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French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878)

Daniel Alcides Carrion, a Peruvian medical student, infected himself with pus from a purple lesion from a sick patient in 1885, seeking to demonstrate the link between a nodule on this patient and a disease known as Oroya Fever. He was successful in demonstrating the link… but unfortunately caught the disease himself and died. (He was made a national hero by the Peruvian government in 1991).

A few years later, in 1892, Bavarian chemist Max von Pettenkofer drank cholera bacteria in 1892, apparently to no effect.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934)

Marie Curie, of course, stands alone in her decision to spend a life working with radioactive substances and paid the ultimate price, dying of radiation-induced aplastic anemia. Not Curie, nor anyone else at the time, knew of the damaging physiological effects of ionizing radiation. Reflecting how little was known, for years she had carried around test tubes containing radioactive compounds in her pocket.

More recently, in 1987, Dr. Daniel Zagury, a professor of immunology at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, injected himself with an experimental HIV vaccine.

The first experiment in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)—one of seven topics to be explored in a new software exhibit at CHM to open in 2014—is undoubtedly part of this same tradition of self-experimentation in the search for knowledge. In September of this year, a team from CHM, made up of curator Marc Weber and media producer Jon Plutte, travelled across Europe obtaining interviews for the new exhibit, to be called “Make Software: Change the World.”

For MRI, the radical medical technology that allows doctors to see inside the human body, we went to visit Sir Peter Mansfield at Nottingham University. Mansfield is discoverer of the ‘echo-planar’ technique of fast imaging and shared the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with American scientist Paul Lauterbur for their invention of MRI. Mansfield’s contribution was to show how radio signals from an MRI could be mathematically analyzed and used to form an image.

Sir Peter Mansfield, CHM Interview, University of Nottingham, September 17, 2012.

Mansfield describes the first human live experiment in 1975 with his new machine, in which he himself was the test subject for an abdominal scan:

Well, in those days … it was necessary to screen the magnet with an aluminum screen, and this was just a box, really, that we built around the magnet. And once the box was there, it had a door on it, but there was no light. When you were in the magnet being screened, being scanned, the door was closed and of course it was pitch black in there. That was one thing. The other thing was that there was no ventilation, so the magnet got very hot, and I was stuck between the coils of the magnet … I couldn’t turn or move because if I did, I would have burned myself. Of course, we were about [at] 50-odd degrees Centigrade [122 degrees Fahrenheit], and I just heated up.

Before we started imaging, I called out to my students outside to say, “Give me just one pulse only.” And so I waited there while they pressed the button to give me a single pulse and didn’t feel a thing. So I said, “Okay, let’s carry on with the scan.” So I was in there for 50 minutes, and I came out like a wet rag, literally. My vest, it was soaking with perspiration. But we managed to get the image…

Mansfield’s discovery was a major proof-of-concept in the development of the technology. The computer he used was a modestly powerful minicomputer, used to control the scanning and processing of Mansfield’s rudimentary images.

Our original computer was very slow and also we were only able to afford 4K of memory and so we were able to produce images but they didn’t really have very many pixels in them, [a] 4K squared image.

Control of the scanning itself is the most delicate yet powerful contribution of computing to MRI. MRI works by basically ‘pinging’ hydrogen atoms (protons) in the body with an electromagnetic pulse and then listening for the response. The shape, phase and frequency of these pulses are controlled entirely by software and it is through this software control that different tissue types in the body can be revealed. One pulse sequence may highlight fat, another water, and still another, cartilage.

Using a specialized pulse sequence, under software control, MRI is especially good at revealing soft tissues like this spinal cord, cartilage, and vertebrae

MRI, of course, also has formidable hardware: a giant superconducting magnet, cooled by liquid Helium to -453 degrees Fahrenheit, and various types of ‘coils’ to direct and shape the scanning signals and to listen for the response from the body. The signals involved are both enormous and tiny, as shown in the diagram below.

Making sense of the tiny signals is the job, again, of software, which filters out the signal from the surrounding noise, resulting in a useful image. But the resulting images are more than just ‘snapshots’ of the body’s interior. By taking multiple images (as slices) of the human body, the MRI allows doctors to ‘page through’ an image—gliding through a brain or a knee joint with a touch of a mouse and revealing the relationships between surrounding structures and the particular area of interest. This ability to visualize soft structures has revolutionized medicine by largely eliminating exploratory surgery as a means of looking inside the body.

Mansfield placed great emphasis on the software behind MRI and the essential role of computers in making it possible:

Well, software didn’t exist as far as we were concerned in those early days and what we did was write our own software and because we were– we even worked initially in machine code so you don’t, you know, there was no software, you had to learn the machine code and write the operational characteristics yourself and our very first images were done like this, basically.

Today, software plays an even more central role, with MRI manufacturers developing dozens of specialized algorithms to undertake sophisticated imaging studies—like tracing the movement of a beating heart, for example.

As well explaining how software has allowed the MRI machine to be created, the MRI gallery of the Make Software: Change the World exhibit will feature and interactive video table in which visitors can try their hand at paging through an MRI image, just like a radiologist.

Finally, if you’d like to try your hand at interpreting an MRI image before then, try the following quiz, provided courtesy of MRI exhibit consultant Professor Dwight Nishimura, Stanford University.

Image A

Image B

Image C

Image D

Image A: shoulder

Image B: hand

Image C: optic nerve (behind the eye)

Image D: prostate and bladder (bladder is bright)

By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz February 23, 2014 1,130,221 Views

Costume design in movies is sort of in the same boat as dialogue in porn flicks; we’re vaguely aware that it’s there, but it’s not something anyone really pays attention to. Thankfully, this also means that movie costumes are the perfect place to hide clever little Easter Eggsfor film maniacs with too much free time to find and childishly geek out over. And if you’ll excuse me, I believe that was my cue to start talking about how …

Warner Bros.

With The Dark Knight , Christopher Nolan wasted no time in establishing that his interpretation of the Joker would be like nothing we’d ever seen before. In just the first five minutesof the movie, Heath Ledger’s character not only pulls off a daring daylight robbery of a mob bank, but simultaneously arranges the deaths of all of his accomplices, and he does it all while wearing a mask from Tim Burton’s reimagining of Snow White .

Warner Bros.

This quickly let us know that the character was a scheming, machine-gun-toting mastermind, which completely set him apart from all the other Jokers that we knew, especially Cesar Romero in the silly ’60s Batman TV show. That is, other than the fact that Ledger wore Romero-Joker’s mask throughout the entire bank robbery.

20th Century Fox Television

All evidence seems to point to the design of Ledger’s clown mask being modeled directly on a scene from ” The Joker Is Wild,” an episode of the Batman TV series that also marked the first appearance of the Joker on the show. In the episode, Adam West’s Batman tracks Romero’s clown prince of crime to the Gotham opera company, where he’s secretly performing an aria from Pagliacci , because back then that was as close as the Joker could get to being an actual killer clown ( look it up). As you can see, the similarities between Romero’s Pagliacci costume and Ledger’s mask are undeniable.

20th Century Fox Television, Warner Bros.
Good luck unseeing that anytime soon.

And if anyone out there is wondering why Nolan even bothered referencing an old comedy series that was campier than a Boy Scout jamboree: While it’s true that The Dark Knight was basically a superhero version of Michael Mann’s Heat , the 1960s series is what has kept Batman alive in the public consciousness for decades, so despite its silliness, it still deserves all the respect it can get. The fact that the man who first brought the Joker to the big screen didn’t respect the character enoughto even shave off his mustache for the role should really be beside the point.

Walt Disney

You can fault the Pirates of the Caribbean movies for a lot of things, but to the franchise’s credit, it always kept true to the Disneyland ride it was based on by having almost nothing to do with real pirates, with Captain Jack Sparrow as the prime example.

Walt Disney
“Everyone always thinks I’m high. I’m really just seasick.”

Try to put away your personal feelings for the movie or Johnny Depp and ask yourself: Does this man look anything like a classic pirate? I don’t know; between the mascara, the bandanna, and the braided beard, he more resembles a goth hippie or something. And what’s up with all the crap woven into his hair? Like this medallion here:

Walt Disney

Huh. That looks suspiciously like the Turkish star and crescent, but … how? Call me crazy, but I faintly recall that Pirates of the Caribbean took place somewhere in the general vicinity of the Caribbean, so what is Jack Sparrow doing with an Islamic symbol in his dreads? Actually, if you subscribe to a Reddit theory, the coin and the rest of Sparrow’s attire might actually be referencing the character’s real-life Muslim inspiration, the infamous pirate Jack Ward.

“Actually, Disneysued. It’s ‘Jake Ward’ now.”

Jack Ward, also known as “Birdy,” was a 16th century English pirate who terrorized the Mediterranean and eventually converted to Islam, taking on the name Yusuf Reis. For 15 years, Ward/Reis sailed the coast of North Africa, plundering ships and commanding hundreds of men, until he became something of a pirate celebrity. There have been songs and entire theatrical plays written about the man, and by all accounts his larger-than-life, drunken legendeventually inspired one of Disney’s largest and sexiest cash cows.

The Islamic coin is just one clue, but there is more to support this theory. Jack Sparrow’s headband, for example, does sort of kind of resemble a turban styleworn in Islamic countries, plus the type of mascara he wears is known as kohl, which was primarily available in North Africa, where Jack Ward operated. Also, after hours of Googling, I discovered that sparrows are in fact birds, and “Ward” and “bird” both have four letters, and also Jack Ward was nicknamed “Birdy,” ergo ipso facto randomus latinus , Disney is secretly converting children to Islam with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Warner Bros. Television

Supernatural is a show that started out as a story about two brothers hunting monsters before ultimately focusing on how adorable Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki are together.

Warner Bros. Television
SPOILER: Very.

As the show slowly changed focus from horror to a kind of magical dark comedy, Supernatural eventually introduced a new leading character: Castiel, a demon-hunting angel from heaven who dresses like Columbo and whose main shtick is that he just doesn’t get how the human world works. Here he is watching porn for the first time:

Warner Bros. Television

Yeah, it’s kind of a lame joke, but Misha Collinsplays Castiel with such a beautiful mix of childlike naivete and deadpan seriousness that you can’t help but constantly laugh at his antics. In fact, Collins did such a great job with making the character his own that you can hardly tell anymore that Castiel was sort of meant to be a parody of John Constantine.

DC Comics, Warner Bros. Television

Non-comic book fans may not immediately get that reference, but they might remember the 2005 moviestarring Keanu Reeves, which made film history by showing Shia LaBeouf getting brutally beaten to death. Well, that movie was actually loosely based on the excellent comic book series Hellblazer starring John Constantine: a chain-smoking antihero conman who investigates paranormal phenomena in an old trench coat and loose tie.

DC Comics
And probably watches a lot of porn.

Eric Kripke, the creator of Supernatural , freely admitsthat Castiel’s clothes are the same ones worn by the occult sorcerer with cancer. Thematically it does make sense, because Supernatural is about working-class guys taking out paranormal threats, which also happens to be the summary of pretty much every Hellblazer comic ever. Although, as far as I know, Constantine never once uttered the phrase ” Hey, Assbutt!” so that’s at least one thing Supernatural has over Hellblazer .

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