Betelgeuse’s sandy gift | Bad Astronomy

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For one of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse still has some surprises up its sleeve. We’ve known for a couple of years it’s surrounded by a cloud of gas, but new observations show that nebula is far larger than previously thought!

[Click to enorionate.]

This new image is care of the Very Large Telescope, and shows a very deep and very high-resolution shot of Betelgeuse in the infrared. The inner black circle is the 2009 shot of the star and its surrounding gas — what we knew about before — and the big image shows all the gas around it just discovered. At the very center is a red circle indicating the actual size of Betelgeuse on this scale — it’s a red supergiant, and nearly two billion kilometers in diameter.

This structure is actually a wind of material blown off of the star itself. The exact mechanism behind this is unclear, though. Red supergiants are so big that gravity on their "surface" (they don’t really have a surface; they just kinda fade away into space) is very weak, and they can barely hold on to ...


Good calories, bad potatoes? | Gene Expression

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Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men:

Within each 4-year period, participants gained an average of 3.35 lb (5th to 95th percentile, ?4.1 to 12.4). On the basis of increased daily servings of individual dietary components, 4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (?0.22 lb), whole grains (?0.37 lb), fruits (?0.49 lb), nuts (?0.57 lb), and yogurt (?0.82 lb) (P?0.005 for each comparison). Aggregate dietary changes were associated with substantial differences in weight change (3.93 lb across quintiles of dietary change). Other lifestyle factors were also independently associated with weight change (P<0.001), including physical activity (?1.76 lb across quintiles); alcohol use (0.41 lb per drink per day), smoking (new quitters, 5.17 lb; former smokers, 0.14 lb), sleep (more weight gain with <6 or >8 hours of sleep), and television watching (0.31 lb per hour per day).

I took the results when they controlled for other variables and filtered them all so that their p-values were 0.001 or less (in fact, of ...

NCBI ROFL: Effect of hydration and vocal rest on the vocal fatigue in amateur karaoke singers. | Discoblog

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“Karaoke singing is a very popular entertainment among young people in Asia. It is a leisure singing activity with the singer’s voice amplified with special acoustic effects in the backdrop of music. Music video and song captions are shown on television screen to remind the singers during singing. It is not uncommon to find participants singing continuously for four to five hours each time. As most of the karaoke singers have no formal training in singing, these amateur singers are more vulnerable to developing voice problems under these intensive singing activities. This study reports the performance of 20 young amateur singers (10 males and 10 females, aged between 20-25 years) on a series of phonatory function tasks carried out during continuous karaoke singing. Half of the singers were given water to drink and short duration of vocal rests at regular intervals during singing and the other half sang continuously without taking any water or rest. The subjects who were given hydration and vocal rests sang significantly longer than those who did not take any water or rest. The voice quality, as measured by perceptual and acoustic measures, and vocal function, ...


Snobby Connoissuership | Cosmic Variance

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xkcd raises an interesting issue or three. Click to see the exciting conclusion, starring Joe Biden.

Naturally, in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich there was a Tumblr account dedicated to Joe Biden eating.

But one can’t help but ask — is it true? Does it really not matter what it is we choose to lavish our attentions upon? Would we find as much depth and complexity in different cans of Diet Dr. Pepper as oenophiles would claim are lurking in a bottle of fine Bordeaux?

I think we have to say no. Some things really are more complex and nuanced than other things. I could provide examples, but they aren’t any better than ones you can imagine yourself.

That’s okay, it doesn’t make the comic any less funny. And there is a clever point that remains true: people pick and choose the things on which they lavish their attention. To one person, all jazz is just noise; another would say the same about classical, and another about punk. The real issue isn’t the existence of complexity, it’s how we choose to recognize and value it. If we went through life taking note of every fact around us, we’d go insane within minutes. Making sense of existence relies heavily on coarse-graining.

But there’s yet another issue! (Yes I know I’m spending too much time analyzing a single comic — or am I deviously making a point?) The cartoon didn’t choose Diet Dr. Pepper as its example, it chose pictures of Joe Biden eating sandwiches. And you know, there really is a lot of depth there. There’s a lot you could say about a large collection of such photographs. So the question is — are any of those things worth saying? Complexity might be necessary for great art, but it doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Paying attention to certain kinds of details seems rewarding in a way that paying attention to others is not.

Anyone have a simple demarcation between the two? When is complexity deserving of study, and when does it merit being ignored? I’m sure aestheticians have argued about this for centuries, and I’m not trying to break any new ground here. I’m just at a loss for a good theory, which isn’t a condition I like to be in.


Polly-math Parrots Add Sophisticated Reasoning to Their List of Clever Feats | 80beats

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What’s the News: Parrots are even less bird-brained than previously thought, suggests a new study in the journal Biology Letters. In a series of tests, researchers have learned that some African grey parrots can use logical reasoning to uncover hidden food.

How the Heck:

Sandra Mikolasch and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria trained seven African grey parrots to find treats stashed under cups. While the birds watched, Mikolasch placed food under one cup and left an adjacent cup empty—the parrots had to choose the correct cup to get their snacks.
After training the birds, Mikolasch hid a seed and a walnut under two separate cups in front of the on-looking parrots. In plain view, she removed one of the treats and allowed the birds to choose cups again. Three of the parrots were able to correctly pick the cup with food at least 70 percent of the time. If the birds were purely guessing, ...


New Camera Lets You Focus Photos After the Fact | 80beats

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What’s the News: Lytro, a Silicon Valley start-up, has designed a camera that lets you shoot first and focus later. The camera captures the far more light and data than traditional models, and comes with software that lets you focus the photo, shift perspective, or go 3D after you’ve taken the photo. The company plans to sell a consumer, fits-in-your-pocket model by the end of the year.

How the Heck:

Lytro’s camera captures the light field, all the light traveling every direction through every point in a scene. Light-field cameras records data—such as direction, color, and intensity—about each individual ray of light. (Typical digital cameras, on the other hand, also take in information on color, instensity, and—to some extent—direction, but they essentially sum up light in a scene and record the total rather than tallying the information for each ray of light.) To do this, the camera has an array of microlenses behind the main lens, which help break up the light coming in into its component rays.
As Lytro CEO Ren Ng told the Wall Street Journal, it’s akin to recording each musician in a band on a different track and mixing the tracks later, rather than recording ...


As arctic ice shrinks, so does a denier claim | Bad Astronomy

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It’s been known for some time that the ice sheet in the arctic is thinning. And now, a new study (PDF) by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program lays this out in grim detail.

The report lists 15 key findings about the changes at the Earth’s northern regions. Fifteen. Here are four that alarmed me particularly:


1) The past six years (2005–2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic. Higher surface air temperatures are driving changes in the cryosphere.

3) The extent and duration of snow cover and sea ice have decreased across the Arctic. Temperatures in the permafrost have risen by up to 2 °C. The southern limit of permafrost has moved northward in Russia and Canada.

7) The Arctic Ocean is projected to become nearly ice-free in summer within this century, likely within the next thirty to forty years.

12) Loss of ice and snow in the Arctic enhances climate warming by increasing absorption of the sun’s energy at the surface of the planet. It could also dramatically increase emissions of carbon dioxide and methane and change large-scale ocean currents. The combined outcome of ...


On the Subject of Fox News, Jon Stewart Shouldn’t Have Backed Down | The Intersection

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Here’s a great segment from Jon Stewart last night–although it has one flaw. But watch first:

The problem is, Stewart wasn’t actually wrong, not even in the teeny way that he confessed to. Politifact cited the wrong studies to refute him, while ignoring numerous studies that I have found, all of which support Stewart. For a full explanation, see my latest DeSmogBlog item. Brief excerpt:

It is of course around contested political facts, and contested scientific facts, where we find active, politically impelled, and emotionally laden misinformation campaigns—and it is in the latter realm that Fox News viewers are clearly more misinformed. Once again, I’ve cited 5 studies to this effect—concerning the Iraq war, the 2010 election, global warming, health care reform, and the Ground Zero Mosque. By contrast, Politifact only cites two of these studies, and attempts to critique one of them (the 2010 election study)—misguidedly to my mind, but who really even cares. It is obvious where the weight of the evidence lies at this point, unless further, relevant studies are brought to bear.

As a result of all of this, Politifact should either produce relevant research to rebut Stewart, or run a far more forthcoming retraction than has been issued so far. Note, however, that the issue grew a tad more complicated last night when Stewart did an excellent segment on all of this, where he both dramatized how much Fox misinformed viewers and yet also kind of conceded Politifact’s point, when he didn’t actually have to. He wasn’t wrong. They were wrong.

When the fact checkers fail—and in this case, they not only failed, they generated a falsehood of their own–they have a special responsibility to self-correct.

Again, full post here.


Don’t Miss Out on Creating the Future

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Time is running out to enter the 2011 "Create the Future" Design Contest. Entries for the ninth annual contest are due by June 30th. Click here to submit your design idea.

Sponsored by COMSOL, Creo - a PTC product, and Tech Briefs Media Group, the contest recognizes outstanding innovations in product design, awarding a Grand Prize of $20,000 USD.

New this year is an Electronics Design category sponsored by Digi-Key Corp. Other categories are Consumer Products, Machinery & Equipment, Medical, Safety and Security, Sustainable Technologies, and Transportation. Entries can be submitted by individuals and/or teams in up to seven categories.

The top entry in each category will receive a workstation computer from Hewlett-Packard. The top ten most popular entries, as voted on by site registrants, will get a 3D mouse from 3Dconnexion. All qualified entrants will be included in a drawing for NASA Tech Briefs T-shirts, and the winning entries will be featured in a special supplement to NASA Tech Briefs magazine.

If you haven’t submitted your design, you have until June 30th to visit http://www.createthefuture2011.com and enter your great idea.

Is This The Next Lamborghini?

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Sure, design-school renderings are a dime a dozen, and most of them never end up seeing the light of day in production or even as life-sized concepts. But this one, the Ankonian concept by Slavche Tanevski of the Munich University of Applied Sciences, very much captures and extends the desig

Beware of Internal Threats

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In a dangerous world, most companies are cognizant that threats may come from outside their walls. However, some threats might come from within such as when a worker tries to trigger an explosion or a trusted supplier turns out not to be so trustworthy. How do you "lock out" internal threats?

The p

The Burning Question

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Some say packaging professionals should remain neutral in the "incineration vs. recycling" debate. Others say weigh in. The politically correct or easiest cause to support has always been recycling. But both recycling and incineration keep packaging out of landfills, presumably the least favorable o

Strange New Glass Proves Twice as Durable as Steel

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From Discover Technology:

Engineers have long sought a material with the strength of glass and the toughness of metal. But the two properties are virtually mutually exclusive. Strong, rigid materials tend to be brittle (think glass), while tough ones that resist shattering are often mall

Do Instrument Interfaces Need Updating?

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Will touch screens and gestures replace the buttons, knobs, and non-touch-sensitive displays we currently find on equipment? What's your take? Are smart phones and tablets pointing the way to promising new ways of controlling instruments and other gear?

The preceding article is a "sneak peek" from