Martian polar ice caps (August 2008)

SPANISH FLU

1918 flu pandemic

Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish influenza at a hospital ward at Camp Funston.

The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.^[1] It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population —making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients; in contrast the 1918 pandemic killed predominantly previously healthy young adults. Modern research, using virus taken from the bodies of frozen victims, has concluded that the virus kills through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). The strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.
Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify the pandemic's geographic origin. It was implicated in the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s.
To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit—thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu.

Penfield's homúnculo

 
 The Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield discovered this little person in the 1930s, when he opened up the skulls of his patients to perform brain surgery. He would sometimes apply a little electric jolt to different spots on the surface of the brain and ask his patients–still conscious–to tell him if they felt anything. Sometimes their tongues tingled. Other times their hand twitched. Penfield drew a map of these responses. He ended up with a surreal portrait of the human body stretched out across the surface of the brain. In a 1950 book, he offered a map of this so-called homunculus.




 

 Phantom Limb (Sensorimotor Homunculus in Panton Phantom Chair), 2011

Sensorimotor Homunculus is a pictorial representation of the anatomical divisions of the portion of the human brain directly responsible for the movement and exchange of sense and motor information of the rest of the body. It gives us an image of how our brain and our body is connected. The 3D model relates to Wilder Penfield's diagram, where the individual body parts are drawn lying across the surface of the brain. This diagram offers an explanation to why some people sense amputated or missing limbs, as short circuits in neighbouring areas of the brain can give the sensation of a phantom limb. Verner Panton's Phantom Chair represents an amorpheous body, which in this image is represented by the fleshy colour, a reference to the brain or an amputated body or a tongue.