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Think drug-induced hallucinations, and the whirly, spirally, tunnel-vision-like patterns of psychedelic imagery immediately spring to mind. But it's not just hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, cannabis or mescaline that conjure up these geometric structures. People have reported seeing them in near-death experiences, as a result of disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia, following sensory deprivation, or even just after applying pressure to the eyeballs. So common are these geometric hallucinations, that in the last century scientists began asking themselves if they couldn't tell us something fundamental about how our brains are wired up. And it seems that they can.
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A group of physicists, engineers, physiologists, and neurosurgeons at University of Washington discovered that brains hooked up to computers quickly adapt, and even grow stronger. For the study, published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested what happened to people who learned to harness the electrical signals in their brains to control a computer cursor.
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80 eclipse images were taken during totality by means of a Canon EOS 5D digital camera equipped with approx. 1 m focal length lens. Unfortunately a lot of images were influenced by clouds and that is why the composition of all images in one resulting image was impossible. Finally 31 images were chosen. About 550 other images (dark frames and flat-fields) were used for eclipse images calibration. The resulting image shows not only the inner corona in the delicate details but also the lunar surface is recorded in a quality not very far from an image taken during the full moon.
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WTF?!
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Christopher Hitchens’ documentary on Mother Teresa.
