Oh, the mysteries of the App Store approval process. MiTube, a jailbreak favorite for downloading YouTube videos directly to your iPhone, is currently available in the App Store for free. With a nice AdMob ad. How strange. More »
A brutal Mount Everest storm might have doomed legendary climber George Mallory. How do we know? Because it’s there—in his team’s meteorological records.
Mallory was the man who, according to legend at least, responded to a question about why he’d want to climb Everest with the immortal reply, “Because it’s there.” But he and his partner, Andrew Irvine, never returned from their 1924 attempt to summit the world’s highest peak. Their lost expedition spurred decades of curiosity about their fate, a curiosity that only intensified when explorers found Mallory’s body in 1999.
For a paper published in the journal Weather, scientists have scoured the meteorological measurements taken at the expedition’s base camp at 16,500 feet and recorded in the logs. Despite the fact that those logs were brought back to Britain in 1926, the researchers argue that they haven’t been part of the discussion of Mallory’s downfall, even though the answer could be right there on the decades-old pages.
The researchers analysed barometric pressure measurements and found that during the Mallory and Irvine summit attempt, there was a pressure drop at Everest base camp of approximately 18 millibars (mbar). Lead author GW Kent Moore, from the University of Toronto, Canada, described this as “quite a large drop”. He said: “We concluded that Mallory and Irvine most likely encountered a very intense storm as they made their way towards the summit” [BBC News].
A storm on Mount Everest is bad news for climbers by itself. But the drop in pressure also depletes the oxygen that’s so precious when you’re so high up.
Dr John Semple, an experienced climber and the chief of surgery at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, said: “Mount Everest is so high that there is barely enough oxygen near its summit to sustain life and a drop of pressure of 4 mbar at the summit is sufficient to drive individuals into a hypoxic state” [The Telegraph].
Even if Moore is right, his storm hypothesis still can’t answer the real burning question about the lost expedition: whether Mallory and Irvine achieved the top of Everest before they died. The 1999 explorers found Mallory’s body more than 26,000 feet up. If he had reached the summit, it would have predated Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1953 ascent by nearly three decades.
For more about Mallory, check out the new documentary The Wildest Dream, which follows both the 1924 ascent and the 1999 mission that finally found him.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The High Life explains the science of altitude sickness
80beats: EXTREME SCIENCE: Doctors Drop Their Pants on Everest for a Blood Oxygen Test
80beats: Why Climbers Die on Everest: It’s Not the Avalanches (or the Yeti)
Discoblog: Spring Cleaning in Everest’s “Death Zone” To Sweep Up Oxygen Bottles & Corpses
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Want to attract a good mate and ward off unknown relations? Secrete a smelly substance from that gland on your chest and rub it all over. At least that’s what a mandrill might do: A recent study suggests that the baboon-like primates may use their smelly secretions to distinguish compatible mates from family.
After taking swabs from mandrill sternal glands, researchers genotyped each sample to determine the monkey’s major histocompatibility complex (MHC)–a unique genetic signature related to the animal’s immune system. They also, using a sorting technique called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, determined each secretion’s chemical makeup, and thus its stink bouquet.
As the study’s leader Leslie Knapp of Cambridge University told the BBC, more “genetically diverse” mandrills, i.e. unrelated, have different MHCs and chemically-speaking different scents:
“[I]t seems that the odour is something that tells us some really important things about the genes of a mandrill.”
If this all sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because some researchers have said the same thing about humans. We somehow–even though researchers can’t seem to pin down human pheromones–seem to pick out one another’s genetic diversity when sniffing out good mates. Related studies have even examined whether birth control messes with our and animal’s don’t-mate-with-me-cousin beacons, which could hypothetically lead to inbreeding.
As Knapp told the BBC, the animal’s colorful face markings also seem important for attracting mates and communicating status. But to complicate matters on our end of the primate family tree, another recent study hinted that, for humans, faces that resemble our own or our parents’ drive us wild, narcissistic lot that we are.
Related content:
Discoblog: You Think You (And Your Parents) Are Hot
Discoblog: Can Pheromone Body Wash Make You More Desirable?
Discoblog: The Nose Knows: Men’s Sweat Smells Like Cheese, Women’s Like Onions
Discoblog: Attention Women: You Can Sniff Out a Man’s Sexual Intentions
Image: Wikimedia / Robert Young
We usually take pictures of people, places and things. But sometimes there's value beyond the subject itself, found in the aesthetics of the photo alone. For this week's Shooting Challenge, I want you to shoot an abstract photo. More »
I have a domestic unvented hot water cylinder that holds 250kg of water and has a heat exchange coil (carrying 80C hot water in a sealed system.) As its unvented it is connected to a diaphram type expansion vessel.
When I fill the vessel with water and charge the water to about 0.5bar when
The Dark Knight has been on DVD and Blu-ray for a while now, but it finally just hit iTunes. The best part? The 31 minutes of previously Blu-ray only bonuses can be had anywhere. More »
Toshiba's Portégé line has always been the top of the company's shelf—with prices to match. The Portégé R705 upends that lineage: It's capable, sure, but it's also affordable. So does it live up to its fancy double-accent-marks? More »
Rejoice, Facebook users with Android smartphones, because there's a new Facebook app looks good at last. It also comes with a handful of useful new features: More »
JoliCloud has been a long time coming, but you can finally download it today. It's a touchscreen-compatible, Linux-based operating system that promises that simplifies your netbook experience. It looks neat, boasts a 700-app directory—and it's totally free. More »
From Discover Technology:
Sure, a laser can shine finely-tuned light to do anything from scanning your barcodes to correcting your vision, but soon that precise hero may meet its match: Physicists have recently imagined a device that can absorb light of certain frequencies, an "ant
From Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now:
Clever augmented reality applications are becoming the natural byproducts of our modern computers--computers that are tiny, have eyes and other location-aware sensors, and are able to place a synthetic layer of in
Our favorite charity-worker Bill Gates has successfully signed up 38 billionaires to give away half of their wealth to those less fortunate, in what could be the largest-scale philanthropic work ever. More »
Today DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong reports on a project called Foldit, in which citizen scientists playing a slick computer game helped to unravel the complex structure of proteins, and in doing so got the game into the prestigious journal Nature.
There are plenty of great ways for non-professional scientists to help out scientific projects. DISCOVER previously brought you the ways to donate your computer’s free time to projects like SETI@home and Stardust@home. But what if you want to use your own brainpower in the aid of science? That can be arranged, as there are plenty of more active ways to contribute to crowdsourced science.
1. Mapping the place where Genghis Khan was buried
This summer archaeologist Albert Yu-Min Lin led an expedition to Mongolia in search of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan—but not before putting out the call for a little help.
Lin’s team provided high-resolution satellite photography of the area they plan to survey. On the mission’s website, volunteers can sign up to scan the images for anything that could help the team on its quest: roads, rivers, or perhaps even the outlines of where long-gone structures once stood centuries ago.
2. Amateur Martians
As we noted yesterday with the Spirit rover’s apparent demise, the rovers and orbiters NASA has sent to Mars have been a smashing success. The only problem is, those robot explorers have sent home more data than NASA’s people can map on their own.
You can help: Play “Be a Martian,” a game set up through the Jet Propulsion Lab. Players earn points and badges by finding the most interesting martian craters for study, or by matching up high-resolution images of the red planet’s surfaces to wider photos taken from above—thereby improving maps of Mars.
3. Fixing that little oil spill down south
With a temporary cap in place and the more permanent “static kill” and relief well measures on their way, we hope that BP is on the cusp of shutting down its oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico for good (fingers crossed). But even if they succeed, the gargantuan task of cleanup remains.
You can help. When BP asked the public to submit ideas for fixing the spill, it got 300,000 responses. Certainly many were kooky, but as the DISCOVER blog The Intersection noted, one proposed scheme seems very similar to the container cap on the leak now. And the X-Prize foundation, which offers multi-million dollar prizes for things like the best lunar craft or high-mileage car, said it would consider such a lucrative prize for the right idea to clean up BP’s mess.
If you’re no Kevin Costner and don’t have an oil cleanup machine in your garage, scientists still could use some help in the long recovery that’s only just beginning. One man, Drew Wheelan of the American Birding Association, sought help this summer to count the ghost crabs on the Gulf Coast, which are imperiled by the oil but harder to count than turtles or birds.
4. reCAPTCHA
You might have already helped reCAPTCHA without even knowing it.
The project, started in 2008 and acquired by Google last year, is helping to digitize old documents like books and The New York Times archive by using talents you have that computers don’t. CAPTCHAs are those squiggly letters and numbers that websites ask you to interpret to prove you’re not a spambot. And the degraded text in old newspapers tends to look a little like CAPTCHAs, making it difficult for computers to digitize them.
So, when computers can’t figure out a word, they ask us. The word or phrase is put into a CAPTCHA, where humans read it with 99 percent accuracy.
5. Galaxy Zoo – classifying galaxies (and more)
Computers have a hard time understanding messy old letters running into each other, and they have a hard time understanding messy old galaxies running into each other, too.
The people behind the Galaxy Zoo project want to understand galactic collisions, and how those collisions helped to provide the variety of galaxy types we see across the universe. So the system shows a volunteer an real image of two galaxies merging into one, surrounded by my computer-simulated images of different types of galactic smash-ups. You, the volunteer, choose the closest match. And when person after person does this with galaxy collision after galaxy collision, a better view of the universe’s evolution comes into view.
Galaxy Zoo volunteers have already turned up a new kind of galaxy, called “green pea” for its appearance. Professional astronomers alone probably couldn’t have scanned enough images to notice this, and computers’ talents aren’t well suited to spotting these oddballs.
We humans notice a surprise.
Follow DISCOVER on Twitter and Facebook.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The 14 Best Ways To Use Your Computer’s Spare Time
80beats: NASA Invites You To “Be a Martian” And Explore the Red Planet’s Terrain
80beats: Computers Exploit Human Brainpower to Decipher Faded Texts
80beats: Crowdsourced Astronomy Project Discovers “Green Pea” Galaxies
The Intersection: Who Gets Credit For the BP Container Cap? You Do.
Images: GeoEye; Wikimedia Commons
Is possible to increase the voltage without using transformer? if not why?
i have a problem in AC 1.5 tone(230v) when the AC is on it is working but after 5 min it is tripped and also voltage is dropped (150v) and also the lighting circuit is dim . the voltage is up and down the AC power circuit is ok what is problem please help me
My friend Glenn Schneider is an astronomer, and also a little bit nuts. He’s an umbraphile, an eclipse-chaser. But he’s not just any guy who travels the world to watch solar eclipses, he gets neck-deep into them. He actually chartered a plane and organized an incredible trip to see the total solar eclipse a few weeks ago — I wrote about this as he was planning it.
Glenn sent me a note to say that the trip was a complete success! They had more than nine minutes of totality to watch — that’s literally more than is ever possible on the ground, because a plane can "chase the shadow", counteracting the rotation of the Earth. He has some details and some great pictures on his site. Check this out:
The blue streamers above and below the Sun (and the dark spot below the Sun) are not real, but artifacts produced by the plane window and the camera. Still, that’s incredible. Sigh. I swear, one of these days I’ll go with him. I’ve still never seen a total solar eclipse. Some day…
For this week's Photoshop Contest, I asked you to stick some of today's gadgets into the glorious days of the early 90's. And you delivered! If only my 11-year-old self could see this stuff, he'd totally flip out. More »
Here’s an excerpt from my first post at the Techonomy blog–just introducing myself. You can read the full post here.
This is my first post on the Techonomy blog, so I mainly want to introduce myself. I’m Chris Mooney, a blogger for Discover and author of several books about the relationship between science and politics, and how things sometimes go dramatically splat in this area.
So I may seem, in some ways, an odd duck at Techonomy—except for the following fact.
As someone who’s extensively covered climate change, evolution, and stem cell battles (among others), I’ve learned there’s a fundamental dynamic here. Something in science or in technology comes along and dramatically changes our lives—and then people resist it. They fight back against the future, or change, or just plain reality.
Grasping this dynamic has in turn led me to look for the next set of issues that are bound to create similar tensions. That’s where Techonomy comes in….READ ON.
Opportunity's first dust devil. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University/Texas A&M
The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this dust devil on camera. This is the first one for Opportunity in the six and a half years on the planet. Spirit has seen dozens of them. I thought sure Oppy had seen one but no, not according to the press release.
This particular dust devil was seen on July 15th while the rover was taking pictures with its panoramic camera to do a bit of drive planning. The dustier conditions near Gusev Crater where Spirit has been working are likely more favorable to create the phenomenon.
Just a day before the dust devil was spotted, conditions near Opportunity were windy enough to blow some dust off the solar panels and increased the power output by 10 percent. Opportunity took a series of pictures on Sol 2220 (in April) which were put together to give a 360 degree view of the area, looks pretty desolate – click here to view it.
It’s not every day that people can get published in one of the world’s leading scientific journals by playing computer games, but Foldit is no ordinary game. The brainchild of Seth Cooper from the University of Washington, Foldit taps into the collective efforts of tens of thousands computer gamers to solve scientific problems.
The goal of the game is to work out the complicated three-dimensional structures of different proteins. Proteins are feats of biological origami; they consist of long chains of amino acids that fold into very specific and complicated shapes. These shapes can reveal how proteins work but solving them is fiendishly challenging. To do it, scientists typically need to grow crystals of purified protein before bouncing X-rays off them. Foldit takes a different approach, using the collective efforts of causal gamers to do the hard work. And its best players can outperform software designed to do the same job. Best of all, you don’t need a PhD to play Foldit, or any scientific training at all. The controls are intuitive, tutorial levels introduce the game’s mechanics, colourful visuals provide hints, and the interface is explained in simple language. While protein scientists concern themselves with “rotating alpha-helices” and “fixing degrees of freedom”, Foldit players simply ‘tweak’, ‘freeze’, ‘wiggle’ and ‘shake’ their on-screen shapes. It’s telling that barely an eighth of the players work in science, and two-thirds of the top scorers have no biochemistry experience beyond high school.
Foldit’s success relies on the fact that it doesn’t shallowly flirt with interactivity – it’s a true game. Cooper designed it to “attract the widest possible audience… and encourage prolonged engagement”. For a start, that meant making it competitive. Players are scored based on the stability of the structures they end up with and a leader board shows how they rank against other gamers.
There’s also a social side – gamers can chat on online forums, work in groups to solve puzzles and share solutions on a wiki. Of course, there’s the thrill of contributing to genuine scientific research, but that motivates less than half of the community. The rest do it for the achievement, the social aspects and largely, because the game was fun and immersive.
And just like real game development, everything was tuned according to feedback from the players. Tools were added and refined, the difficulty of the tutorials was tweaked to stop frustrated beginners from leaving, and puzzles were matched to the skills of the players.
Foldit’s origins lie within Rosetta, a piece of software designed to solve protein structures by simulating and testing thousands of different folds. Rosetta is an example of ‘distributed computing’, where volunteers run the program on their home computers when they don’t need it. They effectively donate their computing power to speed up the laborious task of solving protein structures. But the volunteers wanted to use their biological computers – their brains – as well as their man-made ones. They suggested an interactive version of the programme and in May 2008, they got their wish with Foldit.
To test the usefulness of the approach, Cooper challenged his gamers with ten puzzles – proteins whose structures were solved but weren’t on any public database. Even so, the Foldit players did themselves proud. They outperformed the original Rosetta software on five of the puzzles and matched it on three of them. And in the two cases where Rosetta actually beat the players, it still didn’t get anywhere near the right answer.
The human gamers had many advantages that gave them the edge. The players used a far wider range of strategies than Rosetta does, and some specialise in the early, middle or late stages of the game. And they were also good at working out where to begin. In one game, when they were given ten possible starting structures, they picked the one that was closest to the actual answer. Armed with the same starting set, Rosetta couldn’t do as well.
The humans also had the massive advantage of long-term planning. Rosetta uses a “rebuild and refine” method to gradually arrive at the most stable structure through tiny tweaks. But it won’t investigate a potentially interesting move if it means making the protein temporarily less stable. The gamers had no such problems. They were quite happy to substantially unravel the protein because they knew that they could put it back together in an even better state.
“Computers are obviously superior in the ability to crunch numbers, but lack the intuitive sense of knowing when to crunch numbers, or which tool to best use at a certain point in the game,” says CharlieFortsConscience, one of Foldit’s gamers. “The experience and intuition part of the gameplay, for me, is being able to look fresh at a puzzle structure and note which areas ‘don’t look right’.”
But even experience and intuition has its limits. Some puzzles proved too much for them. While some could solve the hardest of challenges – folding a full protein from its extended chain of amino acids – most struggled. Cooper thinks that he’ll get the best outcomes by blending the best of both human creativity and computer power. If Rosetta can take them half-way, gamers can finish the job with aplomb.
Cooper was so impressed with the players’ strategies that he thinks he can use them to design better algorithms for later versions of Rosetta. As he says, “Our results indicate that scientific advancement is possible if even a small fraction of the energy that goes into playing computer games can be channelled into scientific discovery.” It’s a perfect example of what Clay Shirky describes as the “cognitive surplus” – the free time and mental energy that’s spent on leisure pursuits. Thanks to the Internet, this valuable resource could be channelled into something more productive.
In the meantime, the gamers themselves can smile at the fact that they’ve been published in the prestigious journal Nature. They’re final authors on Cooper’s new Nature paper, listed anonymously (as seems fitting) as the “Foldit players”.
Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09304
More on computer science and video games:
If the citation link isn’t working, read why here
