The Pineneedle Collective

Sunday, 16 June 2013

Thrifted Outift & Hybrids

This is a super comfortable outfit, which I have been wearing various iterations of (minus the wig) for basically the entire past week. I am so excited to finally be finished with exams in 4 days now, and getting back into some blogging! I really, really dislike exam time (who would like exams though, right?) because it involves a whole lot of not sleeping and stress-eating, and of course, not having any time to blog!

sweater - Thrifted dress -Thrifted belt - Thrifted hat - c/o Wholesale Necklace - Claire's (Japan)

Here's another cool thing from my exam-cramming (and more proof that studying science can be really interesting, whining about exams aside).

Zebroids are the types of animals you get when a horse breeds with a zebra (yep, that can happen!) However, because of what is known as "epigenetics", depending on if the mum or the dad was the horse or the zebra, the resulting offspring can vary greatly.

(image source)

I've talked about hybrid animals before (here), but never understood why the resulting offspring was different, depending on who the parent was.

For example, a cross between a female lion and a male tiger results in a tigon. But a cross between a male lion and a female tiger results in a liger.

Tigons and ligers, although both having one tiger parent and one lion parent, vary greatly in their characteristics. Ligers are really really big, whereas tigons are just the same size as their parents.

Below is a baby liger. Let me emphasise that. A baby liger.

(image source)

Why does which one was the mother, and which one was the father, cause such massive differences in the offspring?

Epigenetic imprinting is the cause of this. Certain genes can be switched on or off by a process called "methylation". Maternal (mum) genes and paternal (dad) genes are methylated in different places from each other.

So you get one set of genes from your mother, and one from your father. When they combine, there is almost like a competition for whose genes will be silenced, and whose genes will be expressed. Because of imprinting, depending on who the parent is, the genes that are ultimately expressed vary - leading to both ligers and tigons - even though the DNA sequence does not change (ligers and tigons are extremely genetically related, even though they look very different from one another).

Now I've got to get back to studying ;) You may not hear from me for a few days - I've got an exam tomorrow worth a ridiculous 75% of the course, and then another on Thursday! Anyway, wish me luck!

Wednesday, 12 June 2013

The Illusion of Reality

So I'm blogging again so soon... but I swear I'm not procrastinating on studying (maybe!)

Even though I've been non-stop studying the last few days, do you think I'd just wear comfortable clothes? Nah. This is about as "comfy" as I'll get, haha. I actually spent the morning in my pyjamas, but it's also nice to get dressed up for no reason - I feel like it helps me maintain my sanity! Which, at exam time, is always a good thing.

pants - c/o Sheinside

sweater - Thrifted

necklace - Claire's (Japan)

beanie - stolen from boyfriend

Here's more stuff that I'm trying to cram for my exams! But it's super interesting, don't worry ;)

So much of what we think are solid "facts" about the world we live in are entirely made up by our brains. I didn't realise this until this year, but there is nothing inherently "blue" about an electromagnetic wavelength of 450nm, or inherently "red" about a wavelength of 750nm - yet when these wavelengths of light hit our eyes, we experience blue and red colours.

Here's some amazing facts about colour vision and your brain (read these two posts about colour perception if you don't know much about it!)

Your brain keeps colours constant. A purple wig keeps on looking purple with different kinds of light shining on it (i.e. when you move from inside to outside). Outside light is really blue, but inside light is really yellow - yet the purple wig keeps looking basically the same colour the whole time - even though the actual light being reflected to your eye from the wig has changed vastly in wavelength.

And it's all got to do with context - you use the colour of other things in your world to determine what the colour of things should be. This is called colour constancy.

Don't believe me? Both of this girl's eyes are the exact same shade of grey.

Still don't believe me? This is what happens if you remove everything from the image except for the eyes.

(image from here)

There are also impossible colours that could never be perceived (though you can try here by crossing your eyes). This includes "bluish yellow" and "greenish red". You can't create them (I'm talking about mixing light here, not paints) - whenever you mix these opponent colours you just get grey. Apparently, you could never perceive these mixes of light. What's different about these colours that makes them different from mixing yellow and green, for instance? Again, this isn't anything unique about the physics of light - these colours are only "impossible" because your brain says so!

One more: after images (ignore the seedy music on the video, it's actually really cool.) Your brain makes up colours that don't even exist, just because it was tired of the ones it was looking at.

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Little Red Riding Hood in her Stripey Dress

I am still loving this cape I made the other day. If I get the time after my exams before I head off overseas, I will try and make a tutorial for it! Yep, that's something I have totally forgotten to mention - I'm travelling to Italy for a month in my uni break! I am probably the luckiest lady in the world, getting to travel overseas twice in one year. I am going to Italy because Luciano (who is Italian - could you have guessed from his name?) is going with his family, to meet with their 80+ relatives for the first time ever... and they are taking me along with them!

dress - c/o Cichic (and similar)

cape - DIY

tights - c/o OASAP

necklace - c/o Merrin & Gussy

I am currently into day 3 of the hardcore-studying-regime that I've implemented on myself, so that I will (hopefully) do well in my uni exams next week! So this video (via ASAPscience) seemed quite apt - the Science of Procrastination.

And in case you guys were wondering, this blogging that I'm doing now isn't my procrastination - it's my reward. I've been studying for 3 hours straight and doing a little bit of dopamine-releasing blogging is the reward for me finally wrapping my head around eukaryotic transcription regulation (woo hoo!)

Hope you're all having a more interesting day than me,

Saturday, 8 June 2013

Lady Vintage & Astrogardens

This dress has made me want to take up being a vintage lady full-time. Although the skirt takes up an entire seat on the bus, I love wearing petticoats and swishy vintage-style dresses probably more than any other style of clothing. Plus, basically everyone I interact with compliments me on this dress, which is never a bad thing.

Also, these shoes. They weren't even thrifted. They were free. As in... I found them on the side of the road during our "council collection", where people recycle things they don't want anymore. Now I know some people who would be ashamed by that, but I think that is a ridiculous attitude to have - I just gave them a quick clean, and now I have a brand new pair of (free) shoes, side-of-the-road and everything!

dress - Lady V London

petticoat - Ebay

cardigan - Thrifted

necklace - Claire's

shoes - Thrifted (in a way)
hat - c/o Wholesale

socks - c/o OASAP

I found a pretty cool Kickstarter project the other day. What with much talk lately about sending humans to live on Mars (through the Mars One project and organisations like NASA), there has been more investigation into practical aspects of living on Mars - like gardening. Sending a bunch of dehydrated food over to Mars would be expensive and impractical (and unhealthy), so if people ever want to live on Mars, then they will be need to be able to make their own food. Making a garden bed using Mars soil, with Mars temperatures, wind and gravity, would be a little difficult, however - so this is where the Astrogarden comes in.

The project is primarily an education and communication project right now, aiming to give information to kids and the public about what would be required to sustain people on Mars. However, it's also an ongoing research project. Check it out on Kickstarter here.

I hope that you're all having a gorgeous day so far!

Thursday, 6 June 2013

Lilac Stripes and Recording Your Dreams

Would it ruin these last few posts if I told you the main reason I took the photos all knees-up is because I fell down some stairs, hurt my ankle, and couldn't wear anything but giant comfy socks? Haha. Just *imagine* that I'm wearing some super cool lace-up creepers here, not fluffy pink bed socks.

I'm particularly in love with anything zebra-like lately, so these shorts from Sheinside are a welcome new addition to my wardrobe. They look great paired with a cropped shirt or cropped sweater of any kind. I can't wait to wear them together with some highly impractical shoes ;)

blouse - c/o Romwe
shorts - c/o Sheinside
tights - c/o OASAP

Enjoy this amazing video from ASAP science! Even though I'd already been introduced to most of the concepts in it, it still blew my mind!

I hope you're all very very well!

Tuesday, 4 June 2013

Dungarees & Split Brains

Boater hat + overalls = farmer girl(?) Maybe just a little bit. Not that there's anything wrong with that! I have to say that I don't ever want to take this new wig off, though. I love the colour and the curls, and the subtle gradient. One day, this will be my real hair. It's slowly (slowly!) getting there!

blouse - c/o EFoxCity
wig - c/o Milanoo
overalls - Thrifted in Japan (Wego)
hat - c/o Wholesale
necklace - Claire's (Japan)

I figured that a good way to study for my upcoming exams would be to teach you guys some of the interesting stuff I've learnt this year. So in honour of a neuroscience exam I have today, I'm going to talk about split-brain patients.

In order to cure debilitating epileptic fits in the mid-20th Century (and what is still used as a treatment in the most severe cases, when nothing else can be done), a technique was developed in neurosurgery to cut the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain - entirely cutting the millions of nerve fibres that allow both sides of your brain to communicate with one another. This type of surgery was generally seen as a success - patients seemed to regain normal function and no longer suffer from terrible seizures.

However, because this was such a radical altering of the brain's structure, psychologists wanted to know if these "split-brain" patients differed in any way from people whose brain was more properly connected. And a clever experiment demonstrated that the two halves of the brain could operate independently from one another, and also gave rise to important questions about consciousness.

Look at the image above. When split-brain patients are asked to say what they see in the image (when staring at the + only), they will say they only saw a heart.

But if then asked to draw what they saw with their left hand, they will draw a star.

When asked why they drew a star, rather than a heart, they will have no idea why - because they don't consciously recall "seeing" a star.

Crazy, right?

So what the right side of your body does is controlled by the left side of your brain, and vice versa. Also, everything from the left side of your visual field is interpreted by the right side of your brain, and vice versa.
The "split brain" phenomenon described above occurs because the left side of the brain is where the language centres of the brain are located (both of your hemispheres have most brain functions, but language is one of the few that is only found on one side of the brain). The right side of the brain, on the other hand, has no areas for processing and generating language.

So what is happening here, in "split brain" patients, is that information from the left side of the visual field is sent to the right side of the brain - which has no words for "star" because it has no language centre. But although it can't speak, it can draw. So it sends signals back to the left hand, and the left hand draws a star.

Of course, this brings up the interesting question of whether you can be truly "conscious" without language. Remember, the split-brain patients don't consciously remember seeing a star because the right-side of their brain doesn't have a word for it - and so is "consciousness" a product of language?

By the way, the idea that you are either "right-brained" or "left-brained", and that being "left-brained" means you are analytical and logical, and "right-brained" means you're emotional and artsy, is total crap. You use all your brain, both halves of it.
You are your whole brain. :)