fetters:

This is a scan of a page in the January 2012 issue of National Geographic. In particular, it’s a page from an article about twins, and there’s a section in the article about two identical twins, John and Sam, who have both been diagnosed as autistic, but inhabit wildly different points on the autism spectrum. It’s really interesting to think about these boys who share the same genetic makeup, yet express very differently a disorder that is considered to be largely hereditary. John and Sam (and many other similar stories) have prompted some researchers to examine the role that epigenetics (variability in expression of the underlying genome) plays in autism. In the case of John and Sam, John needed to undergo heart surgery at a very young age (less than four months) and was on antibiotics for a long while after the procedure. Thus, in that crucial developmental period, John and Sam were in radically different chemical environments. How much of a role this could play in gene expression and, in turn, what role this could have in the development of autism are still very much unanswered questions, but they are promising lines of scientific inquiry.

Also, John and Sam are my brothers, and I think this is an absolutely adorable picture of them.

File this under Things I need to reference to myself on a daily basis

(via noseclams)

timeimmemorial:

Still from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Friedrich Nietzsche writes:

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.

I’m not going to lie; I read the plot summary for Melancholia and I thought it was probably the most pretentious and self-important thing I had read that day until this Nietzsche quote was referenced with it.

Lotsa thoughts.

emptycupboard:

(by Niiiiiiiick)

Time Immemorial.: There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more... ›