UPDATE:  SOLVED at 1:15 CDT by Carl

Happy Saturday, and welcome to a new cycle of riddles.  We all start over with a blank slate to build up a list of “riddle champions” for the next bonus riddle.  Tom and I had a lot of fun with the bonus riddle, and we’re looking forward to this cycle.

Same rules apply as always, and I know you’re ready; so here goes:

Today’s answer is an object.

It was discovered by a very famous “father”.

It is a single object, and it stands out from quite a crowd.

This object has many features no other of its kind possesses.

It participates in a remarkable “dance” with some of its partners.

In itself, it is a mixture of old and young.

When you look at this object, you see ghosts.

And finally, take a look at this image:

Image found on PhotoBucket, Jazzie724

It’s a clue.

Are you ready?  You know where to find me… lurking, as usual.

I get smeared sometimes. As a journalist who has actually written on conflict of interest, it can be amusing to watch–but rarely this amusing:

Chris Mooney’s Pharmaceutical Influence

By Jake Crosby

He is the drug industry’s newer, trendier go-to guy in the media, replacing the role of Arthur Allen, who took a break to write about tomatoes. An ex-patriot of “Science”Blogs who now blogs for Discover, and contributing editor to Science Progress, Chris Mooney is perhaps Pharma’s newest writer who has taken on the task of spoon-feeding its message to the public.

From there it is smears all the way down. You can read the whole thing here. My favorite sentence:

Yet despite the previously described mingling with obvious denialists and plagiarists, Chris Mooney is perhaps most notorious in the autism community….

You complete the sentence. But make sure to include the word “Pharma” at least twice….

PS: Orac has more on Jake Crosby’s endeavors…..written pretty kindly, as I think this particular case deserves.

Today, March 20, at 17:32 GMT (1:32 p.m. EST) — after three months of crawling northward — the center of the Sun will lie on the celestial equator, heralding the moment of the vernal equinox.

Or, more understandably, if somewhat less correctly, spring will arrive.

But someone really needs to tell New Mexico (where I’m currently traveling). I don’t think the weather watches the news here.

My friend and Hive Overmind co-blogger Sean Carroll is a theoretical cosmologist, which means he thinks about why the Universe is the way it is, and applies what we know about physics and mathematics to try to understand it. His particular interest is the flow of time, and why it goes from the past to the future. That may seem like a weird thing, but in fact we don’t understand why we remember the past and not the future. Space goes in all directions, but time is a one-way street. Why?

This question is so interesting, in fact, that it caught the attention of noted scientist and thinker Stephen Colbert, who discussed it (and Sean’s new book, From Eternity to Here) on his TV show last week. I highly recommend taking a look at the clip Sean has on his blog; he’s a great example of not only someone trying to pry open the secrets of everything, but also of someone who enjoys doing it, and does a great job explaining it under what must be the high-pressure gaze of Colbert. My congrats to Sean for joining the long list of my friends who have been on that TV show, and of course I’m not jealous at all. Really. Not even a little tiny bit. Seriously.

Foot-in-the-door technique using a courtship request: a field experiment.

“‘Foot-in-the-door’ is a well-known compliance technique which increases compliance to a request. Many investigations with this paradigm have generally used prosocial requests to test its effect. Evaluation of the effect of foot-in-the-door was carried out with a courtship request. 360 young women were solicited in the street to accept having a drink with a young male confederate. In the foot-in-the-door condition, before being solicited to have a drink, the young woman was asked to give directions to the confederate or to give him a light for his cigarette. Analysis showed foot-in-the-door was associated with greater compliance to the second request.”

Door-in-the-face technique and monetary solicitation: an evaluation in a field setting.

“To test the door-in-the-face technique for a private solicitation, 53 men and 37 women in several bars were engaged. In one condition, a female confederate asked the subject to buy her drink because her boyfriend had left without paying the bill. After the subject refused, the confederate requested only 2 or 3 coins. In the control condition, the latter request was the only one. Analysis showed a dramatic increase in compliance for the door-in-the-face condition. A positive effect of the door-in-the-face technique was also observed for the average amount of the donation. The accentuation of the solicitor’s dependency in the door-in-the-face condition seemed relevant for explanation.”

Thanks to John for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/AndrewEick

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Bust size and hitchhiking: a field study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Does this outfit make me look like I want to get laid?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation.

Launch up from your couch and voyage to the final frontier this weekend with Hubble 3D, a hi-tech piece of visual wizardry from Warner Bros, IMAX, and NASA. The movie tracks the efforts of the astronauts on board mission STS-125, who blasted off aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. For this mission, as DISCOVER explained in a review of the movie, Atlantis carried not only its regular payload of new gear for the telescope, but also a 600-pound IMAX camera to record the orbital repair job in breathtaking detail.

Apart from replacing worn out equipment and upgrading the world’s largest telescope so that it could continue to send home breathtaking images of the universe, the astronauts also functioned as cinematographers, using only eight minutes of film to shoot the repair work. The film also takes viewers on a tour of the telescope’s most famous observations, and explains what the ’scope has revealed about such wonders as the stellar nurseries of the Orion nebula and our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Director Toni Meyers, whose credits include a 3-D documentary about the international space station, says: “I think there is a kind of innate curiosity in all of us and a thirst to travel to places that either we can’t go to or it’s extremely difficult to do so” [CNN].

Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this interstellar ride allows viewers to watch crew members working on the open body of Hubble in space even as politicians on Earth debated the telescope’s future. The brisk 40-minute film is also interspersed with vignettes of the astronauts’ pre-launch training in a gigantic underwater repair station.

While the astronauts were confident about their roles aboard the space shuttle, they were nervous of their filmmaking duties. “We’re basically a bunch of knuckleheads,” said [astronaut Michael] Massimino, a graduate of Columbia University with a doctorate from MIT. “Just because you can walk in space and fly a space shuttle doesn’t mean you’ll remember to turn a camera on and off” [CNN]. But director Meyers was more confident about the crews’ directorial and acting talents. “The crew is very engaging, with wonderful personalities…. They really show the audience how difficult it is to do what they were faced with up there”[DISCOVER], she says.

The film opens today, March 19th, in some theaters, but more shows are expected to be added in April when Hubble celebrates its 20th anniversary. For crew members, Hubble 3D was an especially exciting opportunity as they could finally share what they see and do in space with the rest of the world. Astronaut Micheal Massimino, a veteran of two space-walks aboard Atlantis exclaimed: “I tell folks … if you’re in heaven, this is what you would see…. This is what heaven must look like. It’s beautiful” [CNN].

Here’s a look at the making of Hubble 3D.

Related Content:
80beats:Hubble Spies Baby Galaxies That Formed Just After the Big Bang
80beats: Prepare to Be Amazed: First Pics From the Repaired Hubble Are Stunning
80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: Researchers Find First Picture of An Exoplanet! (In 11-Year-Old Hubble Data)
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars

I just started a comments thread over at the Point of Inquiry forums to ask what folks think of my first three programs–on vaccine denial with Paul Offit, on climate denial with Michael Mann, and then on science journalism and disaster with Andrew Revkin. We’ve determined that I’ll be taking next week off, and a D.J. Grothe show that was in the can will air instead. So now is a great time to evaluate strengths and weaknesses and plot new directions. This is, after all, a new experiment, and I want to learn from it and progress. So any thoughts are appreciated. Leave them at the forum thread, or leave them here–and thanks!

At this very moment the LHC is busy trying to set a new world record. The goal is to achieve beams circulating at 3.5 TeV, bringing collisions between protons to 3.5+3.5=7 TeV center-of-mass energy. This would be the highest particle energy ever accomplished by humans (nature somehow routinely manages to produce cosmic rays at energies 8 orders of magnitude higher!). This news is hot off the press: we had a talk today by Lyn Evans, and he gave us the latest update. He should know what’s going on, since he’s project leader of the LHC. Evans shared some entertaining anecdotes from the last few years of commissioning, including:

They use superfluid helium to cool the superconducting magnets. One of the many weird properties of this stuff is that it has zero viscosity. Which means that, if there’s any sort of hairline fracture anywhere in the 27 kilometer long tunnel, the stuff comes spewing out, and very, very bad things happen. Every component, every joint, every one of the tens of thousands of tiny connections has to be perfect. It is this sort of failure which brought the machine to its knees shortly after commissioning, over a year ago.

The magnets are kept very, very cold; the superfluid helium is at 1.9 Kelvin (-271 Celsius), or a couple of degrees above absolute zero. We’re not talking a little vial in a laboratory being kept at this temperature. We’re talking many thousands of tonnes of magnets, kept just above absolute zero (using 96 tonnes of liquid helium). As things cool down, they naturally contract. The decks on bridges do the same thing, hence those serrated grills at the ends of bridges to absorb the expansion and contraction due to weather (if you’ve ever motorcycled across a bridge, you know exactly what I’m talking about). There are equivalent serrated joints in the LHC beam pipe to ensure that it doesn’t contract and rip open upon cooling (which, needless to say, would be bad). But upon reheating a section of the LHC, it turned out some of these devices left little fibers in the beam tube. Not good. How to find them, without ripping open the entire collider (costing millions of dollars and setting the project back precious months)? They ended up blowing a ping pong ball (with electronics embedded) down the tube, and tracking where it would get stuck. A simple, elegant, cheap solution to fix a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

For a while during the construction they ended up with roughly a billion dollars worth of superconducting magnets being stored in a parking lot at CERN. For reference, this is comparable to the entire GDP of many small countries (Bhutan, Guyana, Burundi, etc.), sitting out in the rain and snow. Big science.

Hopefully sometime in the next few days they’ll be running at 3.5 TeV. Apparently it’s been slow going because the system to prevent catastrophic quenching of the magnets (which is what “broke” the machine previously) is on a hair-trigger, setting off all sorts of false alarms (and when it goes off it quenches the magnets [in a controlled manner]). You can keep track of the progress on the LHC webpage (clicking on the image of the ring gives real-time data on the temperature of the magnets). Although this would be the highest energy ever achieved, it still doesn’t significantly surpass the science reach of Fermilab’s Tevatron, since the latter has run for many years (albeit at a lower energy of 1 TeV+1TeV). Both energy and (integrated) luminosity matter in this game, and the Tevatron has gotten more than 8 inverse fb (femtobarns; one of the best units in all of science [think "there's no way to miss it, it's as big as a barn"]). The LHC is shooting for 1 inverse fb. All being well, in a few months they’ll bump the energy up to 5 Tev on 5 TeV. This should significantly open up the scientific discovery space, and could conceivably kick off the next revolution in particle physics. Exciting times!

C-SPAN has opened up their archives, so that you can search and watch all 23 years of their footage. Their Booknotes crew came to a talk I gave at Stanford University Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh. And now you can watch it here.

Think scientists are always tactful? Think again! Here are our five favorite insensitive paper titles of all time:

1.) Ashes to ashes: thermal contact burns in children caused by recreational fires.

2.) An unusual penpal: case report and literature review of posterior urethral injuries secondary to foreign body insertion.

3.) A lucky catch: Fishhook injury of the tongue.

4.) Children and mini-magnets: an almost fatal attraction.

5.) “Here’s egg in your eye”: a prospective study of blunt ocular trauma resulting from thrown eggs.

Photo: flickr/Joe Shlabotnik

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Rectal salami.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Ingested magnets: the force within.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Top 10 absurd papers of 2009.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: ridiculous titles

Pictured here is an European Synchrotron Radiation Facility double mirror system handy for focusing X-ray beams down to the nanometer range. ESRF has used these fine beams to examine recently discovered interstellar dust collected in the Stardust spacecraft. Photographer Peter Ginter describes his process with this image: “I wanted to photograph this detection device, hidden and growing in an eggshell of thoughts, going through many phases of an evolutionary process before it actually sees the light.” While photographing, Ginter noticed the anxiously watching researchers’ faces reflected on the surface of the machine, and “instantly had the gut feeling how very much this instrument was an extension of the scientist’s mind.”

Photograph courtesy ESRF/Peter Ginter

If you haven’t already cluttered your car with talking gadgets and navigation systems, then here’s something else you might want to pop into your driving machine one day: a new augmented reality windshield that’s being developed by General Motors. While the windshield is still years away from the assembly line, car enthusiasts and tech geeks are already getting excited about the idea.

The “enhanced vision system” aims to help drivers navigate through dark or foggy conditions. The system would alert the driver by highlighting landmarks or outlining obstacles like a running animal on the windshield to help the driver avoid collisions.

Here’s how it works. A bunch of forward-looking sensors, including infrared sensors and visible cameras on the windshield, gather data on the external environment. Three other cameras inside the car track the driver’s head and eyes to determine where he is looking. Both sets of data are then paired up so that the enhanced views can be projected on the windshield, overlaid over the actual scene outside the car. This enhanced view or “augmented reality” would clearly point out obstacles on the road, so the driver can avoid them. GM suggests that GPS directions could also be projected onto the glass, so the driver doesn’t take his eyes off the road.

Technology Review explains:

To turn the entire windshield into a transparent display, GM uses a special type of glass coated with red-emitting and blue-emitting phosphors–a clear synthetic material that glows when it is excited by ultraviolet light. The phosphor display, created by SuperImaging, is activated by tiny, ultraviolet lasers bouncing off mirrors bundled near the windshield.

This may all sound a little distracting for the driver. But Thomas Seder, the lab group manager for the Human Machine Interface Group at GM, says: “We definitely don’t want the virtual image that’s on the display to complete with the external world; we just want to augment it.”

Technology Review reports that the augmented reality windshield is not the first of its kind:

Head-up displays (HUDs) are already used to project some information–like a car’s speed or directions–directly in front of the driver, through the windshield, or even through a side view mirror. These sorts of displays have started appearing in high-end cars, and typically work by projecting light to create an image on part of the windshield.

GM hopes to have the augmented reality windshields in the market by 2018. Click here for a video on how the fancy windshield works.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: A GPS to Augment Your Entire Reality
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Phone App Can Identify Strangers on the Street
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera
Discoblog: Look Kids, Big Ben in 1890! Augmented Reality Meets Tourism

Image: General Motors

When we last covered NASA’s Stardust mission a couple weeks ago, we noted that it was one of those missions that just keeps popping up as new findings from its data makes the news. But Stardust might by outdone by another: Cassini, which continues to reveal new surprises about Saturn and its moons—not to mention sending back beautiful images like this new batch. Today in the journal Science, Cassini researchers review six years of Saturn science (here and here) by the hardy spacecraft.

The first review tackles the planet’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. Before Cassini, scientists thought that the magnetosphere, the shield from the solar wind that forms around a planet, contained nitrogen ions that had come from Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Cassini showed that wasn’t so, and that wasn’t the only surprise about the magnetosphere: The spacecraft’s observations showed that it is dominated by water, part of which comes from water vapor plumes that shoot out of geysers on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “The big news is that Saturn’s space environment is swimming in water,” said Tamas Gombosi, a Cassini scientist [Space.com].

And then there are those rings. The scientists released these new photos with the studies. These images are true color, except the black-and-white one and the one with the bluish ring, which is enhanced. You can see the reddish tinge in some of the rings [io9]. Cassini showed that these famous features are not serene circles, but active and mysterious regions. That reddish tinge Cassini spied comes from a contaminant that still hasn’t been identified. Also, the mission documented the perturbing objects and pulls of the moons that shake up the rings. With Cassini the rings “went from like a very beautiful cardboard cutout … to a real 3D structure,” said Jeff Cuzzi, Cassini’s interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust [Space.com].

Cassini has already been in Saturnian orbit since June 2004, and with its recent mission extension, will keep studying the mysteries on Saturn, Titan, Enceladus, and more until 2017. You can keep up with Cassini on Twitter. And while you’re at it, follow us.

Related Content:
80beats: More Watery Eruptions, and More Head, On Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?

Images: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS

My friend Eran Segev, an Aussie skeptic and all-around good guy, submitted a podcast to 365 Days of Astronomy dealing with the venerable Parkes radio dish and its support of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It’s a good story — it was fictionalized in the very cute movie "The Dish" — and he interviews a couple of the men who were there during the whole thing. And if you listen to the whole thing, they mention a familiar name, too…

Thermal images from ESO's ground based telescope on top, taken May 18, 2008, and the Hubble optical on bottom, taken on May 15, 2008. Click for a larger version. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/ESO and NASA/ESA/GSFC

A team of astronomers recently took a look at the  Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the local area around it using a collection of the best telescopes in the world to make a thermal map.  The images show: the Great Red Spot and two smaller storms nicknamed Oval BA and Little Red Spot.

The thermal image was taken in the infrared wavelength range of 10.8 microns, which is sensitive to Jupiter’s atmospheric temperatures in the 300 to 600 millibar pressure range in order to coincide with the altitude of the white, red and brown aerosols seen in the visible-light image on the bottom.

Pretty fascinating stuff.

Here’s the press release and it tells the story:

New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system.

The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. These types of data, detailed in a paper appearing in the journal Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system’s best-known storm system.

“This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system,” said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was one of the authors of the paper. “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated.”

Sky gazers have been observing the Great Red Spot in one form or another for hundreds of years, with continuous observations of its current shape dating back to the 19th century. The spot, which is a cold region averaging about 110 Kelvin (minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit) is so wide about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.

The thermal images obtained by giant 8-meter (26-foot) telescopes used for this study — the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru telescope in Hawaii — have provided an unprecedented level of resolution and extended the coverage provided by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Together with observations of the deep cloud structure by the 3-meter (10-foot) NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the level of thermal detail observed from these giant observatories is comparable to visible-light images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope for the first time.

One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the spot is about 3 to 4 Kelvin (5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the environment around it, said Leigh Fletcher, the lead author of the paper, who completed much of the research as a postdoctoral fellow at JPL and is currently a fellow at the University of Oxford in England. This temperature differential might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm. Not only that, but on other parts of Jupiter, the temperature change is enough to alter wind velocities and affect cloud patterns in the belts and zones.

“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition – and the actual color of the Great Red Spot,” Fletcher said. “Although we can speculate, we still don’t know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm.”

Unlocking the secrets of Jupiter’s giant storm systems will be one of the targets for infrared spacecraft observations from future missions including NASA’s Juno mission.

At some point in evolutionary history dogs diverged from wolves thanks to domestication by humans. But just where did dogs first become man’s best friend? Robert Wayne and his team have many years invested in answering the question, and their newest findings, published this week in Nature, suggest that the answer is the Middle East.

Researchers looked at gene segments from 912 dogs, from 85 breeds, and samples of 225 grey wolves, dog’s close cousins who they evolved from in prehistory, from 11 regions [USA Today]. Dogs and wolves that come from the Middle East, Wayne says, show the most genetic similarity. The researchers propose that dogs were first domesticated there, and then spread outward.

Dogs and wolves are closely related enough that they have interbred at various times, complicating the problem of unraveling dogs’ origin. Wayne’s team suggests that after the domestication of dogs in the Middle East, they interbred with wolves when they reached East Asia, which is how dogs and wolves there came to share some of their genetics.

Indeed, previous research had suggested East Asia as the origin of dog domestication, as breeds from there showed the most genetic diversity. But Wayne says those papers focused on a small subset of DNA called mitochondrial DNA, instead of looking across all 2.4 billion letters that make up the dog genome [NPR]. But Peter Savolainen, one of the scientists arguing for East Asia, says he wasn’t moved by Wayne’s new study. Savolainen says it did not sample dogs in East Asia from south of the Yangtze, the region where the diversity of mitochondrial DNA is highest. Also archaeologists in China have been less interested in distinguishing dog and wolf remains, he said [The New York Times].

So this study won’t be the final word. But what’s not in doubt is the importance of dogs to early human civilization (that is, once the domesticators selected for small body size and other characteristics you’d want to make best friend that doesn’t eat you). Dogs could have been the sentries that let hunter gatherers settle without fear of surprise attack. They may also have been the first major item of inherited wealth, preceding cattle, and so could have laid the foundations for the gradations of wealth and social hierarchy that differentiated settled groups from the egalitarianism of their hunter-gatherer predecessors [The New York Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Where Did Dogs First Become Man’s Best Friend?
80beats: Wolves Have Dogs to Thank for Their Dark Fur
80beats: Hairless Dogs Give Up the Genetic Secret of Their Bald Glory
DISCOVER: The Genetics of… Dogs
DISCOVER: Ascent of the Dog

Image: flickr / mikebaird

At Discoblog, we do our best to keep the party going. So, even as we lurch back into existence after St. Paddy’s celebrations, we are looking forward to our next big party–which just might be the iPad launch party next month. So, here’s an idea for Apple-themed party food, courtesy Chef Ken at The Cooks Den.

There’s nothing like a cheese plate to make an occasion feel festive. For this recipe, you will need:

* 1 Steve Jobs Cheese Head
* Assorted gourmet cheeses such as brie, camembert or stilton
* Crackers
* Fruit

Oh! You’re not familiar with the culinary marvel known as the Steve Jobs Cheese Head? Forgive us. Chef Ken created this perfectly crafted head of the Apple CEO from a block of mozzarella; the chef thinks mozzarella works best, since the color of the cheese matches His Steveness’s pasty white pallor. It’s pretty simple to create this cheesy replica of a Jobs head. For step-by-step instructions, go here.

Once your Steve Jobs Cheese Head has been lovingly crafted, place it on fancy plate, arrange crackers, pieces of fruit, and assorted cheeses, and serve to your guests. Chef Ken also suggests serving Jobs’s head as part of a nacho concoction or in a fusion dish he calls iPad Thai. Hey, the Steve Jobs Cheese Head goes with anything.

But if by some weird chance the Steve Jobs Cheese Head does not grab your interest, you might also consider serving cheese made from breast milk.

This all-natural creation was pumped to existence when chef Daniel Angerer’s wife realized she had a lot of extra breast milk lying around in packets, cluttering the freezer.

But instead of throwing the excess milk out and wasting “gold,” as Angerer terms it, he turned it to cheese, much to the delight of other moms who are now asking for more breast milk recipes.

They want to use their extra milk to make ice-cream, milk shakes, and other stuff that can be fed to fussy eaters.

We aren’t really sure what sort of party would call for the serving of breast milk cheese–but Angerer has helpfully provided detailed instructions from his “Mommy’s milk cheese making experiment” for anyone who wants to follow his example.

Related Content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: St. Paddy’s Day special: Surprise! Drinking makes the Irish more aggressive!
Discoblog: Honoring St. Patrick: Guinness Bubbles Demystified and Why Your Hangover Hurts
Discoblog: A Giant Leap for Cheddarkind: Brits Launch Cheese Into Space
Discoblog: Caution: Your Cheese Grater May Be Radioactive, Study Finds
Discoblog: Cooking with Joel Stein: How to Eat a Placenta

Images: The Cooks Den, Daniel Angerer

Not happy with only dominating the Internet, software giant Google is looking to expand into the television business, too. It won’t be producing content, but Google will be creating software in partnership with Sony and Intel that will help bring the Internet to TVs and set-top boxes all over the land.

With the just-announced Google TV, people will be able to access web features like downloadable games, Facebook, and streaming video on their TV as easily as if they were flipping channels. Some existing televisions and set-top boxes [already] offer access to Web content, but the choice of sites is limited. Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones [The New York Times]. Google expects that products based on its software may be ready as soon as this summer.

Google’s TV platform will use Intel’s Atom chips and may also give Sony a leg up in a highly competitive hardware market, as Sony hopes to bring out the first appliances and maybe even TVs that encorporate the software. The project will use a version of Google’s Chrome Web browser to create an interface where people can use the TV not just to poke around the Internet, but also to play videos from Hulu or YouTube. The company has reportedly already built a prototype set-top box, but the technology may be incorporated directly into TVs or other devices [The New York Times].

However, Google TV will face stiff competition from Roku and Boxee–two existing devices that allow users to stream video from Netflix and a selection of other sites, while Yahoo has also come out with a TV platform that allows users to access certain Web sites. Those competitors, unsurprisingly, say their products are superior to what Google has planned; Roku CEO Anthony Wood argues that the expensive chip inside a Google TV box would raise the device’s cost to about $200, far higher than Roku’s $80 device. But as Google hasn’t officially acknowledged the project yet, price estimates for Google TV devices are pure speculation.

Experts see Google’s project as a pre-emptive move to get a foothold in the living room as more consumers start exploring ways to bring Web content to their television sets. Google wants to aggressively ensure that its services, in particular its search and advertising systems, play a central role. “Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there,” one insider says [The New York Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life
DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
DISCOVER: Google Taught Me How to Cut My Own Hair
DISCOVER: How Google Is Making Us Smarter

Image: iStockphoto

Only the tiny bits of matter, atoms and molecules, have even been observed in a quantum state—until now. In a study in this week’s Nature, physicists report that they’ve put the largest object ever into that state where the weird rules of quantum mechanics apply, and things can be in two places at once. Research leader Andrew Cleland says: “There is this question of where the dividing line is between the quantum world and the classical world we know. We know perfectly well that things are not in two places at the same time in our everyday experience, but this fundamental theory of physics says that they can be” [BBC News].

The researchers’ “quantum resonator,” seen here, is a vibrating device that measures only in micrometers, but that’s large enough for us to see it with a little help from a scanning electron microscope. To see quantum mechanics in action, scientists try to put an object into its ground state, the point when no more energy can be removed from the system. Then they add a quantum of energy back in, which can oscillate between locations. Although only one quantum of energy is put in, any measurements will show either zero or one quanta; strictly, the atom has both [BBC News].

Doing this, however, requires ultra-low temperatures near absolute zero. Unfortunately, the ground state temperature is related to the vibrational frequency. To reach it, you either need to reach temperatures below those possible with current refrigeration methods, or have something that can vibrate incredibly quickly [Ars Technica]. Unable to reach the 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin they thought would be necessary, the researchers went the other way. They crafted this device to vibrate at 6 billion times per second, which meant they could get by with slightly warmer temperature.

Once the system reached ground state, the team created a phonon, a minuscule unit of vibrating energy. And in aluminum nitride layered between two aluminum electrodes, the team observed quantum behavior—the system was in a superpostion of states, simultaneously having both zero and one quanta of energy.

Cleland’s find could be another step toward quantum computing. But for those more interested in mind puzzles than practicality, this line of research could test predictions about “Schrödinger cat” states — named for a hypothetical feline simultaneously alive and dead — in which a system exists in a mix of states known as a superposition. Cleland’s team showed, somewhat indirectly, that a form of superposition existed inside their resonator [Science News].

Related Content:
80beats: Quantum Leaf? Algae Use Physics Trick to Boost Photosynthesis Efficiency
80beats: Quantum Teleportation Is a Go!
80beats: Quantum Cryptography Takes a Step Toward Mainstream Use
80beats: Forget Schrodinger’s Cat. Could We Make Schrodinger’s Virus?
The Loom: Schrodinger’s Tat (science tattoo)

Image: Andrew Cleland

You never know where you’ll find it.