(Paracelsus)
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Friday arrives, and we have a mixed bag for ya… Lots of Links, 2 articles, and Welsh Poetry from the 19th Century. A Feast! Great Alchemical Artwork! What more could you ya want? Music? Tune in Tonight for “The Dance Show….” Presented by yours truly, DJ Kykeon
Non Stop Dance Music, going from 8:00 PM PST on to late. You are certainly invited! We will have Mix Master Morgan on the Weekend as well, so tune in to Radio Free EarthRites!
We went to see Rowan in “Damn Yankees” at his school tonight. Lots of fun. He actually got all of his hair up under his Baseball Cap. Great enthusiastic cast, good pacing, music and dancing. Not the deepest of shows (come on folks, it had a run on Broadway) but enjoyable. If you are in Portland, you should check it out.
Have a wonderful weekend, and be sure to tune in to Radio Free EarthRites tonight for DJ Kykeons’ show…
Cheers,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
The Links..
The Articles: Nest of Cryptids / Print me a heart and a set of arteries
The Poets: Welsh Poets… EBENEZER JONES & ERNEST RHYS
The Featured Artist: Adam McLean (See Site o’ the Day!)
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Links:
Site o’ the Day, Thanks to Don down in Oakland! All the Alchemical Pictures are from this site:
Someone may be spilling the beans at the White House
African fish leaps for land bugs
Pottery points to monks’ quest to create gold
New pictures of ‘living fossil’
(Pan)
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Tales from the Ancient World? Nest of Cryptids
by Daniel Fletcher
I grew up in Devon, England. Down my road there was a quiet little stream with an old wooden bridge. I used to go round there with all of my friends and we knew it like the back of our hands.
One day in June/July we noticed a wasp’s nest dangling from a tree over the water. We just ignored it and carried on playing. The next day we came back and the nest had doubled in size and was now two feet long! We were all amazed, and one kid started throwing rocks at it. I urged him to stop, but he just kept going until the nest fell down and rolled onto the bridge. Suddenly, the nest pulsed like a beating heart and grew to about three feet!
I was terrified, but curiosity got the better of me and I stayed. A man came by walking a dog and the dog ran toward the nest, pushing it into the river. In the river the nest floated along the top and burst. Out of it came thousands of horrific creatures (only an inch long). They looked like snakes, but had huge red eyes and spines along their backs. Without warning they all zoomed off along the river out of sight. The man didn’t really see much as he was trying to control his dog and nobody took the word of a group of kids.
Having grown up and letting it sink in, I now believe these to be the spawn of some cryptid. I can’t find many of these creatures on the net so please tell me if you have seen anything similar.
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Oh Brave New World: Print me a heart and a set of arteries
SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was “printed”, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his “bioprinting” technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of “bioink”, clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.
This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed “biopaper”, with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. “We can print any desired structure, in principle,” Forgacs told the meeting.
Other tissue engineers have tried printing 3D structures, using modified ink-jet printers which spray cells suspended in liquid (New Scientist, 25 January 2003, p 16). Now Forgacs and a company called Sciperio have developed a device with printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster.
Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. “After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner,” says Forgacs.
Most tissue engineers trying to build 3D structures start with a scaffold of the desired shape, which they seed with cells and grow for weeks in the lab. This is how Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues grew the bladders which he successfully implanted into seven people (New Scientist, 8 April 2006, p 10). But if tissue engineering goes mainstream, faster and cheaper methods will be a boon. “Bioprinting is the way to go,” says Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
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Welsh/Celtic Poetry
EBENEZER JONES
When the World is Burning.
When the world is burning,
Fired within, yet turning
Round with face unscathed;
Ere fierce flames, uprushing,
O’er all lands leap, crushing,
Till earth fall, fire-swathed;
Up against the meadows,
Gently through the shadows,
Gentle flames will glide,
Small, and blue, and golden.
Though by bard beholden,
When in calm dreams folden,–
Calm his dreams will bide.
Where the dance is sweeping,
Through the greensward peeping,
Shall the soft lights start;
Laughing maids, unstaying,
Deeming it trick-playing,
High their robes upswaying,
O’er the lights shall dart;
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
When, far down some glade,
Of the great world’s burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems, to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade.
—-
The Hand
Lone o’er the moors I stray’d;
With basely timid mind,
Because by some betray’d
Denouncing human-kind;
I heard the lonely wind,
And wickedly did mourn
I could not share its loneliness,
And all things human scorn.
And bitter were the tears,
I cursed as they fell;
And bitterer the sneers
I strove not to repel:
With blindly mutter’d yell,
I cried unto mine heart,–
“Thou shalt beat the world in falsehood
And stab it ere we part.”
My hand I backward drave
As one who seeks a knife;
When startlingly did crave
To quell that hand’s wild strife
Some other hand; all rife
With kindness, clasp’d it hard
On mine, quick frequent claspings
That would not be debarr’d.
I dared not turn my gaze
To the creature of the hand
And no sound did it raise,
Its nature to disband
Of mystery; vast, and grand,
The moors around me spread,
And I thought, some angel message
Perchance their God may have sped.
But it press’d another press,
So full of earnest prayer,
While o’er it fell a tress
Of cool soft human hair,
I fear’d not;–I did dare
Turn round, ’twas Hannah there!
Oh! to no one out of heaven
Could I what pass’d declare.
We wander’d o’er the moor
Through all that blessed day
And we drank its waters pure,
And felt the world away;
In many a dell we lay,
And we twined flower-crowns bright;
And I fed her with moor-berries
And bless’d her glad eye-light.
And still that earnest prayer
That saved me many stings,
Was oft a silent sayer
Of countless loving things;–
I’ll ring it all with rings,
Each ring a jewell’d band;
For heaven shouldn’t purchase
That little sister hand.
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ERNEST RHYS
The Night Ride
To-night we rode beneath a moon
That made the moorland pale;
And our horses’ feet kept well the tune
And our pulses did not fail.
The moon shone clear; the hoar-frost fell,
The world slept, as it seemed;
Sleep held the night, but we rode well,
And as we rode we dreamed.
We dreamed of ghostly horse and hound,
And flight at dead of night;–
The more the fearful thoughts we found,
The more was our delight.
And when we saw the white-owl fly,
With hoot, how woebegone!
We thought to see dead men go by,
And pressed our horses on.
The merrier then was Sylvia’s song
Upon the homeward road,–
Oh, whether the way be short or long
Is all in the rider’s mood!
And still our pulses kept the tale,
Our gallop kept the tune,
As round and over hill and vale
We rode beneath the moon.
The House of Hendra.
‘S’ai Plas Hendre
Yn Nghaer Fyrddin:
Canu Brechfa,
Tithau Lywelyn’.
I.
The House of Hendra stood in Merlin’s Town,
and was sung by Brechva on his Harp of gold
at the October Feasting of Ivor.
In the town where wondrous Merlin
Lived, and still
In deep sleep, they say, lies dreaming
Near it, under Merlin’s Hill,
In that town of pastoral Towy,
Once of old
Stood the ancient House of Hendra,
Sung on Brechva’s harp of gold.
With his harp to Ivor’s feasting
Brechva came,
There he sang and made this ballad,
While the last torch spent its flame.
Long they told,–the men of Ivor,
Of the strain
At the heart of Brechva’s harping
Heard that night, and not again.
II.
Incipit Brechva’s Ballad of the House of Hendra,
and of his deep sleep there on Hallowmass Night,
and of his strange awaking.
In yon town, he sang,–there Hendra
Waits my feet,
In renownéd Merlin’s town where
Clare’s white castle keeps the street.
There, within that house of heroes,
I drew breath;
And ’tis there my feet must bear me,
For the darker grace of death.
There that last year’s night I journeyed,–
Hallowmass!
When the dead of Earth, unburied,
In the darkness rise and pass.
Then in Hendra (all his harp cried
At the stroke),
Twelve moons gone, there came upon me
Sleep like death. At length I woke:
I awoke to utter darkness,
Still and deep,
With the walls around me fallen
Of the sombre halls of sleep:
With my hall of dreams downfallen,
Dark I lay,
Like one houseless, though about me
Hendra stood, more fast than they:
But what broke my sleep asunder,-
Light or sound?
There was shown no sound, where only
Night, and shadow’s heart, were found.
III.
Anon he hears a voice in the night,
and rising from sleep, looks out
upon the sleeping town.
So it passed, till with a troubled
Lonely noise,
Like a cry of men benighted,
Midnight made itself a voice.
Then I rose, and from the stairloop,
Looking down,
Nothing saw, where far before me
Lay, one darkness, all the town.
In that grave day seemed for ever
To lie dead,
Nevermore at wake of morning
To lift up its pleasant head:
All its friendly foolish clamour,
Its delight,
Fast asleep, or dead, beneath me,
In that black descent of night:
But anon, like fitful harping,
Hark, a noise!
As in dream, suppose your dreamer’s
Men of shadow found a voice.
IV.
Hearing his name called,
Brechva descends to the postern,
and sees thence a circle of Shadows,
in a solemn dance of Death.
Night-wind never sang more strangely
Song more strange;
All confused, yet with a music
In confusion’s interchange.
Now it cried, like harried night-birds,
Flying near,
Now, more nigh, with multiplying
Voice on voice, “O Brechva, hear!”
I was filled with fearful pleasure
At the call,
And I turned, and by the stairway
Gained the postern in the wall:
Deep as Annwn lay the darkness
At my feet;–
Like a yawning grave before me,
When I opened, lay the street.
Dark as death and deep as Annwn,–
But these eyes
Yet more deeply, strangely, seeing,
From that grave saw life arise.
And therewith a mist of shadows
In a ring,
Like the sea-mist on the sea-wind,
Waxing, waning, vanishing.
Circling as the wheel of spirits
Whirled and spun,
Spun and whirled, to forewarn Merlin
In the woods of Caledon.
V.
The spirits are no dream folk;
but ancient inmates of the House of Hendra.
Shades of men, ay, bards and warriors!–
Wrought of air,
You may deem, but ’twas no dream-folk,
Born of night, that crossed me there.
And my heart cried out,–”O Vorwyn!
They are those
Who of old-time lived to know here
Life’s great sweetness in this house.”
I had bid them kinsman’s welcome,
In a word,
For the ancient sake of Hendra,
Which they served with harp and sword.
But as still I watched them, wondering,
Curiously,
Knowing all they should forewarn me,–
Of my death and destiny!
Ere I marked all in the silence,
Ere I knew,
Swift as they had come, as strangely
Now their shadowy life withdrew.
VI
The Spirits being gone,
Brechva hears aerial music,
and sees in vision all the Bards
in the seventh Heaven.
They were gone; but what sweet wonder
Filled the air!–
With a thousand harping noises,
Harping, chiming, crying there.
At that harping and that chiming,
Straightway strong
Grew my heart, and in the darkness
Found great solace at that song.
Through the gate of night, its vision,
Three times fine,
Saw the seventh heaven of heroes,
‘Mid a thousand torches’ shine:
All the bards and all the heroes
Of old time
There with Arthur and with Merlin
Weave again the bardic rhyme.
There a seat is set and ready,
And the name
There inscribed, and set on high thereof
Brechva of the Bards of Fame.
(The Soul)
