…at their fittest, professional cyclists have hearts that are up to 40 percent larger than normal.
via Tour de France Riders Need ‘Mutant’ Bodies : Discovery News.
Archive for the 'Science' Category
C’est l’histoire d’un homme, Jure Robic, qui ne dort que 90 minutes ou moins lors d’évènement d’ultra-cyclisme. Il perd carrément la tête. Au deuxième jour, ses conversations sont saccadé. Au troisième, il est belligérant et paranoïaques, perd la mémoire à cours terme. Par la suite, les hallucinations commences: loup, ours, extra-terrestres, Mujahedeen.
‘‘He pushes himself into madness,’’ says Tomaz Kovsca, a journalist for Slovene television. ‘‘He pushes too far.’’ Rajko Petek, a 35-year-old fellow soldier and friend who is on Robic’s support crew, says: ‘‘What Jure does is frightening. Sometimes during races he gets off his bike and walks toward us in the follow car, very angry.’’
What do you do then?
Petek glances carefully at Robic, standing a few yards off. ‘‘We lock the doors,’’ he whispers.
When he overhears, Robic heartily dismisses their unease. ‘‘They are joking!’’ he shouts. ‘‘Joking!’’ But in quieter moments, he acknowledges their concern, even empathizes with it — though he’s quick to assert that nothing can be done to fix the problem. Robic seems to regard his racetime bouts with mental instability as one might regard a beloved but unruly pet: awkward and embarrassing at times, but impossible to live without.
‘‘During race, I am going crazy, definitely,’’ he says, smiling in bemused despair. ‘‘I cannot explain why is that, but it is true.’’
‘‘All my life I was pushed away,’’ he says. ‘‘I get the feeling that I’m not good enough to be the good one. And so now I am good at something, and I want revenge to prove to all the people who thought I was some kind of loser. These feelings are all the time present in me. They are where my power is coming from.’’
Via kottke.org
“The SDO images are stunning and the level of detail they reveal will undoubtedly lead to a new branch of research into how the fine-scale solar magnetic fields form and evolve, leading to a much, much better understanding of how solar activity develops,” co-investigator Professor Richard Harrison from the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).
“It’s like looking at the details of our star through a microscope,” he told BBC News.
via BBC News.
Je pensais même pas que c’était possible. C’est assez extraordinaire.
Un homme découvre qu’il est le père d’un seul de ses jumeaux.
C’est un ours qui a perdu son poil. Bizarrement, les ours femelles du zoo de Liepzig ont toutes perdu leurs poils.
LIFE magazine nous présente 30 inventions qui font douter du génie humain. Les tomates crient quand nous les tranchons, semble-t-il.
Il y a rien de tel que des plantes au ralenti, mais ça, c’est le sommet, la nature fait de belle chose.
Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid known as a pitfall trap. It has been widely assumed that the various sorts of pitfall trap evolved from rolled leaves, with selection pressure favouring more deeply cupped leaves over evolutionary time. However, some pitcher plant genera (such as Nepenthes) are placed within clades consisting mostly of flypaper traps: this indicates that this view may be too simplistic, and some pitchers may have evolved from flypaper traps by loss of mucilage. — Wikipedia
Big picture nous présente encore des images survoltantes! Pour comprendre le plus grand que nous, il faut regarder vers le plus petit. Est-ce qu’ils sont conscient de notre présence ?
Peering into the micro world – The Big Picture – Boston.com.
A factory in Germany has launched production of a super thin electronic reader that was developed at Cambridge University.
Le tout, sous la supervision de Ninja.