Умные больше плачут: слезы развивают мозг

Плакать наши предки стали раньше, чем говорить - только так можно было сообщить соплеменникам о своих чувствах и мыслях

Среди всех жителей Земли человек - единственное существо, которое может рыдать от счастья или горя. Не удивительно ли, что довольно простая способность разводить мокроту столь уникальна? Почему она присуща только гомо сапиенс? Ответ на этот вопрос дает новая книга профессора неврологии из Университетского Колледжа Лондона Майкла Тримбла «Отчего людям нравится плакать».

Ogdoad of Hermopolis

Definition: The Ogdoad of Hermopolis was the group of gods who created the world, or at least the sun, according to Egyptian mythology centered in Hermopolis Magna. The Ennead of Heliopolis is a contrasting grouping of 9 creating Heliopolitan gods. A third cosmogony is the Memphis Theology, which is centered on the god Ptah.

Since the Ogdoad of Hermopolis is an Ogdoad, there are 8 deities, in 4 pairs of males and females. Their functions may be described as chaos and generation, eternity, darkness, and moisture, or as invisibility, endlessness, obscurity, and water, all perhaps in a primeval watery chaos. The pairs are spelled out in English as Amun and Amaunet, Heh (Huh) and Hehet, Kek and Keket, and Nun and Naunet, although spelling varies. Sometimes in later representations, the male (the first in each pair) is depicted as frog-headed and the female with a snake head, all generated spontaneously from the Nile mud.

Sideline quasars helped to stifle early galaxy formation

University of Colorado Boulder astronomers targeting one of the brightest quasars glowing in the universe some 11 billion years ago say "sideline quasars" likely teamed up with it to heat abundant helium gas billions of years ago, preventing small galaxy formation.

CU-Boulder Professor Michael Shull and Research Associate David Syphers used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at the quasar -- the brilliant core of an active galaxy that acted as a "lighthouse" for the observations -- to better understand the conditions of the early universe. The scientists studied gaseous material between the telescope and the quasar with a $70 million ultraviolet spectrograph on Hubble designed by a team from CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.