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Man, 40, suffers concussion after diving into shallow pool

In 2006, Derek Amato suffered a violent head injury after he dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool. He lost his memory, 35 percent hearing loss in one ear and headaches. But he grew an extraordinary musical talent. Amato found out that he could all of a sudden play piano -- and he could do it well.

Amato writes in a blog post, ” As I close my eyes, I found these black and white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represents a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation in my mind. My fingers started to play the piano keys as if I had done it all of my life. I can't explain the feeling of wonder that overpowered my entire being, although I can tell you the appearance on my friend's face were enough to put us both in tears."

Dr. Darold Treffert from University of Wisconsin School of Medicine identified that he is in a condition of "acquired savant syndrome" -- a condition where a mental impairment results in superhuman skills, according to Popular Science.

And so, the 39-year-old sales trainer from Denver decided to drastically change his life and became a professional pianist.

Video Via TED TALK

This past August, Amato told his story in a TED Talk. When asked what he would do if he suddenly lost his musical gift, he said that he would still be equally grateful for the experience.

"I've had seven years [with this syndrome]. Not too many people get to see this much life in seven years. I've been pretty lucky," he told HuffPost Live. "Hey, if it goes away, I've had seven beautiful years to enjoy it."

Amato is a father of three. He lives in Colorado and, when he’s not making music, he enjoys fly fishing and philanthropy.

References:
WHEN BRAIN DAMAGE UNLOCKS THE GENIUS WITHIN
Man, 40, suffers concussion after diving into shallow pool

Was Genghis Khan history's greenest conqueror?

The Mongol invasion scrubbed nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to surprising new research.

GENGHIS GREEN: The founder of history's largest contiguous empire cooled the planet while taking a body count. (Photo: Wiki Commons/public domain)

Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, reports Mongabay.com.

Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.

Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan's unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere.

"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era," said Julia Pongratz, who headed the Carnegie Institution research project. "Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth's landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."

Pongratz's study, which was completed with the help of her Carnegie colleague Ken Caldeira, as well as with German colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, measured the carbon impact of a number of historical events besides just the Mongol invasion, including the Black Death in Europe, the fall of China's Ming Dynasty and the conquest of the Americas.

What all of these events share in common is the widespread return of forests after a period of massive depopulation, but the longevity of the Mongol invasion made it stand out as having the biggest impact on the world's climate.

"We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn't enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil," explained Pongratz. "But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion ... there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon."

The 700 million tons of carbon absorbed as a result of the Mongol invasions roughly equals the amount of carbon global society now produces annually from gasoline.

Though Genghis Khan's legacy as one of the world's cruelest conquerors isn't likely to change because of the unintended "green" consequences of his invasions, Pongratz hopes that her research can lead to land-use changes that someday might alter how future historians rate our environmental impact.

"Based on the knowledge we have gained from the past, we are now in a position to make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle. We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained," she said.

Sources:

Genghis Khan the GREEN: Invader killed so many people that carbon levels plummeted

Giant virus revived from ancient permafrost

Melting permafrost could unleash new human pathogens

Scientists have discovered a new type of virus in 30,000-year-old permafrost and managed to revive it, producing an infection.

The giant virus obtained from Siberian permafrost was frozen for 30,000 years, but was able to infect an amoeba when it was revived. (Image courtesy of Julia Bartoli and Chantal Abergel, IGS and CNRS-AMU.)

Fortunately, the new virus, namedPithovirus sibericum, infects amoebas and is not harmful to humans.

But its ability to become infectious again after so many millenniums is a warning, writes Jean-Michel Claverie at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Aix-Marseille University and his colleagues in a new study published Monday..

"The revival of such an ancestral amoeba infecting virus … suggests that the thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions might not be exempt from future threats to human or animal health," they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Giant DNA viruses, first discovered just 10 years ago, are so big compared with most other viruses that they are visible under a visible light microscope. Before the new virus was discovered, just two families were known. Both infect amoebas.

The researchers collected a 30,000-year-old permafrost core from Siberia. In order to hunt for giant viruses, they took a type of amoeba that often gets infected with giant viruses and used it as bait. After the amoebas were exposed to permafrost samples, the amoebas became infected with a previously unknown giant virus. The virus has a mix of traits from the two known giant virus families.

The researchers suggest that looking for amoeba-infecting viruses in permafrost is an "inexpensive and safe way to realistically assess the threat" posed by pathogens that might be released from ancient frozen soils and sediments as permafrost melts, either due to global warming or industrial activities such as mining and drilling.