Water droplets interacting with water at 2,000 frames per second.  They can bounce!  Incredible. [via]

The Big Picture is featuring beautiful photos of Martian Landscapes shot from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

My life has been a constant struggle against the futility of existence, that when you think about things like the universe being 800 million-years-old you begin to question your own insignificance.  Still, despite that, the odds of humans even existing in the first place is miraculous.  Let’s not even begin to talk about evolution how we went from single cell organism to complex animals to sentient beings.  That’s impressive.

“So here’s the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy [gigayears] of Earth’s known history, there’s only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about 0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth’s history we couldn’t even breathe the air. And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time — assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we’re down to about 2% survivability.”  Almost enough to make you believe in a divine being.  Almost, but not quite.

She goes on to say on a scale of 1 to 10, the pain is about an eight or nine for a full 24-hours after intercourse.  I don’t know if she’s using my pain scale (10 being decapitation, one being napping in a field of daisies), but this allergy sounds pretty awful to have.

Above is our Sun, “photographed using a special filter which matches the specific shade of red light emitted by hydrogen gas. The image was then inverted to enhance the visibility of the Sun’s chromosphere, giving it the ominus blue glow seen above.”

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Science rocks.  If I were a school superintendent I would put tables like this all over every school in my district.

Update: In 2003, Wake Forest University students Nazila Alimohammadi and Anna Clark built this picnic table.

The two women students created the sculpture as part of a public art course taught in the fall by David Finn, associate professor of art. Students in the class were paired up and assigned to work with campus organizations in creating works for public display. “We wanted our project to be fun and functional without a lot of emotional or political content,” Clark says. An aspiring dentist, Alimohammadi had taken several chemistry classes and suggested working with that department. They devised their “Periodic Table” concept — a pun of the familiar Periodic Table of Elements configuration — and the department responded enthusiastically. Alimohammadi did the structural steel work and Clark hand-painted the surface tiles. The piece, which was dedicated in an informal picnic ceremony on April 15, is accurate in every detail, right down to the auxiliary lanthanides and actinides tables that constitute the table’s bench.

[via & via]

Early this morning, NASA launched the Ares I-X rocket on a sub-orbital test flight.  This is the first new rocket tested in 30 years! BOOYAH!  A cone of cloud formed around the nose as it blasted upward. A beautiful sight under any circumstances. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)

Triboelectrification be damned.  Now that the lightening strikes have passed and there is no worry about static electricity interfering with the onboard systems, NASA is attempting to launch the new $445 million dollar rocket today (eta 10:30a.m.).  The launch test is intended to study how well this rocket design works by gathering data from over 700 onboard sensors.

The 327-foot (100-meter) tall rocket is slated for a two-minute fact-finding flight that will reach a maximum altitude of about 150,000 feet, or 28 miles (46 km), after which it will land in the Atlantic Ocean and boats will collect its spent first stage for study.

They then put the participants, one by one, in a dark anechoic chamber which shields all incoming sounds and deadens any noise made by the participant. The room had a ‘panic button’ to stop the experiment but apparently no-one needed to use it.

Turns out when we have no external stimuli, we superimpose our own patterns.  [via]

Mars missions from 1960 to present by Bryan Christie Design for IEEE Spectrum’s special report “Why Mars? Why Now?” You can check out a larger version at the IEEE site.  Totally worth it.

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The Northwest owes its hazard-prone future to what’s happening underground. Beneath a line of volcanoes that stretches from British Columbia to northern California and includes Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier and Mount Shasta, one of the Earth’s plates is wedged beneath another.

The fault line is called the Cascadia subduction zone, and it shakes every few hundred years when the plates shift. The quaking, which can last for minutes, triggers a tsunami that follows 10 to 20 minutes later and reaches heights of up to 15 feet.

Records show that 20 earthquake-generated tsunamis have struck the Northwest in the last 10,000 years — an average of one tsunami every 500 years. The last one happened nearly 310 years ago, on January 26, 1700.

One theory is that earworms are a form of mild musical hallucination (normally a rare experience), the distinction being that with an earworm you (a) usually aren’t on drugs or suffering from schizophrenia and thus (b) are fully aware there’s no actual music being played outside of your skull. Another theory is that earworms are a side effect of your brain trying to consolidate memories, akin to what happens in REM sleep. Yet another possibility is pondered by neurologist Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia: earworms might simply be a consequence of our being surrounded by music in our lives whether we want to be or not.

PBS will be airing a two-hour-long documentary based on Michael Pollan’s excellent book, The Botany of Desire. The program airs October 28 at 8 p.m.

Did anyone wake up super-duper early, grab their telescope to check out NASA’s moon bomb this morning?  No, I didn’t either.  4:30 a.m. is just too early even for me.  I was hoping to wake up to a destroyed moon and out-of-whack tides, but alas NASA even managed to screw up a simple moon bomb.

I can’t help wonder if the supposed findings that female oral contraception has changed the definition of male sexiness will develop from “Hum, this is mildly interesting” to something the conservative anti-contraception movement could latch onto as another way to demonize healthy family planning.

Future headlines will surely read “Is Oral Contraception killing our beefy hunks?” (read the comment thread in this post if you have any doubts) I can just see the sensationalized evening news promo asking if we can guess which common household pill is choosing our men for us. Advil? Tylenol? Clariton? Aghast, no, it is the dreaded birth control pill.  The shame! 

My first concern here is that reports blanketly talk about “the Pill” as if it were a constant integer. However, the pharmacological make-up of oral contraceptives has changed and is changing dramatically since it was first approved in the US more than 40-years-ago.

Not to mention the numerous social factors that have also changed since oral contraceptives became a widespread option. Over the last 40 years the survival standard has changed significantly. The skills and qualities men need to survive/ support in this country have gone from labor or skilled labor to technological, virtual and less “rugged.” Maybe the pool of masculine men is drying up? Or maybe we are redefining as a nation what the term “masculine” even means. Maleness is an extremely subjective idea.

Women are also increasingly less reliant on men for survival so they may feel freer to choose a mate based on different personal attributes rather than an ability to support or protect. Muscles and a bank account are an ancient relic.

Regardless, it seems a little dangerous to suggest that contraception can have such a broad impact on choices without, as they said, any “reliable evidence.” Not that everyone who reads this will think “Oooo, I am going to stop taking “the pill” (as they call it) so that I can be attracted to more masculine men again” but the implication of both the study and the Daily Mail article is on the negative side — that taking ”the pill” and being attracted to Elijah Wood instead of say, Russell Crowe is inherently wrong. 

I don’t deny that hormonal supplements of any kind have the ability to alter our physiology, but don’t you think it is a little funny that they are blaming the pill for all the hot-demasculated men out there?

Still, actors like Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, Vin Diesel, et. al. all get a leg up in the star department because a lot of ladies do still love to watch those muscles flex. And yet, Johnny Depp is probably one of the biggest Hollywood stars.  Maybe we can blame the pill for his success.

Incredible! Seven new species of bioluminescent fungi have been discovered. “Dennis Desjardin, a mycologist at San Francisco State University who has discovered more than 200 species of fungi to date, and his co-authors found the mushrooms in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico.”

Desjardin believes these fungi developed their glow-in-the-dark capability to spread their spores.  Animals are attracted to them, etc.

Hence, there’s something deliciously satisfying about the discovery of a skeleton older than Lucy and far more significant, as it seems to link humans and chimps in a manner no skeleton before has done.  I know it won’t change anything is the science vs. religion debate, but still. 

“A multinational team discovered the first parts of the Ar. ramidus skeleton in 1994 in Aramis, Ethiopia. At 4.4 million years old, Ardi is not the oldest fossil proposed as an early hominin, or member of the human family, but it is by far the most complete–including most of the skull and jaw bones, as well as the extremely rare pelvis, hands, and feet. These parts reveal that Ardi had an intermediate form of upright walking, a hallmark of hominins, according to the authors of 11 papers that describe Ardi and at least 35 other individuals of her species. But Ardi still must have spent a lot of time in the trees, the team reports, because she had an opposable big toe. That means she was probably grasping branches and climbing carefully to reach food, to sleep in nests, and to escape predators.” 

And even if this isn’t the cold-stone missing link, the holy grail of evolution, it’s another chink in the armor.

Voyager 1 and 2 have passed through the “termination shock” boundary — a magnetic bubble that partially protects the solar system from cosmic rays.  Currently, they two probes are traveling through the heliosheath before moving into the heliopause. The heliopause is the assumed boundary of the solar system.  Read More. [Space via Reddit]

Jonah Lehrer explains the science behind Girl Talk:

Let’s say you’re listening to that catchy Wu-Tang song, with the chorus “And let’s start it like this, son, rollin’ with this one / And that one, pullin’ out gats for fun”. Once the acoustic snippet enters working memory, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex will fire in response to the stimulus – they are the neural representation of the song. Here’s where things get interesting: even when the stimulus disappears – you’ve now started listening to a different song, perhaps that Boston song “Foreplay/Long Time” – those working memory cells continue to fire. They’re still holding on to the Wu-Tang clip, which is why working memory is a type of memory. This echo of activity only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s long enough so that our thoughts get blended together, as seemingly unrelated sensations overlap.

Got it?  Gregg Gillis, the genius behind Girl Talk, is profiled by GQ and interviewed by Whitney Matheson.

Scientists have found 850 previously unknown species living in subterranean water, caves and micro-caverns.These insects, crustaceans, spiders and worms are likely only about one-fifth of the number of undiscovered species the researchers think exist underground amid the harsh conditions of the Australian outback. Two species of blind fish and two of blind eels were also uncovered.

“What we’ve found is that you don’t have to go searching in the depths of the ocean to discover new species of invertebrate animals — you just have to look in your own backyard,” said researcher Andy Austin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

The technology is still in the testing phase, but MIT researchers hope it will be ready within three years.

Ken Morrish of Colaton Raleigh, East Devon, insists he picked this mutated Golden Delicious apple from a tree in his garden.

“The red and green split through the stem is totally perfect – as if I’ve painted it,” Mr. Morrish told the Daily Mail. “It’s a genuine one-off and none of us have ever seen an apple like it before.”

According to horticulturists, who’ve examined the fruit, it’s the product of a random genetic mutation.

“We now have evidence that it is possible to reduce the risk of HIV infection with a vaccine,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in his own statement. “There is little doubt that this finding will energize and redirect the AIDS vaccine field as all of us begin the hard work to translate this landmark result into true public health benefit.”

The trial, which began in 2003, had been disparaged by many critics as a waste of time and money because each of the two vaccines used in it had been shown in individual trials to produce no benefit. But researchers speculated that using them together, with one vaccine priming the immune system and the second boosting that response, would be more effective, and their optimism about this “prime-boost” combination has been validated.

Experts said that it will be many more years before a vaccine is available for wider use, but the results indicate at last that such a vaccine may, indeed, be possible. “It gives me cautious optimism,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped fund the study.

And for those interested in the science behind the trials:

The primer in this combo is Alvac, made by Sanofi Pasteur, which uses a defanged canarypox virus to carry three synthetic HIV genes into the body. The boost comes from Aidsvax, originally made by VaxGen and now owned by the nonprofit group Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases. It contains a genetically engineered version of a protein from the HIV surface.

The study involved more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand who had no unusual exposure to the virus, just the normal everyday risk. Half received four priming doses of Alvac and two boost doses of Aidsvax over a six-month period, and half received placebo shots.

After three years of follow-up, new HIV infections were observed in 74 of the 8,198 people who received the placebo, but in only 51 of the 8,197 given the vaccine, a statistically significant 31% reduction.

To the researchers’ disappointment, however, the vaccine did not reduce levels of HIV activity in those who became infected after being vaccinated.

“Scientists at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Florida restored normal vision to two colour-blind monkeys. The technique could prove to be a safe and effective cure for colour blindness and other visual disorders related to the cones in the retina.”

Monkey research at its finest.  

“Although colour blindness is only moderately life-altering, we have shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate and that it can be done very safely,” Professor William Hauswirth, an ophthalmic molecular geneticist at the University of Florida, told the Times Online. “That is extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding.”

What surprised me the most about this news was that color blindness affects about 8 per cent of Caucasian males, but fewer than 0.5 per cent of females.

Yesterday, NASA released the first set of Hubble images since the 19-year-old telescope was released back into space in May following a long-delayed servicing mission.

“Hubble is back in action,” Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, told the Baltimore Sun. “You’re only getting the tiniest taste of what astronomers are planning to do with Hubble over the many years it’s going to last.”

Above is the Carina Nebula.

“Outbreaks Near Me also lets users send their own reports, including photos, to the HealthMap team, which will review them for possible inclusion on its world map. The application will also send alerts about new outbreaks in the user’s area, or tell them if they’ve just entered a new place where disease activity has been reported.” 

This new iPhone app from John Brownstein of Children’s Hospital Boston and Clark Freifeld of MIT’s Media Lab is based on HealthMap, which compiles Google searches, news reports, blogs, and chats as well as old-timey, next-day “traditional” news sources, and maps data about emerging disease outbreaks.  The perfect resource for surviving the zombie apocalypse has finally been created.  Thank god.

Researchers for IBM Zurich used an atomic force microscope to map out the above hydrogen molecule’s structure, which “could help in the design of many things on the molecular scale.”  Many things! Like electronics or even drugs.

The measurement requires extremes of precision. In order to avoid the effects of stray gas molecules bounding around, or the general atomic-scale jiggling that room-temperature objects experience, the whole setup has to be kept under high vacuum and at blisteringly cold temperatures.

However, the tip of the AFM’s prong is not well-defined and isn’t necessarily sharp on the scale of single atoms. The effect of this bluntness is to blur the instrument’s images.

The researchers have now hit on the idea of deliberately picking up just one small molecule – made of one atom of carbon and one of oxygen – with the AFM tip, forming the sharpest, most well-defined tip possible.

Their measurement of a pentacene molecule using this carbon monoxide tip shows the bonds between the carbon atoms in five linked rings, and even suggests the bonds to the hydrogen atoms at the molecule’s periphery.

So what did you do today?

Like for example, work being done at Oregon Health Science University (OHSU) right now.  Scientists were able to produce monkeys with genetic material from two mothers.  Now, that alone sounds scary, ethically questionable, sort of Island of Dr. Moreau. 

But!  But!  You have to understand the process and implications for this research.  Researchers “developed a way to replace most of the genes in the eggs of one rhesus macaque monkey with genes from another monkey. They then fertilized the eggs with sperm, transferred the resulting embryos into animals’ wombs and produced four apparently healthy offspring.”

The technique was developed for women who have disorders caused by defects in a form of DNA passed only from females to their children, and the researchers said they hope the work will eventually translate into therapies for people.

“We believe this technique can be applied pretty quickly to humans and believe it will work,” said Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who led the work, published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Women would be able to give birth to healthy offspring without the fear of passing along genetic diseases.  Are you telling me that this isn’t important and cool and worth a few monkeys?

Looks like you’re screwed either way dope fiends.  The good news is you should be thankful for those dirty, dirty hippies parading around Phish shows.  Dudes who smoke pot are also more likely to have significantly higher sexual partner numbers.

[Harvard’s Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton's] study suggests that honesty in particular is automatic only for some, which [John Bargh, a Yale social psychologist who studies automaticity,] interprets to mean that some portion of the population might be naturally honest, while others struggle with telling the truth. “It could potentially be some of the most intriguing evidence for group selection,” Bargh speculates, adding that the results are reminiscent of the evolutionary idea that “cheaters” and “suckers” coexist in a specific ratio in the animal kingdom. The classic example is parasitic cuckoos and the hapless birds that raise the cuckoos’ young. Bargh wonders if the ratio of “cheaters” to “suckers” exists in our species as well.

This echoes the new book by Robert Feldman, titled The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships, which is the culmination of about 3 decades of research on the issue of lying in a casual and professional environment and how this affects our ability to trust others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Time Magazine sat down with Robert Feldman to discuss the book:

One of the reasons people get away with so much lying, your research suggests, is that we are all essentially dupes. Why do we believe so many lies?

This is what I call the liar’s advantage. We are not very good at detecting deception in other people. When we are trying to detect honesty, we look at the wrong kinds of nonverbal behaviors, and we misinterpret them. The problem is that there is no direct correlation between someone’s nonverbal behavior and their honesty. “Shiftiness” could also be the result of being nervous, angry, distracted or sad. Even trained interrogators [aren't] able to detect deception at [high] rates. You might as well flip a coin to determine if someone is being honest.

You can read excerpts at the book’s website and find out more about the book at Twelve Publishers.

I find myself struggling with being honest and not resorting to “little white lies” just about every hour and every day of my life.  It’s helped me to be honest about this and to have friends who call me on this and challenge me to be a more truthful person.  [via here/here]

I hope Sir David Attenborough, a British naturalist, will be happy after a group of botonists named a newly discovered varietal of pitcher plant after him. 

Nepenthes attenboroughii, discovered on a remote mountain in the Philippines, is so big that small rodents can be trapped inside and slowly dissolved by flesh-eating enzymes. 

“You have to have names for things and and you run out after a bit,” Attenborough told the Times Online. “It’s just a compliment, but it’s very nice to receive compliments.”

It’s probably because this is not the first species named after him.  Among the honors he has received have been a spiny anteater in New Guinea, a rare tree in Ecuador and a marine reptile, the Attenborosaurus, that lived during the Jurassic period.

I would gladly settle for a man-hole cover.  Er, um, maybe like a highway.

They also rely on the internet and P2p gaming for their social outlets.  This is the inevitable outcome from an entire generation of kids being raised on video games.  But with all averages, they tend to be skewed by the extreme outer-participants.  And with a sample size of only 552, the average could look much worse than the norm.

In December of 1995, astronomers did a risky experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope. They pointed it to a region in space the size of a speck of dust that is seemingly empty and kept the telescope watching for 10 days.  Using redshift data, a 3-D animated view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was created.

It is humbling to think just how tiny humans are in the scheme of the universe.  [via here/here]

Had no idea who he was until this morning.  One would think that someone who’s made significant contributions to the field of electromagnetism would be more well-known. Today is the day of his birth.

Thus the study of electromagentism was born, and it’s the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers. Remember that next time you flick a light switch.

As with many great discoveries, it happened by accident. In 1820, Ørsted, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, was preparing an evening lecture when he noticed that a compass needle moved away from magnetic north and pointed to the wire whenever current flowed from the battery.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the compass needle pointed in the opposite direction when you flipped the battery round.

With an invisible current creating an invisible field that moved a physical needle, this caused quite a stir at the time. In London, the Royal Society gave him a medal, and he was also made a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit, of the French Legion of Honor, and the Danish Order of the Dannebrog. On his death in Copenhagen in 1851, he was given a state funeral.

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