Tonight!!! "Experimenting with Death: An Introduction to Terror Management Theory," Lecture, Observatory

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Tonight! Michael Johns on all things Terror Management Theory! 8:00! Observatory!

Full details follow. Hope to see you there!

Experimenting with Death: An Introduction to Terror Management Theory
An Illustrated Lecture by Michael Johns, Former Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Wyoming
Date: Thursday, May 6
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker attempted to develop a unified theory of human behavior. He argued that it was the human capacity to grasp and contemplate our own mortality–and our need to suppress this knowledge–that was at the root of human culture and behavior, from genocide to altruism, religion to philosophy. Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a psychological theory directly based on Becker’s work, developed by a group of social psychologists interested in testing Becker’s assertions about death as a core motivator of human behavior. Over the last 25 years, psychologists in the North America, Europe and the Middle East have conducted hundreds of studies to test hypothesis derived from Becker’s work and the Terror Management Theory it inspired. This body of research compellingly supports Becker’s thesis and reveals the ways in which mortality salience influences behaviors ranging from aggression and stereotyping to creativity and sexuality. Using segments from the documentary “Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality,” this lecture will introduce Terror Management Theory and discuss the often clever experiments that have been conducted to test its tenets.

Michael Johns is a social psychologist and works as a research scientist in the NYC Department of Health. He has published numerous research articles and book chapters on a variety of topics, including Terror Management Theory. Before moving to Brooklyn, Mike was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Wyoming.

You can find out more about this presentation here. For more on Ernest Becker's wonderful book Denial of Death, click here; for more on the film "Flight From Death - The Quest for Immortality," click here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Call for Cosmic Cleanup

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The increasing volume of man-made junk floating above Earth poses hazards for manned missions and satellite systems alike. The collision of two satellites in 2009 alone produced about 1,500 fragments larger than 10 cm. Technologies to monitor and predict trajectories of more than one million pieces

The Taxidermy of Mr. Walter Potter and his Museum of Curiosities, Melissa Milgrom

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Melissa Milgrom--author of Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy and panelist at the recent Congress for Curious People--has just published a nice article about that undisputed king of Victorian anthropomorhic taxidermy, animal artist and museologoist Walter Potter; following is a brief excerpt:

Athletic toads? Rats gambling in a dollhouse of decadence? How about bespectacled gentlemen lobsters?

No, this isn’t Wes Anderson’s sequel to Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the work of English Victorian taxidermist Mr. Walter Potter. Potter was famous for his over-the-top anthropomorphic scenes—kittens at the tea table; guinea pigs playing cricket—which were displayed in his Museum of Curiosities from 1861 until 2003 when his wondrous collection was sold in a contentious auction, which I attended in Cornwall.

One of England’s oldest private museums, Potter’s belonged to the era of the amateur nature lover when museums were spirited jumbles, not the sober typologies they would become post-Darwin. Potter’s verged on the freakish: random, cluttered, crammed to the rafters with curios and oddities, weird accumulations and creatures that were stuffed, pickled, dissected, and deformed. And I was lucky, though it filled me with sadness, to wander through Potter’s crooked corridors on its very last day...

Had Potter attended the Great Expo (very likely) he would have seen among the taxidermy displays a comic depiction of Goethe’s fable Reinecke the Fox reenacted with semi-human foxes. Sounds childlike—and it was in the best, most passionate way—but in the days before irony anthropomorphism was a form of endearment (imagine Beatrix Potter, no relation). More so, the facial expressions were expertly manipulated, raising the taxidermic bar and inspiring followers.

Known as the Grotesque School, “mirth-provoking” characters were the equivalent of a blockbuster movie. Queen Victoria herself stopped to linger and laugh at a frog shaving another frog. And taxidermists began transforming all sorts of animals into tiny humans: crows playing violin, frogs doing the cancan, squirrels as Romeo. None were as ambitious as Mr. Walker Potter...

You can read the full article on the Wonders and Marvels blog by clicking here. You can find out more about Milgrom's Still Life--which contains a nice discussion of Potter and his work--by clicking here. If the life and work of Walter Potter is of interest, I also highly highly recommend that you check out the wonderful, lavishly-illustrated Walter Potter and his Museum of Curious Taxidermy, written by Congress for Curious People lecturer Pat Morris; you can do so by clicking here or by visiting Observatory (more on that here).

All images are of Walter Potter's work and are drawn from the wonderful Ravishing Beasts blog; you can see them in context by clicking here.

Collecting the oil spill

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Why not have an inverted funnel below wave depth supported by a ship on the surface to collect the oil spewing out of the riser pipe connected to the collection funnel on the sea-bed? The ship would manoeuvre according to where the current took the top of the pipe.

Why the Electronics Industry Needs 3D Technology

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From EETimes:

Why 3D extraction? It all comes down to the need to create, from the layout view, a more precise electrical circuit model, which when simulated gives the designer performance characteristics such as timing, power and noise, as well as other important parameters like g

A piece of asteroid falls to Earth in June, but in a good way | Bad Astronomy

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Hayabusa-earth-returnThe Japanese mission Hayabusa ("Falcon") has been nothing if not ambitious. Launched in 2004, it reached the bizarre asteroid Itokawa a little over a year later. It took phenomenal images and other measurements, and even landed on the asteroid itself to take samples, destined to be returned to Earth.

But it has suffered a series of crippling mishaps that have threatened the mission time and again with failure. However, despite all that, the end game is in sight: Hayabusa is almost back home, and on June 13, sometime around 14:00 UT, the sample recovery capsule will parachute down to the Earth.

hayabusa_itokawaThis is an unprecedented opportunity for scientists! While meteorites that fall to Earth give us samples of asteroids, this will be the first time we’ll have obtained one that has not been through the perils of atmospheric re-entry directly. Also, Itokawa is just plain weird. As you can see in the picture, it’s covered in rubble, and lacks impact craters! This is strong evidence that it’s not a single, monolithic body; in other words, it’s not a solid rock. It may instead be more like a pile of rubble, an asteroid that has been shattered repeatedly by low-speed impacts with other rocks, but had its own gravity hold it together like a bag full of shattered glass.

Asteroids like this may comprise a significant percentage of all the asteroids we see. And if one of them is headed toward Earth, how we deal with a rubble pile may be very different than how we might try to push a solid rock out of the way. Studying Itokawa is therefore very important… and may just save the world.

The sample return capsule will land in Woomera, Australia, where it hopefully will not be attacked by venomous Koalas (everything Down Under can kill you). I just learned that my old friend and editor J. Kelly Beatty will be there to watch it come back! He’s doing it as part of the high school at which he teaches; go read his remarkable story to learn more.

And expect to hear a lot more about this in the coming weeks, too. It will take a long time to study and understand the actual samples returned, but in the meantime the re-entry itself is very exciting, and hopefully we’ll get cool video of it too.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Mike Murray.

Drawing credit: Corby Waste and Tommy Thompson for NASA / JPL. Image of Itokawa credit: JAXA


Cuttlefish tailor their defences to their predators | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.

The best communicators know to cater to their audiences, and cuttlefish are no different. A new study shows that these intelligent invertebrates can target their defensive signals to the hunting styles of different predators.

CuttlefishCuttlefish and their relatives, the octopuses and squid, are expert communicators whose incredible skins can produce a massive range of colours and patterns. Cuttlefish mostly use these abilities to blend into the background but they can also startle and intimidate predators by rapidly changing the display on their dynamic skins.

Keri Langridge and colleagues from the University of Sussex, watched young cuttlefish as they were threatened by three very different predators – juvenile seabass, dogfish (a type of shark) and crabs. A glass partition protected the cuttlefish from any actual harm but gave them full view of the incoming threats.

She found that the cuttlefish only ever used startling visual displays when they were faced by seabass, which hunt by sight. As the fish approached, the young cuttlefish suddenly flattened their bodies to make themselves look bigger and flashed two dark eye-spots on their backs to startle the predator. This pattern is called a ‘deimatic display’ and it was used in 92% of encounters with seabass.

In contrast, Langridge found that the cuttlefish never presented the deimatic display, or any other type of visual signals, to dogfish and crabs in any of 72 trials. And for good reason – neither predator hunts by sight. Crabs sense chemicals in the water, while dogfish (like all sharks) track their prey through the electricity generated by their own bodies.

To these hunters, the cuttlefish’s dynamic skin is all but useless, and it would be foolish to waste time in bluffing with visual signals. That would just allow the predator to draw closer and might even attract the attention of other threats. Better then to immediately flee, which is what the young cuttlefish did.

Langridge found that young cuttlefish go through a similar series of threat displays for all three predators. They break their camouflage by first intensifying their colours and then turning uniformly dark. They then either used the deimatic display or fled immediately, depending on the species of predator.

The study begs the question: how do the cuttlefish tell the difference between the different predators? Even though the trained biologist’s eye could tell apart a dogfish and a seabass, they are superficially very similar. The remarkable consistency of the cuttlefishes’ responses suggests that they have access to clear clues that allow them to quickly and accurately distinguish between these groups.

Many of other cases of predator-specific signals come from the world of back-boned animals and I blogged about one such example earlier this year. Ground squirrels pump hot blood into their tails to make themselves look bigger in front of rattlesnakes, which hunt with by tracking body heat. However, they didn’t bother with hot tails when faced with gopher snakes, which lack heat-sensitive pits.

Langridge’s study is further evidence that the intelligence of cuttlefish and their kin is a match for many back-boned animals. Indeed, one of the cuttlefish’s relatives, the mimic octopus, also uses targeted defences. It changes both shape and colour to mimic a large variety of toxic marine animals and it tends to reserve its sea snake disguise when pestered damselfish, which sea snakes eat.

References: Langridge, K.V., Broom, M., Osorio, D. (2007). Selective signalling by cuttlefish to predators. . Current Biology, 17(24), R1044-R1045.

The European Suborbital Shuttle

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From Gizmodo:

Following the trail of SpaceShipTwo, Dassault has been working on a new suborbital civilian spacecraft. Not to be confused with the Future High-Altitude High-Speed Transport 20XX, the new aircraft could be a 11-ton vehicle derived from their VEHRA satellite launcher.

Thermal Energy Treats Asthma

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From The Engineer - News:

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new system developed by Sunnyvale, California-based Asthmatx for the treatment of severe asthma.

Read the whole article

MIT Unveils First Solar Cell Printed on Paper

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From Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine:

When most people think of solar cells they picture the rigid glass panels that dot rooftops around the world. But the solar cells of the future will be much more adaptable, with researchers already succeeding in creating highly absorbing fl

How to Move Live Tank Current Transformer?

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Dear All,

i am having a live tank current transformer of 5.5 meters weight is approx 1400 kG. almost 2/3 of its weight is on the top of it thats why its very unstable while moving from one place to another.what is the best method to move it safely. please suggest.

Regards,