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In the postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe, different areas of the brain tissue correspond to different areas of the body. This mapped part of the lobe is called the sensory homunculus. The amount of space in the homunculus which is apportioned to each part of the body corresponds to the amount of nerve endings in that part of the body, and therefore the sensitivity of the somatosense of that region. In simple language - in a part of your brain where all the nerves end, there is a little map of the human body made of brain tissue. The nerves for your arm end in the arm part of this area, so when you feel arm pain it travels along the nerve to this part of your brain, and when the signals in your brain originate from this piece of brain tissue you know it's your arm hurting.

Firstly, I would strongly caution you against buying food, especially unbranded microorganism-based food, on eBay. Ebay sellers can easily set up shop and make a quick buck selling sham products. That seller you linked to has only 110 feedback - you're taking a pretty big gamble buying from them. Secondly, why would eating a chlorophyll-rich food give you green bowel movements? Chlorophyll is digestible. I'm vegetarian, I eat dark greens every day and have never seen this. I would suggest the first product you bought might have have an additive dye to exaggerate the green colour of the powder, and that it was this dye which coloured your stool. If you want to eat spirulina, a good way to know you're getting the real stuff is to grow it yourself. If you want to buy it, buy it from a reputable shop which you know will be buying from large brands and conforming to food safety regulations. Holland & Barrett or Boots.

Aspirin does cause anticoagulation, so it does make the bleeding worse. Specifically thromboxane A2 formation is inhibited. Thromboxane A2 is responsible for platelet aggregation which causes blood clotting, so inhibiting it reduces clotting and increases bleeding. It's all in the Wikipedia article

I strongly disagree with those who suggest you need to learn in a structured environment. I technically attended school, but didn't go to classes and then only really began my (self-)education after leaving 6th form. I started teaching myself science at age 21, I'm now 25 working as a researcher and approaching the end of a degree (which I didn't start until much later than most) and get by far the highest marks in my year, although I don't go to most lectures (only the ones where the lecturer actually adds value to the information). There is absolutely no reason why you can't start learning now and be expert in some areas with a high level of all-round science education within a few years. My first recommendation is to learn maths. If I could start my science education again, I'd have done the maths at the beginning. It is the basis for describing quantities and relationships in a structured way in all the sciences - learn it at the beginning and you'll grasp everything else much more easily and accurately. I've tried a bunch of books, and if you've done GCSE you should be able to go into A-level stuff with some work. The best book by far is Core Maths for Advanced Level by Bostock and Chandler. I've settled on this one after buying all those recommended by several UK universities (Bristol, Oxford) for students entering a maths or physics degree but who need to get up to scratch. I would also recommend that you just download/buy crazy amounts of documentaries. They will keep your interest strong and your knowledge increasing until you're ready to get into more serious materials. All BBC/David Attenborough series are interesting for biology, and there are lots of good series for physics too. The BBC iPlayer has excellent stuff on it, especially on BBC4. For example the Joy of Stats, The History of Maths, The Story of Science, etc. Watching them will keep you exposed to new ideas which you can then look up for yourself. There are a few EXTREMELY good internet resources which you should try out: Wikipedia (duh!) - learn to go on click frenzies. For example just start with the biology page, then read until you find some interesting idea which is also a link. Follow the link, and pretty soon it'll be midnight at you'll suddenly realise you've been engrossed in cell biology for the entire day. A lot of what I know, I got the basis from getting sucked into the Wikipedia vortex. Khan Academy - This guy has revolutionised self-teaching science. You can start from wherever you are right now, and just watch his video lectures and follow the course until a really quite advanced level. He's easy to learn from, and he basically learned it all as he went along, getting experts and friends to help with the material. Youtube! Since you're an artist, you'll probably find visualising some ideas makes them stick better. Just search for your current topic of interest and check out the interesting looking videos. Again, I'm biased towards biology, but there are many, many good visualisations of cellular and molecular processes on youtube. Then when you're starting to get a grasp of the basics, you can invest in some text books or download some ebooks. It depends what you want to learn as to which books are best - you should check back when you're further along to ask for recommendations. You asked if there's a place for beginners? Khan Academy is my number one recommendation for a free online resource. It's video, so there's not a lot of reading. Just get a notebook and a propelling pencil, and start on the 'Developmental Math' (if you can't remember the GCSE stuff) or the 'Pre-algebra' (if you do remember some GCSE basics). Good luck.

Good to know about imath. What packages are used in the standard math environment? amsmath and amssymb?

OK so it's an mpeg4 video, H264 format with multiview video coding compression. It's stereoscopic (3D) video... why did you post it?

it looks like a media format with the wrong extension. 264 usually implies the H264 mpeg4 encoding for video. Where did you get the file? Give us all the information and we can figure it out. And err.. what's this got to do with physics? edit: 01001111011010000010000001110011011011110111001001110010011110010010000001001001001000000110110101101001011100110111001101100101011001000010000001110100011010000110010100100000011000100110100101101110011000010111001001111001001000000110101001101111011010110110010101110011

What encoding is that? Can't detect it.

As others have suggested, an active compost heap in your greenhouse works well, and is fairly common amongst the old guys on my allotment. You need to make sure you're adding fresh material frequently, and turning the pile once a week or so. If you leave it longer it will slow down or you'll get some anaerobic decomposition - not what you want in a closed space. If you get a really good compost system going it actually heats up the greenhouse significantly as well, giving an added benefit. If you actually want to run a commercial greenhouse this way you're gonna need a consistent source of compostable material that isn't too far from your compost system.

Perhaps it's just that away from the buildings the air is colder. I'd be interested if there is a real effect of cars' emissions though.

Yes, resistance is very specific and so is the virulence of the bacteriophage. Last summer I was working on engineering bioluminescent Salmonella enterica serovars. I transformed 5 different strains so that they glowed green, then I videod the effect of different phage types on the various S. enterica strains. I found that no phage would kill all the strains. However, if an S. enterica strain was resistant to one phage type, it was often susceptible to a different type. When one phage type affected two strains, it often killed them at different rates, or killed one strain completely but only slowed the growth of another. I experimented with cocktails of different phage types, and that was effective for a short while, but if I cultured the S. enterica continuously, giving them a small dose of the phage cocktail early in the culture, they would be highly resistant to any cocktail combination after a few days. This just goes to show how specific the relationships are, and how rapidly bacteria can evolve resistance.

This is interesting, why do you keep Daphnia cultures? Toxicology? Or just curiosity? Or with a vat that large are you using them as a feedstock? Sorry that I don't know the answer to your question.

first line of the Wikipedia article: I added the emphasis.

As far as I know it's not to do with muscle damage directly, but due to kidney problems. In chronic diabetes some patients develop diabetic nephropathy, a kidney disease. The kidneys usually filter creatinine out of the blood, but this function is decreased with diabetic nephropathy, leading to increased creatinine levels. When doctors measure creatinine levels of DM patients, they are looking for signs of kidney disease.

Erythrocytes do have a nucleus during erythropoiesis until they reach the reticulocyte stage. The mRNA is generated during the developmental stages before the nucleus is expelled, and the quantity in the cell reduces with the expulsion of the nucleus but, as I understand it, is not entirely diminished. What remains can, with the residual ribosomal RNA, be used to maintain the required amount of haemoglobin.

OK, well I certainly have no intention of driving you away from the forums or dissuading you from learning about things. It's just that, this being a science forum, it's reasonable to expect to have to support your statements with evidence. I would encourage anyone to use the same standards in their own search for knowledge: don't take rumour or unsubstantiated claims at face value, only trust verifiable sources of information. If you have some information and it's not from a reliable source, you shouldn't state it as fact. Please don't feel that you have to leave for that reason, it would be much more beneficial to you and others if you stayed and made rigorous contributions.

It's worth bearing in mind, though, that ultimately there is no way we can predict the direction of our own evolution. Ultimately evolution, like most things, is governed by high-impact, unpredictable events. Karl Popper and Nassim Nicholas Taleb called them 'Black Swans'. It's fun to speculate about where evolution might take us, but pointless to 'believe' in any idea more than any other.

If the universe exists for infinite time, an infinite number of combinations of matter can occur. Every combination which is possible will occur, including you. So you're not special (I'm not being cruel, I'm not special either). It's great that you're thinking about all this stuff, but don't you think you should keep it all to one thread? You are exploring essentially the same issues in all your posts, and it would be easier for people to guide you to where science can help your thinking if you kept it all together in one place. I was going to give you a nice big explanation of the anthropic principle and how to apply it to your current trains of thought, but I'm not sure which thread to put it in.

Sorry to pull you up twice in the same thread, but what's your source for this information? I could only find a dubious Yahoo! Answers thread about it, and nothing in the scientific literature. I highly doubt this is true, since almost all the negative prejudices about RH- blood group come from David Icke's stupid 'reptilian' paranoid conspiracy (warning, the link points to one of the most misguided communities on the internet).

I'm sorry but that's a link to a 'natural health' website which has nothing to do with science. There is no such report by the WHO. The WHO have sponsored two large-scale studies which both found no link between mobile phone use and cancers or any other health risk apart from increased risk of having a car crash whilst using a mobile phone. Here's the WHO summary, and here's their Q&A on the subject. The Wikipedia article also has a fair coverage and links to a lot of further reading. On what do you base your disagreement?

I know of one light-hearted 'study' by LSE professor Oliver Curry which suggested the species will split in two a'la H.G.Wells' The Time Machine.

Despite (misplaced) popular opinion, dozens of large scale studies and meta analyses have concluded that there is no evidence of long term mobile phone use being associated with an increased risk of disease, including brain cancers, or mutations.

Sulfur trioxide is formed when sulfur dioxide, given off by combustion of fossil fuels, is oxidised by free hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere. Read the details here. Flocculation is the process by which particles aggregate to form clumps, so deflocculation of soil is the breaking up of clumps of soil particles. Acidification is obviously the soil becoming more acidic.

It seems a lot of people misunderstood your questions. The enzymes are also synthesized from (ultimately) a DNA template, the first ones come from parental cells and all subsequent ones are made in the cells from amino acids. Yes, in order for DNA replication to occur efficiently you need those enzymes in place, but once the process is running it sustains itself, as long as you provide the raw materials (mineral nutrients + amino acids). The nucleotides are floating around in the cytoplasm. They also come initially from parental cells, and then are synthesized in the cell once the cell machinery is functioning.