The Russian Space Agency has released this speeded up video of a Soyuz spacecraft approaching and docking in the International Space Station. It's like Battlestar Galactica, but without phasers. Or Cylons. Or Vipers. Or Starbuck. Actually, it's nothing like BSG.
I like it anyway, although it makes me sad: Soon, they will be the only ones doing this. [Flight Global]
Our favorite love doctor, Debby Herbenick, explains what to do after accidentally sending a romantic—or possibly kinky—message to the wrong person. And what happens when you tweet said message publicly, instead of sending direct?
If you misdirected a line about what you plan on doing with your tongue later that night to a good friend rather than your partner, I'm sure everyone can be grownups and laugh that one off. Hey, at least you have a sex life, right?
But if you misdirected such a line to your boss? Well, let's just say that pretending your personal IM or Facebook accounts got hacked (or maybe your phone was stolen) may not be such a bad idea. Post a few ridiculous things or send another message to your boss pretending it's from the perpetrator, and then complain about how scary the internet is for the next few days at work. For a certain segment of the population, blaming "the Internet" tends to work. Problem solved.
Now, if you tweet something out loud that was meant to be a Secret Message (I'm against using the term "direct message", which I feel has no flavor whatsoever) you could delete it immediately but it may still show up in your followers' Twitter feed leaving you feeling panicked and scared. Instead, try to cover your tracks with another Tweet that makes the first one seem funny or silly and something you totally meant to write but in an ironic sort of way.
Read more of Dr. Debby's love advice here during Gizmodo's Bad Valentine celebration.
Debby Herbenick, PhD is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of The Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, a sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute and author of Because It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. She blogs at MySexProfessor.com.
Oops image by ktpupp/Flickr under CC license
Bad Valentine is our own special take on the beauty—and awkwardness—of geek love.
Looks like the Google Chrome for Mac Beta update available now is bringing extension support (yes!), bookmark syncing, a cookie manager, and a task manager along with some general stability improvements. Definitely worth a look. [Chrome Blog via Lifehacker]
Maybe he was trying out the TVs or the baseball bat, maybe he was struck by Walmart rage. Whatever the case, this guy destroyed a row of TVs before sitting down in the electronics aisle and waiting for the police.
The smashed televisions add up to about $22,000 in damaged goods, 29 counts of criminal damage to property, and one bottle of confiscated anti-depressants. I suppose that's just an itsy-bitsy bit worse than what went down with that foul-mouthed Australian guy. [Huffington Post via Engadget]
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered the first genes linked to stuttering — a complex of three mutated genes that may be responsible for one in every 11 stuttering cases, especially in people of Asian descent [Los Angeles Times]. Scientists have long suspected that stuttering has genetic roots, as it’s often seen in families and twins, but this is the first time they’ve identified genes linked to the problem.
Dennis Drayna, the geneticist who led the study, said he was shocked that two of the implicated genes were linked to rare, fatal metabolic disorders [USA Today], but noted that must stutterers don’t suffer from those disorders. Surprisingly, the genes that were altered in the stutterers are involved in removing metabolic waste from brain cells.
The researchers analyzed a section of chromosome 12 in a large Pakistani family and found that there were several mutations in three particular genes. “We think a special group of cells in the brain are particularly sensitive to these subtle mutations in these genes,” Drayna said [BusinessWeek]. He suspects that the mutated genes still partially function, but likened the system to a car that needs a tune-up: “It still runs but not quite right. Some cells in the body need this to run like a Ferrari in order to function properly and those cells are involved in the production of speech in the brain,” he continued [BusinessWeek].
Drayna said that this finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, would be instrumental in identifying children who might develop a speech impediment later on in life. This could help parents preclude future problems by getting the child into speech therapy early on. The National Institutes of Health estimates that there are 3 million people in the United States afflicted with this speech impediment–many of them children. About 60 percent of these people have at least one family member who stutters. Researchers believe that other genes will be found that also play a role in stuttering.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Biology of . . . Stuttering
DISCOVER: The Art of, Um, Speaking Clearly
DISCOVER: Say Aah
DISCOVER: Throat Talkin’
Image: iStockphoto
Fastmac, who know how to make iPhone backup chargers, just made a more form-fitting version that also has an IR port. That means your iPhone is now a universal remote.
With their included app, the iPhone 3G and 3GS can control basically any IR-sensitive device you have as long as it's docked into the case. The case itself has a 1300 mAh battery, a built-in flash, a USB port for charging another device, and an on-off toggle. The price is $100, which is slightly higher than normal cases, but normal cases can't turn your TV on and off. It also has neat functions like being aware of your local channel guide and jumping to the correct channel, like a real grown-up universal remote.
No solid word on availability yet. [Fastmac]
How to design a AHU cooling capacity for a office area as base on the following information;
1) Floor area is 2720m2
2) base on 350 pax
Allan
For those of you waiting with bated breath…
I’m happy to announce that, following last week’s news about the Lancet’s retraction of the 1998 paper that started the modern vaccine-autism scare, I decided to focus my first Point of Inquiry episode on this topic–and secured a guest who’s probably the best in the business for that purpose. I’m referring to Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, life-saving inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, and most important for our purposes, the author of the single best book on the whole autism-vaccine fiasco, 2008’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.
I’ve now read Offit’s fantastic book twice, and greatly enjoyed the conversation we had about it for the show. (Minus the gazillion technical hoops I had to jump through to learn how to record the program, which will hopefully get a lot easier.) I won’t tip my hand about the show any further–it airs tomorrow, please listen then–but I’m confident that listeners will enjoy and learn much from it (even though, given that this is my first show as a radio host, utter perfection is hardly to be expected).
I’ll have a post tomorrow as soon as the show is up and available for download.
Hello,
My first attempt at qualifying a new WPS for welding 1.25 Cr -.5 Mo steel "almost passed". Both root bends passed, but one face bend did not quite pass. I am awaiting the bent specimens from the lab. Here is a description of my first process attempt:
1/4" Thick ASTM A387 Grade 11 Cl
Hi - first post here so please be gentle 🙂 I'm after some advice please. I did search around a bit and couldn't find any related messages - hopefully this is the right thread for this topic.
I'm doing some consulting with a client at the moment who have a number of Ethernet over Plastic Opt
What are we going to do with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
The panel got itself in major trouble a few weeks ago when it admitted a major goof, that it included a detail in its 2007 report saying the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, which is a huge exaggeration. Chief Rajendra Pachauri stood by the report as a whole as a sound piece of research, and indeed the first section of the four-part series, which is about physics of anthropogenic climate change, has seen no errors surface. That section laid out the evidence that human activities are boosting carbon dioxide levels in the air and are therefore warming the planet. But four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to explain how global warming might affect daily life around the world [Christian Science Monitor].
The IPCC’s errors have given ammunition to deniers of global warming, especially U.S. politicians who have spent the recent batch of snowstorms beating their chests over how wrong climate scientists must be for there to be a blizzard in February. (Though to be fair, and in recognition of the fact that all politicians are opportunists, people on the other side have blamed single storms like Hurricane Katrina on climate change, which is just as silly.) So, to save some face for climate science, several scientists have proposed ways to fix the IPCC in this week’s issue of the journal Nature:
1. Split Into Three Panels
The University of East Anglia’s Mike Hulme proposed breaking up the IPCC into three: one group for science, one to evaluate how climate change could alter various regions of the globe, and one to debate policy options. Says Hulme: “This restructuring would allow clearer distinctions to be made in areas that have been troublesome for the IPCC: assessments of published knowledge versus policy analysis and evaluation; the globalized physical sciences versus more geographically and culturally nuanced knowledge; a one-size, top-down model of ownership and governance versus more inclusive, representative and regionally varying forms of governance.”
2. Make it Independent
For German researcher Eduardo Zorita, it’s not just the IPCC’s mistakes that make it lose public trust, it’s the fact that it’s full of government nominees that occupy “a blurred space between science and politics,” and work under unmanageable stress and deadlines. Zorita says the a climate body ought to be more like the US Congressional Budget Office—accountable, but independent.
3. Don’t Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater
Thomas F. Stocker has worked with the IPCC, and defends it as an “honest broker,” but not a perfect one. Rather than throwing away something that he argues has served the world well for two decades, he recommends against swift overhaul because of a spat of bad news. That includes resisting calls to speed up the process: “The panel concluded that the production of comprehensive reports roughly every six years is preferable because it ensures the robustness required for a thorough and rigorous assessment. Faster turnover would jeopardize the multi-stage review and thus compromise authority and comprehensiveness.”
4. Hurry Up Already
Jeff Price of the World Wildlife Federation takes the opposite stance: “The current period between assessments is too long. One option would be for the IPCC, or another body, to produce an annual review, assessment and synthesis of the literature for policy-makers (for example, three annual review volumes with a synthesis chapter in each volume) prepared by experts in the field.” He also recommends shorter, quickly produced papers in the interim between the longer tomes.
5. Open It Up
Citing the black eye that climate scientists got from the University of East Anglia emails controversy, IPCC contributor John R. Christy says that the IPCC needs to be as open as it can be, even at the risk of a little craziness: “An idea we pitched a few years ago that is now worth reviving was to establish a living, ‘Wikipedia-IPCC’. Groups of four to eight lead authors, chosen by learned societies, would serve in rotating, overlapping three-year terms to manage sections organized by science and policy questions (similar to the Fourth Assessment Report).… Controversies would be refereed by the lead authors, but with input from all sides in the text, with links to original documents and data. The result would be more useful than occasional big books and would be a more honest representation of what our fledgling science can offer. Defining and following rules for this idea would be agonizing, but would provide greater openness.”
If you want to read the full text of the recommendations, they’re currently available for free at Nature.
Related Content:
80beats: Once Again, Cold Weather Doesn’t Disprove Global Warming
80beats: Climate Panel Admits Glacier Blunder, Scrambles To Save Face
80beats: The New Murder-Mystery Game: Who Killed Copenhagen?
80beats: Climatologist Steps Down as “ClimateGate” Furor Continues
The Intersection: Fox News Presents a Classic “He Said, She Said” on Climate Science
The Intersection: Sounds Familiar
The Intersection: How the Global Warming Story Changed, Disastrously, Due to “ClimateGate”
Image: flickr / bsabarnowl
A DRAMATIC SHIFT IN TEXAS GOVERNOR'S RACE IN ONE SINGLE DAY
From Eric Dondero:
You've heard the old cliche'; a day can be a lifetime in politics. That day here in Texas came today.
Ron Paul Republican candidate for Governor of Texas Debra Medina, was a guest on the Glenn Beck radio show this morning. Something rather unexpected happened. And it led Glenn and his co-hosts Stu and Pat Grey to lose their breakfasts.
(Of note, Pat is from Houston, and was a longtime radio talk show host here on KTRH before he went full-time with his friend Glenn. He is a self-proclaimed "Christian libertarian." He knows Ron Paul and his followers, very well.)
I happened to be listening to the show. And had an immediate reaction similar to Glenn's.
"The fastest way back down to 4% in the polls..."
A reference to Medina's recent climb from 4% to 24%.
Full Disclosure: As regular readers of this blog know well, I'm a big Rick Perry supporter. But I also felt Medina was bringing up issues in the debates, that lent well to the primary race. Obviously, I don't feel that way any more.
You judge for yourself.
UPDATE!
AP just broke the story...
Excerpt related to Libertarian Republicans via Washington Post:
Beck, who is influential among the Libertarian-leaning voters that Medina has attracted, said he had been flooded with mail since he announced she would be on the show. Medina said in the interview that she has not been questioning the attacks publicly.
"There was a theme that ran against you, and that is, you are a '9/11 Truther,'" Beck said, referring to the term given to people who doubt the official account of Sept. 11.
"While I don't endorse anyone ... I think I can write her off the list," Beck said. "Let me take another look at Kay Bailey Hutchison if I have to. Rick, I think you and I could French kiss right now."
UPDATE!
Medina loses Dallas Morning News columnist over comments
From Politico:
Mike Hashimoto, a Dallas Morning News columnist who was leaning toward supporting Medina, wrote Thursday afternoon that Medina’s slip has severely damaged her bid.
“Sorry, but some things are deal-breakers,” Hashimoto wrote. “Inability to say, with clarity, that she dismissed ‘9/11 truther’ thought and would not surround herself with anyone who thought that way is enough for me to make it a two-person race again.”
If you play right-wing radio-host Rush Limbaugh to a bunch of bark beetles, could the sound kill them? Or could rock music make make insects so annoyed that they’ll stop whatever they’re doing? In one of the goofier experiments we’ve heard of lately, scientists decided to find out.
The researchers had a serious goal: to find a way to combat invasive beetles and to stop their destructive, tree-destroying, bark-eating behavior. The answer: loud, nasty, and offensive noises.
Changing ecosystems and climate change have allowed destructive bark beetles to spread out through new territories, where they’re wreaking havoc on the ponderosa, pinyon, and lodgepole pines. So scientists took infested trees back to the lab and played the “nastiest, most offensive sounds” they could think of to the beetles in the bark. Enter, Limbaugh, Queen, and Guns n’ Roses.
The beetles were not amused.
Discovery News reports:
The sounds disrupted tunneling, mating and reproduction for the beetles, making it harder for the insects to eat through the trees. The project, dubbed “Beetle Mania,” concluded that acoustic stress may disrupt the tenacious insects’ feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other, according to a presentation recently at the National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America.
But after a while, the beetles grew accustomed to the noxious noises, researchers found. What ticked off the beetles even more than Limbaugh was the manipulated call of the insect itself. The scientists took the aggression call made by males of the “tree killer” Dendroctonus species and altered the call, making it longer and louder than usual. This drove the beetles nuts. When they heard this sound right before mating they turned on each other, with the male beetles tearing apart the females.
So, what might the beetles have appreciated, if not loud, clangy, obnoxious music? The scientists suspect they might quite like their Liverpool-born namesakes.
Related Posts:
Discoblog: Beetle-Inspired Adhesive Lifts Lego Man; Could One Day Do Same for Regular Man
Discoblog: A Literally Crappy House Protects Beetle Larva From Predators
Discoblog: Cyborg Bugs! Researcher Controls Beetles With Radio Antenna
Image: The Rush Limbaugh Show
Does the human brain have a “God spot”–a particular region that regulates feelings of spirituality and connection to the universe? One year ago, DISCOVER reported on a scientific study of spiritual people that couldn’t pinpoint one location in the brain as key to controlling religious feelings. But now a new study proposes that there is a link between the physical make-up of the brain and attitudes towards religion and spirituality.
By observing brain cancer patients before and after brain surgery, researchers in Italy have found that damage to the posterior part of the brain, specifically in an area called the parietal cortex, can increase patients’ feelings of “self transcendence,” or feeling at one with the universe. The parietal cortex is the region that is is usually involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation [New Scientist].
The study, led by psychologist Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine in Italy, surveyed 88 brain cancer patients before and after surgery to remove their tumors. They were made to fill out a questionnaire regarding their beliefs, including a section to check their measure of “self-transcendence.” People score highly for this trait if they answer “yes” to questions such as: “I often feel so connected to the people around me that I feel like there is no separation”; “I feel so connected to nature that everything feels like one single organism”; and “I got lost in the moment and detached from time”. The same people also tend to believe in miracles, extrasensory perception and other non-material phenomena [New Scientist].
The scientists found that before the surgery, patients with parietal cortex tumors reported higher levels of self-transcendence than patients with tumors in the frontal cortex. After the tumors were removed, the parietal cortex patients had even higher self-transcendence scores, while the frontal cortex patients showed no change.
The researchers say these findings, published in the journal Neuron, suggest that selective damage to the parietal cortex caused a specific increase in religiosity and spirituality. Patients who had parietal cortex tumors removed also dealt better with bad news regarding their mortality and health; while the ones with problems in the frontal cortex were more bitter about health problems. Urgesi hypothesized that naturally low activity in parietal regions in people without either brain damage or cancer could predispose them to self-transcendent feelings, and perhaps even to religions that emphasize such experiences such as Buddhism [New Scientist].
Critics point out that the study left a lot of unanswered questions, and note that directly equating spirituality to the self-transcendence scale is somewhat controversial. But other researchers see this study as an important step in understanding the religious brain. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania said, “Sometimes people are quite skeptical about combining spirituality and religion with neuroscience,” he says. “This is one of the few things I’ve read that gives the hope that some of these questions might be tractable” [ScienceNow Daily News].
Related Content:
80beats: God on the Brain: Researchers Probe the Neural Circuitry Behind Religious Beliefs
DISCOVER: The God Experiments showcases five researchers who study religious experiences
DISCOVER: Dalai Lama Speaks Language of Science
Image: Cosimo Urgesi
How long is this bow which I've just finished?
Cherry belly, Ash back, Waterbuffalo nocks.
A Gooz card to the nearest
Del
(I'll accept imperial or metric, but none of those darned intergalactic or squirrel units)
On concentrating solar power plant (tower reciver) what is the heat transfer fluid which transfer the heat to the water and how can it circulated on the cycle
From NatGeo, A Travelers Guide to the Planets
A Travelers Guide to the Planets. National Geographic is premiering a new series starting Sunday night at 9 pm (Feb. 14th). Kind of like a mini-series because the shows are going to run on three consecutive nights, two shows each night. See here.
I was lucky enough to be able to watch the first two: Saturn and Jupiter. Each show is an hour and I found them to be very entertaining.
According to the schedule they are going to start with Saturn and they give a great summary of the Cassini mission and include some of the most recent findings so it’s very up to date.
If it were me, I’d have started with the Jupiter episode only because they talk a bit about the planet’s interior and the massive pressures and temperatures involved and referenced that in the Saturn episode. No matter.
Marian recently did a post about the possibility of life on Europa and of course that is covered in the Jupiter episode. It kind of sounded to me, or they made it sound, the more likely place to start looking would be Enceladus because all the building blocks are there and open and free for the taking.
Check your local listings and record them if you have to. I think you will like them, I did. Oh and the Mercury episode looks to be GREAT! Lights on the night side? Who knew? The preview is on the link above.
I like my iPhone, kinda. It’s not that great as a phone, but it does have lots of fun apps. The maps hardly ever tell me to take a wrong turn at the last second, and I rather enjoy taking fuzzy red photos in low light levels.
Snark aside, there are a lot of good science and entertainment apps for the iPhone. But because I am so stubbornly reality-based, it didn’t occur to me that there would be some apps that border — if not flounce solidly into — alt-med nonsensery.
That is, until I received an email from BABLoggee Cameron Carr, who told me about an app that cures headaches.
Hmmm.
Called, oddly enough, "Headache", it uses "… principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine [that] teach that energy imbalances in the body often contribute to headache symptoms, and these imbalances can be corrected with pressure to specific points on the body."
Energy balances! Wow, that sure sounds sciencey! Except whenever you talk to people who believe in this, they can never really tell you what energy is, or how it flows, or what precisely it does. I guess it only sounds sciencey.
So basically, this app embraces both the ancient and the modern, but with a slippery grip on both.
My favorite line in the app description is, "Selected by licensed acupuncturists, these points may bring you safe, natural, effective relief." Hmm, just "may"? And c’mon, "natural"? The app can make your phone emit sounds or vibrate, which it claims "may" relieve your headache if you hold the phone against these imagined points. How is that "natural"? Even Steve Jobs wouldn’t claim that.
Having this stuff supported by acupuncturists doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence either. Acupuncture is the idea that sticking needles at certain locations in your body can restore the balance of this energy flow. If that’s true, acupuncture can be tested to see if it works. Surprise! It has been, and it doesn’t. Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t work any better than the placebo effect.
The thing about headaches is, they can have lots of causes. Sometimes they go away by themselves, sometimes they don’t. Certainly the placebo effect will help some percentage of the time, as might a gentle vibration (just as a gentle neck massage might relieve some symptoms as well). So testing a product like this isn’t easy… and there are approximately a bajillion other products like it, so they’ll never all get tested. There are a hundred ridiculous products — no, probably ten thousand — for every person actually willing to do a proper scientific test of its efficacy. There’ll never be an end to them.
I cannot say whether this app really works, or is thinly disguised quackery. Given the description on the app’s page, I suspect it’s just another alt-med claim with little or no evidence in support of it, just as I suspect it’ll do quite well. Just as the company’s Aulterra cell phone EM neutralizer probably does quite well (and you have to read that page to believe — or disbelieve — it) despite there being no credible evidence that cell phones cause any harm… unless you’re using one while driving, or skydiving.
Science pays in the long run, but stuff you just make up pays off really well in the short run. And since it’ll never, ever, go away, nonsense pays off in the long run too.
I wish there were an app to cure that.
"We expect to launch in one to three months after completing full vehicle integration," said Brian Mosdell, Director of Florida Launch Operations for SpaceX. "Our primary objective is a successful first launch and we are taking whatever time necessary to work through the data to our satisfaction before moving forward." ... Though designed from the beginning to transport crew, SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft will initially be used to transport cargo. Falcon 9 and Dragon were selected by NASA to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) once Shuttle retires. The $1.6B contract represents 12 flights for a minimum of 20 tons to and from the ISS with the first demonstration flights beginning in 2010."
