about to scan the pad he asked where’d it have come from and turned towards the kid and asked “Did you put that shit up there?”. He told me to put it back and then told his 11 year old child that he “ain’t paying for that gay ass notebook.”. So I looked at the kid, who was close to tears and saying how he ran out of paper at home and my heart broke. So I gave the pad to him, for free, and told the dad I would take care of it. I gave the kid some tokens for a game outside and said I would look forward to buying some of his drawings and paintings when he’s all famous. He kids face was so priceless and I thought everything was good. But then, about 10 ten minutes after giving the kid his notebook, I walked outside and saw this. The drawing pad all ripped up and tossed on the pavement. I could only imagine what happened in the parking lot, but I know that that poor kid heart is fucking ripped apart, just like this pad.

I’m fucking horrified that there are parents like this, who, just because it’s not masculine or gender specificthey won’t let their children follow their true passions or explore interests that lead to their happiness. Even more so, I’m horrified that parents don’t care about the fine arts anymore because it doesn’t have job security. Since when did it ever matter to a child if their passion makes them money or not? Parenting is about supporting whatever makes your child happy. Have some fucking consideration for your child’s wants not your homophobic and anti-art ideals.