Georgia Tech researcher Manos Tentzeris holding
up one of his inkjet-printed antennas.

What’s the News: With all of the electronics cluttering our daily lives, the air is abuzz with ambient electromagnetic energy from sources like cell phone networks, radio and television transmitters, and satellite communications systems. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a simple, cheap way to harness that wasted energy: capturing it with inkjet-printed antennas and storing it in batteries.

How the Heck:

Electrical engineer Manos Tentzeris and his team created an ink mixture containing nanoparticles of silver, which, as a conductor, is useful for building circuits. Using an inkjet printer, they printed radio frequency components and circuits onto paper and flexible plastic.
The printed antennas receive a wide range of frequencies—100 MHz to 60 GHz (that is, all the way from FM radio to radar). The researchers installed the antennas in miniature devices that collect the energy, convert it to DC power, and store it in ...

This is a pretty nifty illusion: as you look at a spot between two rapidly changing images of faces, your brain distorts the images, making them look really weird:

I could do without the title they chose for the video, but the paper on which it’s based is called "Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces", which may not explain much, either. What it means, basically, is that as the faces flash, certain features get distorted by your brain, and the amount of distortion depends on how much that feature deviates from the rest in the set. In other words, someone with slightly larger eyes gets perceived by you as having huge eyes. Go ahead and pause the video and click through it; the faces are pretty much normal faces, so the distortion really is an illusion.

I think that’s pretty neat; I’m fascinated by how our brains perceive faces in particular, since people see them everywhere. I’d love to see some variations on this, like showing men’s faces, or a man on one side and a woman on the other. Would it work for animal faces too? Hmmm.

I’ll note that some people ...

What’s the News: A daily dose of anti-HIV drugs can significantly reduce the likelihood that straight men and women will contract HIV from an infected partner, according to two new clinical studies. These studies add strong evidence to earlier findings that taking HIV drugs can prevent healthy people from contracting the disease, and are the first to show that the drugs reliably lower transmission risk in heterosexuals.

How the Heck:

One study enrolled 4,758 straight couples in Kenya and Uganda, in which one partner—either male or female—had HIV and the other didn’t.
The uninfected partners were split into three even groups. Each group was given a different type of pill, which they were instructed to take daily: a pill containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir; a pill with both tenofovir and another HIV drug, emtricitabine; or a placebo.
Over course of the three-year study, 47 participants taking the placebo contracted HIV, compared with 18 taking tenofovir and 13 taking the combination pill—meaning that the drug ...

The life of the cottony cushion scale insect reads like something from the most ridiculous of tabloid newspapers. Dad leaves parasitic body parts in his own daughter, which produce sperm that fertilise her eggs. He is both father and grandfather to his own grandchildren.

On top of that, these insects are mostly hermaphrodites. With the exception of the odd pure male, almost every individual is both male and female. They reproduce by having sex with themselves, fertilising their own eggs with their own sperm. And this means that scale insects can be father, mother, grandfather and grandmother to all of their grandchildren. Good luck drawing that family tree.

Scale insects are small animals that suck on plant sap for a living. Encased in bizarre waxy shells, most people wouldn’t even recognise them as insects – the cottony cushion scale, for example, looks like a dollop of shaving foam. It and two of its close relatives are the only known hermaphrodites out of several millions of insect species.

In most hermaphroditic animals, an individual grows up and develops the organs that make both sperm and eggs. But that’s not the case for ...

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If anyone works at, or knows someone who works at, Genzyme Oncology in San Antonio, can you contact me? I have a few questions. Any of these methods will work:

I’ve been taking surveys of the readership of this weblog since 2004. Here is my last one, from the summer of 2010. Before I moved to Discover I also did one in the winter of 2010. Here’s a reader survey from the winter of 2009. Another from 2005.

I set up a survey with a new service this time. I did integrate some of the suggestions of commenters as well. One difference between this survey and previous ones is that I have a lot more free-form text boxes with numeric answers. So you give your specific age or income, instead of selecting from a category. The survey shouldn’t take more than ~5 minutes, as many of the questions are yes/no, or very simple, such as your highest education attained.

I’ll post the first results within 24 hours, and probably post the raw files at some point in the near future if you want to crunch them yourself. I set it up so it goes from banal demographic questions in the beginning to more detailed and somewhat esoteric queries by the end. None of the questions are mandatory.

You can complete the survey at this link: http://questionpro.com/t/ACQlIZK0wT.

Update: ...

Fig. 1: Traditional (left) and “cool” (right) placements of the stethoscope when not in use.

It’s CMAJ week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles from the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s holiday issues. Enjoy!

“Objective: To determine whether the “cool” or circumcervical placement of the stethoscope when not in use is as efficacious as the traditional placement in terms of transfer time to the functional position.

Methods: Measurement of time taken by 100 health care professionals in each group to transfer stethoscope to functional position.

Results and interpretation: The cool group was much slower than the traditional group, despite their younger years. This wasted time could translate into a substantial financial burden on Canada’s health care system.”

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Doctors on display: the evolution of television’s doctors.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: For some reason, med students don’t want to show their genitals in class.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Self-surgery: not for the faint of heart.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

This is a guest blog post from Darlene Cavalier, founder of ScienceCheerleader.com and ScienceForCitizens.net

Last night, Laura Eilers, AKA Ms. Virginia, was crowned MS. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! The Science Cheerleaders–current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders pursuing science and engineering careers–are very fortunate to have Laura as our extremely talented choreographer and creative director.

In addition to being a former cheerleader for the St. Louis Rams, cheerleader and choreographer for the Kansas City Chiefs, and an NFL Hall of Fame Game Cheerleader, she’s also the creator of Going Pro Entertainment, LLC, a network of professional cheerleading and dance alumni.

In school, her favorite science projects included “creating an amoeba structure out of cookie cake and icing, researching anthropologist Dian Fossey and her work with gorillas, as well as engineering a balsa wood structure that could withstand heavy weights. My team and I tested the structure repeatedly and competed with other schools for the strongest balsa structure.”

And, yes, she “most definitely believes evolution should be taught to our children.”

Congratulations, Laura!

And now, I’d like to turn your attention to a recent blog post written by Joshua Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas. Following up on all the chatter surrounding the Miss USA contestants’ answers to the question of whether evolution should be taught in schools, Josh writes:

I’m glad to see professional cheerleaders and pageant contestants stepping up and talking about science. It has to have been nerve-wracking for the Miss USA contestants to be asked about the question without time to prep, and I think the awkwardness and “ums” and “likes” and “you knows” in the transcript mostly just reflect how people actually talk, especially when we’re nervous. The substance of the Miss USA pageant answers wasn’t at all impressive, but the fact that the pageant thought Miss USA should be able to speak about science education is impressive.

Ms. Virginia, or “huge science geek” Miss California (now Miss USA), can go into rooms and connect with audiences that just don’t care to listen to anything said by me, or PZ Myers, or Richard Dawkins, or Eugenie Scott. So can a professional cheerleader. And if the goal is to make a more science literate society, it behooves us to make sure that women waving pom poms or wearing a sash with a state name on it are just as ready to talk about the joys of science as a doctor in a white coat or a geologist in dusty jeans.

And at the end of the day, I smile every time I see Cavalier play this video. Because why shouldn’t a little girl at a massive science festival want to be a doctor and a teacher and a cheerleader? How better to encourage all of her dreams than to chat with a former professional cheerleader who is now a doctor and cheers for science? Someone else might see that you can call yourself a science geek and a history geek and still be chosen Miss USA, and decide to take her schooling more seriously. And that’s for the best.

Read Josh’s full post here.

I usually do a reader survey once a year or so. I figure I should do one soon. Usually I ask standard demographic questions, etc. Since I’ve been at Discover for over a year I assume there’s been some change since I first arrived. I’ll open up the comment thread on this post for questions to ask. I’m going to “push” my survey on Facebook and Google+ and twitter too, so hopefully I can get the N in the ~500 range as a target (I’ve gotten that high before).

What’s the News: Childhood obesity rates have escalated dramatically in recent years, in concert with nationwide explosion that has 34% of American adults falling into that category.

Now, scientists writing in the July 13 issue of the Journal of American Medical Association argue that much as feeding kids too little is considered child neglect, so should be feeding them too much. And if the former is grounds for removing them from their families, then the former may be as well.

As you can imagine, in the last 24 hours, numerous commentators have responded, and the ensuing debate touches on the causes of obesity and the difficulty of treating such a pervasive, devastating problem.

The Tinder:

17% of kids 2-19 are obese, according to the CDC. That’s triple the rate in 1980.
Ethnicity and socio-economic level are tied to risk of obesity: Low-income, black or Hispanic children have especially high rates.
Childhood obesity can affect kids for the rest of their lives—in addition to having trouble breathing, high blood pressure, depression, and liver disease as kids, they may develop type 2 diabetes and are more likely to be severely obese adults, which comes with its own cluster of related ills, ...

It couldn’t be easier to make sweeping edits on a computer document. If I were so inclined, I could find every instance of the word “genome” in this article and replace it with the word “cake”. Now, a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School and MIT have found a way to do similar trick with DNA. Geneticists have long been able to edit individual genes, but this group has developed a way of rewriting DNA en masse, turning the entire genome of a bacterium into an “editable and evolvable template”.

Their success was possible because the same genetic code underlies all life. The code is written in the four letters (nucleotides) that chain together to form DNA: A, C, G and T. Every set of three letters (or ‘codon’) corresponds to a different amino acid, the building blocks of proteins. For example, GCA codes for alanine; TGT means cysteine. The chain of letters is translated into a chain of amino acids until you get to a ‘stop codon’. These special triplets act as full stops that indicate when a protein is finished.

This code is virtually the same in every gene ...

I’ve seen a lot of lunar eclipses, and they are usually really lovely (as the pictures I’ve been posting attest to), but they’re very slow, lasting for hours. It’s fun to look for a minute, go do something else for a few, then look again and see how the lighting on the Moon has changed. You don’t really get a sense of motion, just change over time.

But what if you could smoothly speed it up? What would it look like then?

Magic.

This time lapse video was taken by Jean-Luc Dauvergne in Tajikstan (as an aside, the capitol city of Dushanbe is my hometown Boulder’s sister city). It spans 5 hours, and you can see just how the very bright full Moon plunges into darkness as it enters the shadow of the Earth.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, the Moon was near the galactic center in the sky, so you can see the Milky Way hanging dramatically next to the red Moon, festooned with various star-forming gas clouds as indicated in the video.

This is a stunning view of the eclipse like I’ve never seen before. The reflection on the lake is ...

Information has never been easier to find or record. Within seconds, the Internet lets us find answers to questions that would have remained elusive just a few decades ago. We don’t even have to remember the answers – we can just look them up again.

Now, three psychologists have shown how our memories might react to this omnipresent store of information. They have found that when American students expect to have access to information in the future, they remember that information less well. But there’s a positive flipside: they’re also better at remembering where to find the information again.

The study lends some solid experimental weight to a game of speculative ping-pong that has bounced along for years. In 2008, Nicholas Carr asked if Google was making us stupid in a provocative Atlantic article that raised the prospect of weakening memories, among other potential ills. In his later book, The Shallows, Carr wrote, “The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.”

Critics ...

Silicon Valley: Not Enough Of A Good Thing:

The right questions to be asking aren’t “why does Silicon Valley create so few jobs;” it’s “why doesn’t everyone move to the Bay Area” (the rent is too damn high) or “how come there’s only one high-tech cluster.” After all, if industrial age capitalism had just created the prosperity of the Detroit area in its heyday, we’d look on it as a huge bust. But we had lots of industrial production clusters, of which the Detroit automobile industry was just the most famous.

I think there’s a standard geographical reason why capital intensive production of material goods exhibits polycentrism: the cost of transport matters. Many of the early industrial nuclei were located relatively close to the inputs for manufacturing. Additionally, once the goods were produced they had to be distributed as cheaply as possible, so location was another essential fixed parameter. Big eastern industrial centers loom large in the public imagination, but the same logic applies in other regions of the nation. Cheap electricity and abundant clean water is why many tech-oriented manufacturers are based out of the Pacific Northwest. It isn’t as if you could just relocate the Columbia river.

The spacecraft Dawn is now just one day away from entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta, the second-largest in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. On July 9th, it snapped this photo of the rock, from just over 40,000 km (24,000 miles) away:

As far as I can tell, this is the highest resolution image of Vesta ever taken! Vesta is a slightly flattened mildly-lumpy spheroid with a diameter of about 530 km (260 miles), and you can see it’s peppered with impact craters, as expected. It may just be the lighting, but they look shallower than I would’ve thought. Sometimes that happens when the impacted body is soft, like ice or loosely packed material — though we know the surface is rocky. Maybe it’s powdery, like the Moon’s surface? There are grooves, too, possibly cracks in the surface. Stress fractures from an impact?

It’s too early for me to speculate much, and I’m no expert, but this certainly whets my appetite to see what happens when Dawn slips into orbit and starts taking high-res images of the surface!

That will happen tomorrow, when I am at The ...

In March I wrote about two studies that raised the tantalizing possibility that the tree of life, which till now has appeared to have three main branches, turns out to have a fourth.

Some of the evidence for the fourth branch (or “domain,” as taxonomists would call it) came from a newly discovered and very strange group of viruses. They’re known as giant viruses, because they’re about a hundred times bigger than typical viruses and can have over a thousand genes. If there was indeed a fourth domain , it meant that giant viruses were part of one of the oldest lineages on Earth. By studying them we might learn about the earliest stages in life’s evolution.

Since then, there have been a couple developments that merit a follow-up. In April, Didier Raoult of Mediterranean University in Marseille and his colleagues published a new study on another species of giant virus. Their previous studies on the fourth domain involved giant viruses that were first discovered in the water in air conditioners, infecting amoebae called Acanthamoeba. But now scientists are finding giant viruses all over the world, in lots of ...

Several years ago, researchers in (you guessed it) Japan put together a reasonable facsimile of the human vocal apparatus in an attempt to help hearing-impairing people learn to better modulate their voices. The details of how this process works can be perused here, but we’d just like to treat you to a trailer of this creepy little puppy in action, moaning the nursery rhyme “Kagome, Kagome,” before some major film studio options it for a B-grade horror flick. Titles, anyone?

(via PopSci)

Well, at least Anthony Watts apologizes for calling me a kid–kind of:

I will apologize to Chris Mooney though for calling him a “kid blogger” based on that youthful photo he uses. It just seemed so much more cuddly (he looks amiable and likable in it) than calling him a schill blogger.

That’s verging on kind, until the end. The photo is from last year.

Anyway, Watts does not apologize for suggesting that the authors of the astroturfing study (which is getting a heck of a lot of free PR!) committed some sort of ethical breach in their research design, which they didn’t. Instead, he’s off on a new critique of the study (I told you it would be disconfirmation bias without end), which he has read this time.

“Why wouldn’t they mention that the study was conducted on a private Intranet and not on the World Wide Web?” Watts asks. Maybe because it’s obvious? Or at least it is to me, in that I know something about this kind of research, and I read the paper, and never even got the remote impression that this was a live study on the real live web. I mean, how would you control such a thing? How would you know who your subjects were? How would you know how the websites affected them? Etc etc etc.

But Watts continues:

Well I don’t know about you, but if you want to learn about something in the wild, you generally study it the in wild. What we have here are manufactured, “fake” websites, running on an Intranet (apparently, according to Mooney’s query of the authors). And generally, when I hear about a study on websites as applied to real websites viewed on the world wide web, I expect the study would be about real world websites, not one limited to a lab fishbowl.

As I see it, this would be like doing Jane Goodall like studies of wild chimpanzees based on chimp-robots made to look like chimpanzees, confined in the lab, and studying how they interact with students who are told they aren’t actual chimpanzees, but disguised as marketing salesmen.

Can you follow that? I’m having trouble, but then, I’m just a kid.

Let me just make the obvious point that, in order to do a social scientific study, the design has to be practical and manageable enough for you to be able to get enough participants, and learn enough about them, to actually find some strong results. This, of course, is why so many of these studies are done on undergraduates who volunteer (or get paid some small amount) and come into a campus lab. The design surely has limitations (what design doesn’t?) but it is a time honored one.

In any case, here’s the bottom line on the astroturfing study (discussed in more detail here). Astroturfing is real, it affects the climate issue, and astroturf websites and organizations make scientific claims about climate that are misleading. They’re not the only ones doing so–nobody has suggested that Watts’ blog is an astroturf site, for instance–and those involved probably believe they’re good and honest people who are just following the evidence, in the same way that almost everybody thinks of themselves.

But nevertheless, what this study shows is that for most people, if you visit a website that contains these sorts of dubious claims, it misleads you. It makes you doubt. Perhaps this was obvious anyway, but the study captures it.

Now, I think you would probably find the same thing if you didn’t call it “astroturf” and just called it “climate skeptic websites” or “climate denial websites.” But the point remains: Misinformation works. Not a surprising thing–but definitely a depressing one.

What’s the News: We’ve all probably heard the myth, made popular by Disney’s Dumbo, that elephants are afraid of mice. While that idea may not be exactly true (video), elephants do make sure to avoid another tiny critter: bees. Knowing this, zoologists from the University of Oxford loaded fences in Kenya with beehives, in hopes of deterring roaming African elephants from eating or trampling farmers’ crops. Now, two years later, the researchers are reporting in the African Journal of Ecology that the novel barriers are working wondrously and could be a viable option for protecting African croplands.

What’s the Context:

Oxford zoologist Lucy King first learned in 2007 that honeybees—and even just the recorded sound of their buzzing—can scare off African elephants. Although a bee stinger cannot penetrate an elephant’s thick skin, elephants learn to avoid bees because the little insects gravitate toward their eyes and the insides of their trunks. Elephants will even sound a low-frequency alarm call when they encounter bees, causing other ...