Spock was so 100% right to go into that whale tank they went back there because they needed whales and he was the only one who had the sense to actually speak to a whale about the issue. That was a completely logical and rational minded decision and so what if he disrupted an aquarium tour. Scotty altered the course of technological advancement I think it’s fine if Spock startles a few marine biologists
FLORENCE — As early as 1595, descriptions of stains and discoloration began to appear in accounts of a sarcophagus in the graceful chapel Michelangelo created as the final resting place of the Medicis. In the ensuing centuries, plasters used to incessantly copy the masterpieces he sculpted atop the tombs left discoloring residues. His ornate white walls dimmed.
Nearly a decade of restorations removed most of the blemishes, but the grime on the tomb and other stubborn stains required special, and clandestine, attention. In the months leading up to Italy’s Covid-19 epidemic and then in some of the darkest days of its second wave as the virus raged outside, restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord.
“It was top secret,” said Daniela Manna, one of the art restorers.
On a recent morning, she reclined — like Michelangelo’s allegorical sculptures of Dusk and Dawn above her — and reached into the shadowy nook between the chapel wall and the sarcophagus to point at a dirty black square, a remnant showing just how filthy the marble had become.
She attributed the mess to one Medici in particular, Alessandro Medici, a ruler of Florence, whose assassinated corpse had apparently been buried in the tomb without being properly eviscerated. Over the centuries, he seeped into Michelangelo’s marble, the chapel’s experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations, and, more recently, providing a feast for the chapel’s preferred cleaning product, a bacteria called Serratia ficaria SH7.
“SH7 ate Alessandro,” Monica Bietti, former director of the Medici Chapels Museum, said as she stood in front of the now gleaming tomb, surrounded by Michelangelos, dead Medicis, tourists and an all-woman team of scientists, restorers and historians. Her team used bacteria that fed on glue, oil and apparently Alessandro’s phosphates as a bioweapon against centuries of stains.
In November 2019, the museum brought in Italy’s National Research Council, which used infrared spectroscopy that revealed calcite, silicate and other, more organic, remnants on the sculptures and two tombs that face one another across the New Sacristy.
That provided a key blueprint for Anna Rosa Sprocati, a biologist at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, to choose the most appropriate bacteria from a collection of nearly 1,000 strains, usually used to break down petroleum in oil spills or to reduce the toxicity of heavy metals. Some of the bugs in her lab ate phosphates and proteins, but also the Carrara marble preferred by Michelangelo.
“We didn’t pick those,” said Bietti.
Then the restoration team tested the most promising eight strains behind the altar, on a small rectangle palette spotted with rows of squares like a tiny marble bingo board. All of the ones selected, she said, were nonhazardous and without spores.
“It’s better for our health,” said Manna, after crawling out from under the sarcophagus. “For the environment, and the works of art.”
Sprocati said they first introduced the bacteria to Michelangelo’s tomb for Giuliano di Lorenzo, Duke of Nemours. That sarcophagus is graced with allegorical sculptures for Day, a hulking, twisted male figure, and Night, a female body Michelangelo made so smooth and polished as to seem as if she shone in moonlight. The team washed her hair with Pseudomonas stutzeri CONC11, a bacteria isolated from the waste of a tannery near Naples, and cleaned residue of casting molds, glue and oil off her ears with Rhodococcus sp. ZCONT, another strain which came from soil contaminated with diesel in Caserta.
It was a success. But Paola D’Agostino, who runs the Bargello Museums, which oversees the chapels and which will officially reveal the results of the project in June, preferred to play it safe on Night’s face. So did Bietti and Pietro Zander, a Vatican expert who joined them. They allowed the restorers to give her a facial of micro-gel packs of xanthan gum, a stabilizer often found in toothpaste and cosmetics that is derived from the Xanthomonas campestris bacteria. The head of the Duke Giuliano, hovering above his tomb, received similar treatment.
Then, in February 2020 Covid hit, closing the museum in March and interrupting the project.
Sprocati took her bugs elsewhere. In August, her group of biologists used bacteria isolated from a Naples industrial site to clean the wax left by centuries of votive candles from Alessandro Algardi’s baroque masterpiece, a colossal marble relief in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome of the Meeting of Attila and Pope Leo.
The bacteria strains got back to the Medici Chapel, which had reopened with reduced hours, in mid-October. Wearing white lab coats, blue gloves and anti-Covid surgical masks, Sprocati and the restorers spread gels with the SH7 bacteria — from soil contaminated by heavy metals at a mineral site in Sardinia — on the sullied sarcophagus of Lorenzo di Piero, Duke of Urbino, buried with his assassinated son Alessandro.
“It ate the whole night,” said Marina Vincenti, another of the restorers.
The Medicis were more accustomed to sitting atop Florence’s food chain.
In 1513, Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici became Leo X — the first Medici pope. He had big plans for a new sacristy for the interment of his family, including his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the powerful ruler of Florence who largely bankrolled the Renaissance. Il Magnifico is now buried here too, under a modest altar adorned with Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, flanked by saints that also had their toes nibbled by cleansing bacteria. But back then his coffin waited, probably on the Old Sacristy floor. He was soon joined by Leo X’s brother, Giuliano, and his nephew, Lorenzo, the Prince to whom Machiavelli dedicated his treatise on wielding power.
“You had coffins waiting to be buried,” said D’Agostino. “It’s kind of gloomy.”
Pope Leo X hired Michelangelo to design and build the mausoleum. The pope then promptly died of pneumonia. In the ensuing years, Michelangelo carved the masterpieces and then ran afoul of his patrons.
In 1527, with the Sack of Rome, Florentines, including Michelangelo, supported a Republic and overthrew the Medicis. Among the ousted princes was Lorenzo di Piero’s sometimes volatile son, Alessandro, whom many historians consider a real piece of work. Michelangelo couldn’t stand him, and when the Medicis stormed back, it was Michelangelo’s turn to flee.
In 1531, the Medici Pope Clement VII pardoned Michelangelo, who went back to work on the family chapel. But by that time, Alessandro had become Duke of Florence. Michelangelo soon left town, and the unfinished chapel, for good.
“Alessandro was terrible,” said D’Agostino.
Alessandro’s relative, known as the “bad Lorenzo,” agreed and stabbed him to death in 1537. The duke’s body was rolled up in a carpet and plopped in the sarcophagus. It’s unclear if his father, Lorenzo, was already in there or moved in later.
“A roommate,” D’Agostino said.
In 2013, Bietti, then the museum’s director, realized how badly things had deteriorated since a 1988 restoration. The museum cleaned the walls, marred by centuries of humidity and handprints, revealed damages from the casts and iron brushes used to remove oil and wax, and reanimated the statues.
“Come and see,” Bietti said, pointing, Creation-of-Adam-style, at the toe of Night.
But the cleaner the chapel became, the more the stubbornly marred the sarcophagus of Lorenzo di Piero stood out as an eyesore.
In 2016, Vincenti, one of the restorers, attended a conference held by Sprocati and her biologists. (“An introduction to the world of microorganisms,” Sprocati called it.) They showed how bacteria had cleaned up some resin residues on Baroque masterpiece frescoes in the Carracci Gallery at Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Strains isolated from mine drainage waters in Sardinia eliminated corrosive iron stains in the gallery’s Carrara marble.
When it came time to clean the Michelangelos, Vincenti pushed for a bacterial assist.
“I said, ‘OK,” said D’Agostino. “‘But let’s do a test first.’”
The bacteria passed the exam and did the job. On Monday, tourists admired the downward pensive glance of Michelangelo’s bearded Dusk, the rising of his groggy Dawn and Lorenzo’s tomb, now rid of the remnants of Alessandro.
“It’s very strange, especially in this time of Covid,” Marika Tapuska, a Slovakian visiting Florence with her family said when she learned that bacteria had cleaned up the sarcophagus. “But if it works, why not?”
you ever just sit and realise u can’t remember 80% of your childhood? like … what happened? who am i ..?
Many people in the comments are saying “trauma”, but this is actually a very normal occurrence. It’s called Childhood Amnesia, and it’s a process which, as the brain reorganizes itself for cognitive thought that is developed in late childhood, it changes the Accessibility of those memories during recall. Many childhood memories are available to the person, but they will not be remembered during regular recall activity, you have to “trick” your brain into remembering with different tactics.
This is because there are two parts to memories - their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.
This is an important distinction, because trauma memory is “stored in the body”, i.e. you get triggers that send your body into a cascade of uncontrollable feelings, sensations and reactions. Whereas childhood memories won’t generally do that, they are just recalled at odd times with odd associations.
reblogging this because I’ve legit seen people freaking out when they realised they can’t remember some of their childhood, thinking they might have some repressed trauma.
So you mean my brain literally looked at my whole childhood and said “sorry that file type is no longer supported”
Like can we summon this m
like to charge reblog to cast
A monster?
A Hero
Sweet pangolin baby. A little guy. A friend
LIKE TO CHARGE REBLOG TO CAST
Lieutenant Uhura take the helm
I was watching this episode with an ex-military friend and this scene came on. He made this weird kind of grunt, which I took to be a sound of disgust.
But when I asked him what his problem was, he just smiled.
“No! This is AWESOME. The senior bridge crew is all cross-trained on each others stations! She’s a lieutenant so of course she’d be trained up on driving the ship… that’s exactly the kind of redundancy you’d want in an emergency situation.”
“He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn’t have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.”
book edit: THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET, BY NATASHA PULLEY
Let’s fly.
[ID1: digital drawing of Michael Bunrham from the thighs up standing with her hands behind her back. She is dressed in a red uniform with black trousers.and silver and gold chips. Her long braids are pulled from her face, with a few braids falling over her shoulders. Her right eyebrow is quirked defiantly and an a faint smile streches her lips. In the background, yellow sparks are flying over the Discovery’s distinctive disk. A sky full of stars can be seen behind. End ID]
[ID2: close-up of the same picture, focused on Michael’s face. End ID]
not to pretend that “american teachers should be paid more” isn’t a valid issue, but i think that people focus on that part too much. not only are they underpaid, they’re expected to work insane amounts of UNPAID overtime, pay for their own classroom supplies because they won’t always be provided, learn how to protect students in the event of SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, get rung through the ringer by both parents and admin, almost all times as the only adult in a classroom, and do all of it while focusing simultaneously on test scores, learning, student behavior, social emotional needs, fun, AND maintaining a smiling facade because you’re expected to be a customer service professional at all times in addition to that list.
Yinka Shonibare , Refugee Astronaut II, 2016
Fibreglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, net, possessions, astronaut helmet, moon boots and steel baseplate
186 x 87 x 103 cm
© Yinka Shonibare
Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York, Photographer: Stephen White
