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Originating from Asia or Africa, padauk wood can be obtained from a wide variety of Pterocarpus species. Padauk wood is a valuable resource due to its durability, strength, and stability when being worked. Its reddish color is quite distinguishable, although often confused with rosewoods, a wood that is somewhat related to padauk.

Extremely common, African padauk is also called Vermilion due to its reddish color. Its heartwood can be a pale orange or a deep brown-red color, with the wood darkening after being cut. With a typically straight grain, African padauk’s texture is open and coarse, with a natural luster.

Resistant to termites and other insects, African padauk is a very durable wood with exceptional rot resistance. Very easy to work with, it finishes glues and turns very well. Some care must be taken due to the possibility of tear-outs occurring during planing on both interlocked or quartersawn grains.

Although having a unique red coloration, this darkens over time even with UV-inhibiting finishes to prolong its natural color. However, African padauk’s strength, stability, and durability make it a very popular wood amongst woodworkers. With a pleasant scent when being worked, this wood can be utilized for furniture, turned objects, veneer, musical instruments, and other wood objects.

Melody and rhythm can trigger feelings from sadness to serenity to joy to awe; they can bring memories from childhood vividly back to life. The taste of a tiny cake may have inspired Marcel Proust to pen the seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, but fire up the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," and you'll throw the entire baby-boom generation into a Woodstock-era reverie.

The scientists found that the songs that triggered the strongest response from both the emotional and intellectual parts of the brain were correlated with a willingness to pay more. And that suggests that people get not just a sensory reward from listening to music but a direct intellectual one too, even if they're unaware of it. The nature of that reward, Salimpoor believes, based on this and earlier research, has to do with pattern recognition and prediction. "As an unfamiliar piece unfolds in time," she says, "our brains predict how it will continue to unfold."

Music may, in other words, tap into a brain mechanism that was key to our evolutionary progress. The ability to recognize patterns and generalize from experience to predict what's likely to happen in the future. In short, the ability to imagine is something humans do far better than any other animal. It allowed us (aided by a far less glamorous opposable thumb) to take over the world.

Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth, two kilometers below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.

The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 meters in Switzerland.

Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa's volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.

And the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, they have warned. "If one of these volcanoes were to erupt, it could further destabilize West Antarctica's ice sheets," said glacier expert Robert Bingham, one of the paper's authors. "Anything that causes the melting of ice which an eruption certainly would, is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea.

"The big question is: how active are these volcanoes? That is something we need to determine as quickly as possible."

The Edinburgh volcano survey, reported in the Geological Society's special publications series, involved studying the underside of the West Antarctica ice sheet for hidden peaks of basalt rock similar to those produced by the region's other volcanoes. Their tips lie above the ice and have been spotted by polar explorers over the past century.

But how many lie below the ice? This question was originally asked by the team's youngest member, Max Van Wyk de Vries, an undergraduate at the university's school of geosciences and a confessed volcano fanatic. He set up the project with the help of Bingham. Their study involved a**lyzing measurements made by previous surveys, which involved the use of the ice-penetrating radar, carried either by planes or land vehicles, to survey strips of the West Antarctic ice.

The results were then compared with satellite and database records and geological information from other aerial surveys. "Essentially, we were looking for evidence of volcanic cones sticking up into the ice," Bingham said.

After the team had collated the results, it reported a staggering 91 previously unknown volcanoes, adding to the 47 others that had been discovered over the previous century of exploring the region.

These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 meters. All are covered in ice, which sometimes lies in layers that are more than 4km thick in the region. These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system, which stretches 3,500km from Antarctica's Ross ice shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.

The domestic ferret is known to be affected by several distinct ferret health problems. Among the most common are cancers affecting the adrenal glands, pancreas, and lymphatic system. Viral diseases include canine distemper and influenza. Certain health problems have also been linked to ferrets being neutered before s*xual maturity was reached.[1] Certain colors of ferret may also carry a genetic defect known as Waardenburg syndrome. Similar to domestic cats, ferrets may also be affected by hairballs or dental problems.

Like many other carnivores, ferrets have scent glands near their anuses, the secretions from which are used in scent marking. Ferrets recognize other individuals from these a**l gland secretions, as well as the s*x of unfamiliar individuals. Ferrets may also use urine marking for s*x and individual recognition.

Males, if not neutered, are extremely musky. It is considered preferable to delay neutering until s*xual maturity has been reached, at approximately six to eight months old, after the full descent of the testicles. Neutering the male will reduce the smell to almost nothing. The same applies to females, but spaying them is also important for their health. Unless they are going to be used for breeding purposes, female ferrets will go into extended heat. A female that does not mate can die of aplastic anemia without medical intervention. It is possible to use a vasectomized male to take a female out of the heat.

White Island is one of several volcanoes in New Zealand that can produce sudden explosive eruptions at any time. In this case, magma is shallow, and the heat and gases affect surface and groundwater to form vigorous hydrothermal systems.

In these, water is trapped in the pores of rocks in a super-heated state. Any external process, such as an earthquake, gas input from below, or even a change in the lake water level, can tip this delicate balance and release the hot and trapped water pressure.

The resulting steam-driven eruption also called a hydrothermal or phreatic eruption, can happen suddenly and with little to no warning. The expansion of water into steam is supersonic in speed, and the liquid can expand to 1,700 times its original volume; this produces catastrophic impacts.

The expansion energy is enough to shatter solid rock, excavate craters, and eject rock fragments and ash hundreds of meters away from the vent. We know of sites in New Zealand where the material has been blasted out over 2 miles (3 km) from the vent by such eruptions.

While a 92-year-old woman delivering a 60-year-old baby may sound like a bizarre plot twist from the movie "Benjamin Button," it's true. Huang Yijun, 92, of southern China, recently delivered a child which she'd been carrying for well over half a century.

The baby wasn't alive, however. The woman was carrying a lithopedion or stone baby. It's a rare phenomenon that occurs when a pregnancy fails and the fetus calcifies while still in the mother's body.

According to Dr. Natalie Burger, endocrinologist and fertility specialist at Texas Fertility Center, lithopedions start off as ectopic pregnancies, a condition where the fertilized egg gets stuck on its way to the womb, implants and develops outside the uterus.
"Usually an ectopic pregnancy will mean a [fallopian] tubal pregnancy, but in a small percentage of cases, the pregnancy can actually occur in the abdominal cavity in places like the bowel, the o***y, or even on the aorta," she says. "These are very rare locations and they can be very dangerous."

In most cases, Burger says, doctors will recommend the pregnancy be terminated due to the extreme risk to the mother. Or the fetus will simply die on its own due to a lack of blood supply. "The vast majority never get anywhere close to multiple months of pregnancy," she says. "They die, the tissue breaks down and they're gone."

In certain cases, however, the implanted fetus gets to an advanced stage before it dies. Too large to be absorbed by the body, the remains of the child or its surrounding amniotic sac slowly calcify, turning to stone as a way to protect the woman's body from infection from the decomposing tissue. Because the mother's body doesn't recognize the hardening mass as foreign if there are no other complications she can basically just go on with her life.