International Space Station flyover to light up Valentines sky over WA – PerthNow

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As far as romantic nights out go, you can barely go past a night gazing at the stars.

Tonight, just in time for Valentines Day, West Australians will be treated to a spectacle in the night sky.

The International Space Station will fly over tonight and, according to the experts at the Perth Observatory it will be glow particularly bright for the most romantic night of the year.

It will be visible over WA between 8.37pm and 8.41pm.

Matt Woods told PerthNow the space station flew over WA monthly but rarely is it so bright.

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NASA and the European Space Agency

It happens to be that because its about 450km above Earth, its still receiving light from the sun and were in the right place at the right time to see it so bright, Mr Woods said.

Valentines Day night is proving to be popular for Perth stargazers, so much so, that loved-up couples had been put on to a waiting list for a special event at the observatory tonight.

I think even if theyre not thinking it all the time, people really are pretty amazed by whats in the universe, he said.

It also gets you massive brownie points.

If youll be too busy gazing into your lovers eyes to look at the stars tonight, the space station will also make two appearances at 7.50pm tomorrow and at 7.51pm on Monday.

But, stargazers will have to keep their fingers crossed for clear skies with stormy conditions and showers forecast tonight and partly cloudy conditions over the weekend. The clouds are forecast to clear in time for Monday.

Space enthusiasts will gather at Curtin University on February 29 for Astrofest, which is one of their biggest events of the year.

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International Space Station flyover to light up Valentines sky over WA - PerthNow

Op-Ed: Rust shield vs space radiation Debunking the space travel BS – Digital Journal

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The finding by Lockheed Martin and North Carolina State University effectively sinks one of the big issues in missions to Mars and beyond. A simple, easily-applied layer of powder can be an effective defense against radiation. This procedure would be marginally more difficult than any other type of assembly on any type of vehicle, like putting duco on a car. This, it turns out, is a baseline solution for one of anti-space rhetorics more banal objections. Consider for a moment a large number of people obviously dedicated to raising objections but never finding solutions. The theoretical objections to space exploration are almost unbelievably tedious in their dogma. Lockheed Martin and North Carolina State University had the insight and acumen to simply find the compound, evaluate it, and pin down a highly productive use for the material. The everythings impossible BS has to goConsider also the knowledge base required to make a finding like this. Now consider the lack of knowledge required for the everythings impossible approach to space travel and other future aspirations. Interesting contrast, isnt it? Now consider this Cheap, effective radiation shielding has a lot of practical uses. Satellites, for example, or systems vulnerable to solar flares, spring to mind. Why would such an important subject be so utterly neglected, never mind denigrated, by people so passionate about proving the impossibility of critical future needs? Sometimes this BS is qualified by the use of phrases like existing technology cant, but weve just had 200 years of massive technological advances, based entirely on solving problems like that. Case in point Artificial gravityA classic case of everythings impossible in the same context as radiation shielding is the spaceflight zero gravity issue. Long times in zero gravity lead to a range of physical risks for space travelers. Not least of these are muscle degeneration and leaky astronaut circulation issues. These are real problems, and proposals have been stymied for years by the everythings impossible argument. There are pages and pages of discussion on artificial gravity, and even more pages of actual designs, some dating back decades. Some of these designs are, to put it mildly gutsy, ambitious and deserve lots of credit for getting out of the pedantic box and staying there. The only thing holding back proper experimentation and research is the everythings impossible argument. The artificial gravity issue is critical to future space exploration. It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks it's possible or impossible; it must be done. One of the classic early cases of destroying these totally negative everythings impossible arguments was in 1903. An academic wrote to his friend that everything had already been discovered, and that science would inevitably follow the ideas of the 19th century. Six months later, the Wright Brothers took off. A bit later, mass production, electronics, genetics, space flight, and the 20th century obliterated that sort of thinking forever. Total obliteration is where everythings impossible needs to go, right now. Its a useless view of anything. Lockheed Martin and North Carolina State University have delivered a massive hit to this baseless idiocy with their research. Keep hitting these do-nothing dogmas until theres nothing left to hit. When you hit light speed, hit the accelerator. If the universe doesnt like it, it can get out of the bloody way.

This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com

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Op-Ed: Rust shield vs space radiation Debunking the space travel BS - Digital Journal

NASA, Langston University partner to keep astronauts healthy for future long-term space travel – KFOR Oklahoma City

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LANGSTON, Okla. (KFOR) - A local university has teamed up with NASA to study the effects of micro-gravity on astronauts.

"Today is a big day. We're going to sign a document that establishes a relationship between NASA and Langston University," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced a new partnership with the university to study the effects of micro-gravity on astronauts-- something that is key when considering long-term space travel.

"The research that will be done at Langston University is going to give us the counter measures that are necessary so humans are healthy all the way to Mars and all the way home," Bridenstine.

Students are also focused on ways to boost astronauts' immune systems. One strange fact about space travel is that dormant viruses-- like chickenpox--can activate during space-flight.

"We're trying to see what happens if we use plant extracts or natural countermeasures and seeing how that will affect the immune system to increase it, Myshal Morris said.

They will send a payload of biological experiments to the international space station in August-- all aimed at supporting an astronaut's health in no gravity.

"Maybe you're flying all the way to Mars at that point, and there's no way for you to get healthy so we have to make sure we mitigate against that," Bridenstine said.

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Is Virgin Galactic And Its Version Of Space Travel Finally For Real? – Forbes

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NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 28: Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Galactic, poses for photographs ... [+] before ringing a ceremonial bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to promote the first day of trading of Virgin Galactic Holdings shares on October 28, 2019 in New York City. Virgin Galactic Holdings became the first space-tourism company to go public as it began trading on Monday with a market value of about $1 billion. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Virgin Galactic (SPCE:NYSE) blasted off on Valentines Day 2020, rising more than 21% to a 52-week high despite a falling stock market. The company was founded in 2004 by Sir Richard Branson (#478 on the Forbes billionaire list with, $4 billion) and has yet to earn a profit.

Why did the stock rocket upward? The company made a three-hour positioning flight. It flew its passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, from Mojave Airport in California to its commercial headquarters at Spaceport Americas Gateway to Space building in New Mexico.

But the simple flight was, as the company puts it with its typical hype, another vital step on its path to commercial service.

The transfer of the spacecraft to its long-promised Spaceport America base is indeed big step in the companys 15-year journey to credibility. Typical of the companys history of hype is its exciting website. It opens with a little aircraft flying over the desert and suddenly belching rocket fire, along with video of an astronaut at the controls of a vibrating spaceship.

The product has been pre-sold to more than 600 would-be space tourists in 60 countries who have put down deposits on future flights.

Virgin Galactic Founder Sir Richard Branson demonstrates a spacewear system, designed for Virgin ... [+] Galactic astronauts, at an event October 16, 2019 in Yonkers, New York. - At the event Virgin Galactic and Under Armour unveiled the worlds first exclusive spacewear system for private astronauts. (Photo by Don Emmert / AFP) (Photo by DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty Images)

But before Virgin Galactic reached orbit in the stock market in October of 2019 through a reverse-merger maneuver, it suffered a well-publicized series of reverses and controversies that might have derailed another company.

The opportunity to build the Spaceport, for example, was won by New Mexico in a bidding war with California. But with more than $250 million in New Mexico taxpayer money spent, the spaceport was largely unused for years. As the Atlantic put in in 2018, Although the spaceport has been flight-worthy since 2010, the first launch by its anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic, still hasnt taken off.

Of course, the biggest setback was the tragic 2014 crash of the original SpaceShipTwo on a test flight, which killed one pilot and injured another. The spacecraft was destroyed. But with more than a billion in capital raised from the likes of Abu Dhabi and Boeing, among others, Virgin Galactic soldiered on, with this weeks transfer of the space craft a major milestone for the company.

On the flight, the carrier aircraft, VMS Eve (named for founder Sir Richard Bransons mother) ferried SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity out of Mojave, where Virgin Galactics manufacturing and test facilities are base. (Virgin says the building of two additional spacecraft is well underway in Mojave.) The pair landed at 15:49MT, where Virgin says it was greeted by an enthusiastic group of teammates who will operate the spaceship in New Mexico.

This captive carry flight also let Virgin engineers evaluate VSS Unity for over three hours at high altitude and cold temperatures, which the company says are difficult to replicate at ground level. The flight was also an opportunity for Italian Air Force test pilot Nicola Stick Pecile to become the fifth pilot to complete a flight in VSS Unity.

As part of the getting ready for space process, Virgin Galactic has moved 100 team members to New Mexico, hired 70 local people, and now has transferred the space craft and carrier ship.

With the arrival of SpaceShipTwo in the New Mexico desert, Virgin Galactic says it will launch captive carry and glide flights from the New Mexico base so the spaceflight team can coordinate with Virgins airspace and ground control. After the glide tests, the team will carry out rocket-powered test flights from Spaceport America to continue to evaluate the spacecrafts performance, including final spaceship cabin and customer experience evaluations in preparation for the start of commercial spaceflight operations.

WhiteKnightTwo, carrying SpaceShipTwo, takes flight over Spaceport America, northeast of Truth Or ... [+] Consequences, on October 17, 2011 in New Mexico. Sir Richard Branson was on hand to host the Keys To A New Dawn event, for the dedication of Virgin Galactic's new home at Spaceport America, the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport in southern New Mexico, where the Spaceport America Terminal Hangar Facility will serve as the operating hubfor Virgin Galactic and is expected to house two WhiteKnightTwos and five SpaceShipTwos, in addition to all of Virgin's astronaut preparation facilities and mission control. AFP PHOTO / Frederic J. BROWN (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

The irrepressible Sir Richard Branson, a founder of the company, has vowed to be among the first customers, as a sort of human proof of concept. As the Virgin Galctic website trumpets, Together we open space to change the world for good.

Branson will turn 70 in July. But as his improbable career shows, the British billionaire might just pull it off.

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How to Optimize Your Headspace on a Mission to Mars – Singularity Hub

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Imagine being confined to a metal cell with a couple of other people and few amenities for months or even years. Maybe after that, youll be moved to a new compound, but you still have no privacy and extremely limited communication with your family and anyone else in the outside world. You feel both crowded and lonely at the same time, and yet no one comes to treat your emerging mental-health problems.

While this might sound like life in prison, it could just as easily be life as a deep-space explorer, in a sardine can of a rocket hurtling to Mars or a more distant world. Despite years of research by NASA and others, scientists have little insight into the psychological, neurological and sociological problems that will inevitably afflict space travelers battling depression, loneliness, anxiety, stress and personality clashes many millions of miles away from home. Sure, a growing body of research now documents the impact of microgravity on ones brain and body, along with the exercises and medical attention needed to mitigate the effects. But social isolation, limited privacy, interpersonal issues, along with vast separation from loved ones, remain relatively unexplored.

Even massive Star Trek spaceshipswith plenty of space per personcome with counselors on board, but what if the crew member with counseling training gets injured or falls ill during a critical moment? If morale plummets and rapport among the team disappears, an emergency situation could spell the end of both the astronauts and the mission.

Space confronts us with many fascinating worlds and phenomena. But we have to traverse the void to reach them, and almost any trip will be long and boring before we arrive. Peeking out the little window offers the same view you saw yesterday and the day before. While a jaunt to the Moon takes just a few days, its a slow, eight-month journey or longer to Mars. A trip to the more intriguing asteroids or moons of Jupiter and Saturn such as Europa and Titan would take years. (And, just for scale, an attempt to send a crew to Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would likely take millennia.) Then, when you arrive, new challenges and more isolation await you.

Research on people in prison and solitary confinement offers lessons that deep-space astronauts could learn from. People in prison develop symptoms similar to ones reported by those stationed for long periods on the International Space Station: hallucinations, stress, depression, irritability and insomnia, all of it exacerbated when physical activity is difficult to achieve. You dont have the freedom to go outside for a peaceful stroll to clear your mind or to visit and get cheered up by old friends. In solitary confinement, the social isolation, the loneliness and monotony affect your mental state and your brain activity after only a couple of weeks, and some people never totally recover from the ordeal.

To make matters worse, communication with Earth suffers more and more delay the further one travels from home. Deep-space astronauts would benefit from messages and video calls with loved onesor better yet, virtual-reality interactions with thembut as they fly further away, it becomes less and less feasible to have those conversations. Even a highly trained team of professional, resilient people would struggle when theres an increasingly tenuous connection to everyone they know on Earth.

Its hard to imagine what these situations will be like, but NASA is trying. The agencys psychological experiments with the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) involve sequestering a six-member crew in a cramped dome for four months to a year on a remote, otherworldly spot on Mauna Loa, a rocky volcano. Over that time, participants pretend theyre living on another planet, such as Mars. Theres a 20-minute delay in written communications with mission control (which means 40 minutes between a message and its reply). The dome is equipped with extremely limited amenities (such as composting toilets and freeze-dried food). And residents can leave the habitat only for short time periods in simulation spacesuits.

As part of these experiments, participants wear devices and answer weekly questionnaires that track their heart rates, sleep quality, fatigue and changes in mood. Researchers hope to learn which individual and group qualities help to solve problems and resolve the interpersonal conflicts that inevitably arise when people are cooped up in a tiny space.

Researchers have already accumulated plenty of data, though not from the most recent mock mission. That one didnt fare as well as hopedit had to be aborted after only four days. After fixing an issue with the habitats power source, a crew member appeared to have suffered from an electric shock and needed an ambulance. After that individual was taken away, a disagreement about safety concerns resulted in another person withdrawing from the simulation, which then had to be called off.

An earlier simulation of six men squeezed into a spacecraft-like module in Moscow also produced surprising results. Those crew members developed increasing trouble sleeping and sometimes slept more than usual, becoming more lethargic and less active. One members sleep rhythm shifted to a 25-hour cycle (which is actually the length of a Martian day), making him out of sync with everyone else. Follow-up research showed that the two crew members experiencing the most stress and exhaustion were involved in 85 per cent of the perceived conflicts.

In a real mission to Mars, people will get hurt, and someone might even get killed. When heated arguments develop, cooler heads will have to prevail. Real space travel probably will have more boredom and more infighting than anything on Star Trek or Star Wars. (Theres a reason why science fiction relies on ludicrously fast speeds: it makes such trips short enough for a story.)

To minimize conflicts among the astronauts or the pain of someone suffering from a mental breakdown, experts will need to spot the signs of their flagging mental state beforehand. These future space explorers will probably undergo a battery of physical and psychological tests every day, week and month, and their data could be sent to scientists at home for analysis. Anything raising a flag of concern could then be addressed.

If theres one thing the limited research shows, its that its hard to predict who will cope best and work well together as the weeks and months, maybe even years, wear on. Many factors can boost the chances of success, however, especially if crew members give each other precisely the kind of support and encouragement that people in prison are deprived of.

A well-performing team needs talented leaders and a closely knit group of people. They need to build trust between each other while theyre training, long before the rocket blasts off. Diverse, international crews could help to overcome some challenges that might come up, but that diversity also sometimes results in cultural and interpersonal problems. A larger crew would likely perform better than a smaller one, but the teams size will always be limited by how much weight and fuel can be launched.

Once theyre in space, people need to keep busy, and they need to think they have something worthwhile to do, even if its actually of limited value. They also need a tiny bit of privacy and entertainment at times, which might include something they brought from home or a simulation of the family and friends they left behind. While at work, the crew members need clear goals and procedures to follow in a wide range of situations. Only people shown to be resilient under pressure for long periods and who have strong teamwork skills even in stressful, sleep-deprived conditions should be part of the crew.

But this is just a start. Two out of 135 space shuttle missions ended in disaster, both for unforeseen engineering problems, but none of them really faced the psychological tests that more perilous, more distant missions will have.

Humans love to explore. Its in our blood. But setting foot on the Red Planet in 20 or 30 years is a more daunting task than anything else ever attempted. To make sure our quest to explore Mars and more distant worlds continues, we have to keep examining not just the engineering challenges but the challenges of our own minds.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Image Credit: NASA

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How to Optimize Your Headspace on a Mission to Mars - Singularity Hub

Could a USB-C Charger’s Chip Get You to the Moon? This Guy Did the Math so You Don’t Have To – Singularity Hub

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Comparing todays computers to their famous ancestors is a popular pastime.

As we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing last year, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) became a particularly juicy target. The analysis, of course, showed just how much more powerful the chips used in common smartphones are than the computers that got us to the moon. Not too shocking, but amazing nonetheless.

For fun, Forrest Heller, a software engineer at Apple who previously worked on Occipitals Structure 3D scanner, thought hed cast around for a different comparison. How would far more basic chips, say, the ones in USB-C chargers, compare to the AGC?

Heller took a deep and detailed look and came to a fairly startling conclusioneven these modest chips can easily go toe-to-toe with the computer that got us to the moon.

Lets start with the caveats.

No USB-C charger on the market was designed to survive space travel. Goes without saying, but hey. Also, Heller says he didnt dive into how many external devices the AGC supported, and hed have to do more digging to find out if his chosen chargers chip would satisfy Apollos needs (not to mention 1960s-era voltages might be too high for it). Finally, as is often the case in space-rated devices where the price of failure is high, the AGC had a lot of redundancy built in (it ran calculations three times). Heller decided to leave this redundancy out of his final conclusions (though he may return to it).

So, how do the two stack up?

Heller looked at three USB-C chargers and chips and ultimately chose the most powerful, the Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 and its Cypress CYPD4225 chip, for his thought experiment. Given the decades separating one from the other, the comparison is not at all straightforward. Much of Hellers work is in making the conversion. (For the technically inclined and curious, be sure to read his post for a detailed blow-by-blow.)

Here are the highlights: Heller found the CPU in the Anker charger is 563 times faster than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Which is impressive, but speed isnt all, Heller notes. NASA scientists opted for memory over speed. A small delay was worth the ability to load a bigger, more useful program. That is, the computers capability trumps speed.

And here, Heller found the two are a bit more comparable.

The Anker PowerPort Atom PD2 has a little over twice the RAM and can store up to 1.78 times more instructions than the AGC. That means that while no charger bought stock on Amazon is ever going to send astronauts to the moon, in theory, you could load an equivalent software package to perform the tasks required by the Apollo spacecraft.

All those caveats in mind, Heller concludes youd only need the computing power of four of these Anker USB-C chargersone for each of the three computers on the command and lunar modules and one for the computer riding the Saturn V boosterto get to the moon.

Now, this isnt to slander the Apollo Guidance Computer. Not at all. The AGC was amazing.

It was one of the first and most significant computers to use silicon integrated circuit chipsthe same basic technology behind the chips we use todayand was about the size of a few shoe boxes when computers were rooms packed with vacuum tubes. Without the AGC, no human pilot could have kept the Apollo spacecraft on course to the moon and back. Probably most incredible was how much it did with how little. You might say a USB-C charger is the opposite: Notable for how little it does with how much.

And thats really the point, isnt it?

Computers were rare and lovingly handcrafted back then; now theyre a commodity. Which is why you can put the equivalent of NASAs moonshot computer in a wall charger and sell it for $54.99. Its why 7 of the worlds top 10 public companies by market capitalization make a living navigating and adding to an ocean of computation, and Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet alone are worth almost $5 trillion on the open market.

So, due respect to the original. And with so much more power at our fingertips, lets remember the AGC and make the most of all that potential to do awe-inspiring work.

Image Credit: NASA

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Give us more room, airlines! Forget permission to recline our seats – msnNOW

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Editors note: The opinions in this article are the authors, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of Microsoft News or Microsoft. MSN Travel Voices features first-person essays and stories from diverse points of view. Click hereto see more Voices content from MSN Lifestyle, Health and Travel.

Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastianpoured fuel on an alreadyfiery, ragingdebate this past week when he suggested passengers should first ask and receive permission from the person behind them beforeleaning backtheir seat.

The proper thing to do is if youre going to recline i somebody that you ask if its OK first, he said.

Earlier in the week, a videowent viralof an agitated American Airlines passengerpunching the seat andchewing out a fellow traveler for failing to do so.

Like chronic territorial feuds between warring tribes, the greatairlineseat space battles are not a recent phenomenon, though the intensity and frequency of them seem to be escalating.In fact, back in 2003, Ira Goldman, a former Senate aide, invented and began selling the Knee Defender a small device that hooks onto the back of the tray table and prevents the person in front of y

As its popularity began rising and tempers along with it, airlines took notice andprohibitedits use. So, like fireworks, its one of those rare items thats not illegal to buy but which youre technically not allowedto use.

Goldman has long defended the product, suggesting its use could result in something of a dtente in the skies.

It gives you the chance to be human beings, he said. Do you want the conversation to start before the laptop screen is cracked or after its cracked?

The Knee Defenderis adjustable andallows for seats to recline in degrees. Its not an all or nothing proposition.

Reaction to Bastians recommendationthis weekto negotiate space has run the gamut from hearty agreement to outraged defiance.

Civility and courtesy are always a good thing, especially when youre flying 40,000 feet up in the air, butthe suggestion ofDeltas chief and even Goldmans ingenious entrepreneurial fix areignoring the root of the problem.

In a desperate attempt to maximize revenue, airlines havefor decadesbeen shrinking both the width and pitch of seats. In the 1950s and 60s long considered the golden age of jet travel, the distance between seatswasas much as36 inches. Today, someare as close as 28 inches apart and as narrow as 17, down from 20 a few decades ago.

Industry executives justify thegreat shrinkage by pointing to the economic realitiesof the business, a claim thatsbuttressedby howfew of the airlines of my childhood still exist today. I have great memories ofwelcoming my dad homeat JFKscircularPan Am terminal or being mesmerized by the magical, futuristic red-carpeted building that once housed TWA. As a young man, I flew Eastern, America Westand Northwest Airlines.

Theyre all gone, and withthemtheir nice, comfortable seats not to mention the once standard meals even in coach. My boys didnt believe me when I told them I was served steak and eggs on my first cross country flight between New York and San Francisco back in 1984.

But how much profit is enough and how long before the companyfinally acknowledges that theyre treatingthe customer as cattle?It seems Deltas suggestion is a subtle way of admitting what we all know that the space between seats is now bordering on the ridiculous.

At 6-foot-4, Ive grown accustomed to being jammed into my seat. I try and rationalize the discomfort by just being grateful to fly at all. I think about the pioneers who labored across the rugged and ragged plains in wooden wagons, many of them dying along the way. What kind of wimp or privileged person am I to complain about my tight space when what took my forefathers five months still only takes me fivehours?

Yet, there is still something unsavory and troublesome about the great airplaneseatsqueeze, especially for those with a disability orsomeone whose sizealready makes traveling a challenge.

I think of a friend who has arthritis, a painful and debilitating condition thats exacerbated when hes confined to tight spaces.Its just not fair and its certainly not considerate.In an age of increasing accommodation, shouldnt industries be compelled to create products that benefit not burden the consumer?

Of course, thegreatseat debate is big business. Now, with most airlines, you dont just buy a ticket you have to also buy your seat and if you want more room, well, youre going to pay for it. Im a capitalist and I get it. Its just irritating and leaves me feeling increasingly fleeced.

Newtons third law is that for every action, theres a reaction and the foolishness of airlines to try and fit more people in the same space is literally and figuratively squeezing the customer to a breaking point.

This is going to sound self-righteous, butI gave up reclining my seatyears ago, a decision borne out of the old biblical adage to, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.Im also a bit like George McFly from Back to the Future, who famously said, I'mafraidI'm just notverygood at confrontations.

Wed all be a lot better off if the airline executives responsible for positioning the seats on airplanes would likewise follow suit.

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Why Fire Is the Greatest Tool of All Time – Popular Mechanics

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Whether were staring into the depths of a campfire or watching a Space Shuttle burn 500,000 gallons of fuel as it rises off the launchpad, mankinds obsession with fire is so innate we almost take it for granted. Yet fire has catalyzed the human races most significant innovations; its helped us survive and flourish.

At the same time, the path that took us from hunching around a lightning-struck tree for warmth to carrying lighters in our pockets has many reminders of fires volatilityfrom the epic scope of The Great Chicago Fire to the explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon. Fire comes with a big fat warning sticker, but nonetheless, its mans most essential tool.

Almost every primitive culture has a story about how man came to harness fire, and many of these stories involvecuriouslypetty theft. From the famed Greek myth of Prometheus snatching fire from Zeus and handing it to man (thanks for that, bud, and sorry about the whole bird-eating-your-liver thing), to the Native American story of Rabbit stealing fire from the bloodthirsty Weasels, to the Polynesian legend of Maui taking fire from the birds during a fishing trip for his mother, our desire to control the element has always run up against our better instincts.

Without fireand later, without combustionthere would be no skyscrapers, air travel, International Space Station, bourbon, or medium-rare steaks.

The themes of thievery make sense. In the days of early man, fire was our most valuable possession. Sculptor Paul Manship summed up this sentiment in his art. Behind his famous statue of Prometheus in New York Citys Rockefeller Center, he paraphrased the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, noting that fire proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.

Without fireand later, without combustionthere would be no skyscrapers, air travel, International Space Station, bourbon, or medium-rare steaks. The element has unlocked and enabled some of the greatest industrial and technological achievements in human history.

Heritage ImagesGetty Images

Its impossible to know when the first fire was made, but we can speculate at its earliest major use: cooking, says Alan Rocke, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of the history of science and technology at Case Western Reserve University.

Cooking with heat broadened early mans palate by killing off potentially dangerous microbes in formerly unsafe foods. Fish and beef are at their juiciest and free of illness-causing bacteria at 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Rabbit is safe at 160F; chicken at 165F. Fire tenderizes meat (pulled pork falls apart at 205F), but at 330F it also triggers the Maillard reaction (browning) to give steak a mouth-watering sear.

Find Your Fuel

Keep seasoned woodmeaning it's been air or kiln driednear the fireplace (a couple of days indoors should dry out most pieces). Wood with rough surfaces will catch easier than smooth wood. For tinder, gather two handfuls of twigs and break them so they resemble a No. 2 pencil in length and diameter. Half a section of newspaper or a grocery store mailer will work as kindling.

Shape Your Kindling

After making sure your chimney's damper is open, tear the newspaper into two-inch-wide lengths and rub the strips between your fingers so they separate into ribbons. Put the ribbons in the fireplace in a mound the size of a tennis ball. Rest some of your tinder on top of the mound and lean more tinder on those twigs to create a little hut around the paper.

Prime Your Chimney Fuel

In wintertime, cold air coming down your chimney can suppress a fire and push smoke into your house. "Priming the flue" reverses the draft. To do this, roll up a spare piece of newspaper, light one end like a torch, and stick it up your chimney for a few moments. The rising hot air will push the cold air out of the chimney, allowing smoke to escape.

Light It Up

Light the paper. As it ignites, lean larger pieces of tinder against the hut. After those catch, add a fuel log on top of the hut, being careful not to smother the flames. To help the wood catch, blow air across the bottom of the fire where the newspaper meets the surface of the fireplace. Don't have a fireplace tool set? Use sturdy metal kitchen tongs to move the wood around.

Harvard professor and primatologist Richard Wrangham, Ph.D., suggests that the invention of cooking fed evolution itself by unlocking energy-giving nutrients for our ancestors evolving brains and bodies.

In fact, Wrangham suggests that our digestive tracts evolved as a result of discovering cooking. Human guts are 56 percent small intestine and 17 percent colon, while those respective numbers for chimps are almost the opposite: 23 and 52 percent. Translation: Chimp guts are better at breaking down plant fibers and meat collagen than human ones. We need blenders, food processors, and sweet, sweet heat to help our bodies absorb food in a way our guts can handle, says Rocke.

Around 10,000 BCE, our cavemen ancestors began to ditch hunting and gathering in favor of the farming life, and our usage of fire diversified. We started baking, defending our land from predators (the flashpoint of a sabertooth-warding wooden torch is 572F), and firing pottery (clay particles fuse at 1,650F). You can do some things with bowls made from reeds, says Rocke, but to make containers useful for cooking, you need fire.

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When wood reaches its flashpoint, the heat exorcises impurities like water vapor, sulfur compounds, and nitrogen compounds, leaving essentially pure carbon behindcharcoal. This substance burns hotter than normal wood, and throughout history, more heat has led to better tech.

The Hittites were some of the most prolific iron producers of the Bronze Age (33001200 BCE), and evidence suggests they were among the first ancient empires to discover that they could prevent their tools and weapons from rusting by forging steel from iron and charcoal. When charcoal fuses with iron ore, it acts as a reducing agent, attracting oxygen away from the metal. It also lowers irons melting point.

This lower heat threshold allowed the Hittites to produce more durable iron weapons on a mass scale. It also helped them gain trade leveragein the 13th century BCE, a Hittite king sent another ruler an iron dagger as appeasementand gave them a tactical edge over their bronze-bound opponents, including the mighty ancient Egyptians.

The invention of charcoal was a great asset to society because it enabled all these high-temperature processes, Rocke says. You can do some metallurgy without charcoal, but you cant make iron or steel, both of which require a blast furnace.

It isnt certain how the Hittites mass-produced malleable iron and steel, but archaeologists are confident that blast furnaces operated in China as early as the 5th century BCE. Blast furnaces liquefy metals at 3,000F. In ancient China, this meant the introduction of cast iron, the ultra-malleable, ultra-rust-resistant material the Western world has used in cannons, bridges, and, yup, the cast iron skillet in your kitchen that can withstand 2,000F.

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No image captures the intersection of fire and modern industry better than a burning oil derricks column of flame. After Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859, people began to refine that oil over a fire and distill it into some of the tentpole resources of modern life: kerosene, diesel, and gasoline, the last of which could be boiled off and condensed between 104401F.

Early on, Americans used these resources mostly to illuminate our cities and homes, but in the mid-to-late 19th century, gasoline became fuel for a more adrenal, exciting purpose: helping us go far and go fast. The liquid-fuel internal-combustion engine burns a mixture of gasoline and air to create a combustion that expands gases inside the engine to push the pistons and rotate the crankshaft.

This simple fire-powered design became the basis of modern transport, from the Wright brothers plane at Kitty Hawk, to the refurbished Challenger 2, which topped 448 miles per hour and broke the land speed record in 2018, to the 2,300-ton diesel engines that power container ships through the Panama Canal today.

Gasoline had great advantages over electricity or gaseous fuels: energy density, weight, volume, Rocke says. You needed those differences if you were going to put your power plant [your fuel source] on a moving object.

In 1900, just 22 percent of American automobiles were powered by gas; but thanks to Henry Fords mass-production methods, the invention of the self-starting ignition in 1912, and our newfound need for speed, the internal-combustion engine gained supremacy among autos. Fire was powering us toward modern life.

This modernization put fire and combustion at the crossroads of practicality and danger once again. The early 1900s were fraught with fatal conflagrations. Chicagos Iroquois Theater fire in 1903 killed more than 600 people, and in 1910, the Big Blowup wildfire in Idaho, Washington, and Montana killed at least 85 people as it reduced 3 million acresan area about the size of Connecticutto ashes.

These fires prompted changes: The Iroquois fire led to the invention of the emergency exit panic bar for doors, and the Big Blowup led to the development of some prescribed-burn containment techniques. But they also served as reminders of the risks that come with implementing combustion in our everyday lives.

Harness the Power of Fire

Today, Rocke suggests the advances wrought by fire have ironically taken us past it. Many energy and power advances of the 20th century dont involve combustion: Nuclear energy relies on a physical reaction rather than a chemical one, and renewable energies like solar, wind, and water power skirt combustions literal explosiveness. We understand now there are costs of powering the world with fire, from deforestation to pollution to climate change. Going forward, we have to reconcile these downsides with fires awesome potential.

Because it is awesome. Fire sparks the reaction between aluminum and ammonium perchlorate that turns solid rocket fuel into the driving force of space travel (NASAs rocket boosters reach 5,000F during launch). When fire is used to distill alcohol (which evaporates at 173F), were treated to things like Four Roses Single Barrel bourbon and Blantons Original.

Every time you strike a match, the stroke of friction between the match head and the box turns the boxs red phosphorus to white, and it takes just 86F for white phosphorus to combust. Then you have fire at your fingertips.

Its hard not to stare at that little flame. Simple combustion still inspires us at a basic, primal level, whether were throwing another log on the fireplace or sitting around a backyard bonfire. As Rocke affirms: Fire is so elemental, it will never go away.

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Why Fire Is the Greatest Tool of All Time - Popular Mechanics

3 Stocks That Will Only Break Your Heart – Motley Fool

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It's Valentine's Day, but you've probably had enough of Cupid by now. Love is great and all, but sometimes you just need a box of matches more than a matchmaker. Not every stock that sweeps you off your feet will be a winner, and I have three investments that I think will be heartbreakers.

Himax Technologies (NASDAQ:HIMX),Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), and Virgin Galactic(NYSE:SPCE) are three stocks that are flying high this year, but susceptible to selling off in the near future. Let's go over why these three market darlings may ultimately break your heart.

Image source: Getty Images.

Among the more unlikely stocks hitting new 52-week highs on Thursday is Himax Technologies, a designer of display drivers and other semiconductor products. The stock has nearly doubled this year, up 83% in 2020 after announcingbetter-than-expected preliminary financial resultslast month. The stock is making hearts go aflutter this week by actually posting those fourth-quarter results and issuing encouraging guidance.

Revenue for the fourth quarter clocked in at $174.9 million, declining 8% from a year earlier. A small gain in its small and medium display drivers segment was more than offset by a 22% plunge in large display drivers. Its non-display business also staged a year-over-year retreat. The excitement here is that business is actually growing sequentially, a big deal for a cyclical business like the semiconductor industry.

Guidance for the current quarter is even better. It sees an 8% to 18% year-over-year increase in the first quarter. It has historically posted a sequential top-line decline in the first quarter, but it's eyeing a 1% to 10% advance this time around during the seasonally sluggish period. The headwinds that it was warning about a few months ago are now tailwinds, with Himax eyeing positive momentum across its smartphone, tablet, and automotive display lines.

This all sounds like good news, but Himax has a habit of disappointing investors. The stock has only moved higher in one of the past six years. The only year in that time that it did move higher -- nearly doubling in 2017 the way it is right now -- it would go on to fall precipitously in each of the two following years.

This will probably be the most controversial of the three names on my heartbreaker list, but it's hard to justify the electric-car maker's stock more than tripling over the past six months. Revenue rose 2% inits latest quarter, and while it did see a 23% increase in the number of cars it delivered during the period it was basically consumers shifting to the cheaper Model 3 at the expense of the older and pricier S and X models.

The bullish narrative here is that Tesla should be valued more as a tech stock than a conventional automaker. Well, on that front, we're seeing ASPs (average selling prices) move lower given the product mix shift for a business that is low margin by tech standards.

I'm not bearish on Tesla. Analysts see revenue more than tripling within the next three years and I don't disagree with that. Wall Street pros see profits exploding skyward at this point, and I'm applauding. However, Tesla stock is a volatile beast. The effervescent bullishness for a company behind big-ticket products in an economy that can't be buoyant forever is a problem. Even bulls wouldn't be surprised if Tesla stock closes out the year below Thursday's $804 close. The median analyst price target is $506. The company is a long-term winner, but the same can't be said about the near-term prospects for the stock with its $153 billion enterprise value.

All three of these stocks are taking off this year, but Virgin Galactic is the only one that has more than doubled in 2020. Space tourism for the masses, for now, is just a billionaire's dream. True to its Virgin moniker, this is Sir Richard Branson's dream for space travel. He competes against other moneyed market icons Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Tesla's Elon Musk (SpaceX).

These are three pretty smart billionaires piloting these three pet projects, and since Virgin Galactic is the one venture that is now publicly traded, it's easy to see why space buffs with stars in their eyes are flocking to the stock. Branson hopes to start taking folks willing to shell out $250,000 on their first trip to the edge of space as soon as later this year.

Virgin Galactic dreams of a future of Earth-orbiting hotels, science labs, and transcontinental service, but folks are paying up just for the experience of going up to the edge of space -- joining the 50-mile high club to be technically considered an astronaut -- in a reusable vehicle. Hundreds of wealthy consumers have already booked with Virgin Galactic, but we're still decades, if not longer, away where this becomes anything other than a novelty. As the lone public play with a thin float, this is going to have more ups and downs than Avenue 5. Space travel is a gamble at this point, and it's why Virgin Galactic is a risky wager after soaring 105% so far this young year.Investing in IPOscan be risky, but this particular newbie is out of this world in more ways than one.

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3 Stocks That Will Only Break Your Heart - Motley Fool

The British children’s show creators worthy of the biopic treatment – British GQ

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Teletubbies creator Anne Wood

The real story

Wood grew up in a colliery village near County Durham during the Second World War. Despite not having much access to literature as a child, she self-published her own magazine, Books For Children, and founded the Federation Of Children's Books Groups, which caught the attention of TV producers.

A stint at Yorkshire Television and TV-AM saw her create her first show Rub-A-Dub-Tub before a change of management saw her set up her own production company, where she created the likes of Rosie And Jim.

Teletubbies came about when, during a trip stateside to try to break America, Wood and Tots TV puppeteer Andrew Davenport visited Washington's National Air And Space Museum and noticed that astronauts walking on the moon resembled giant babies. The idea was cemented when Wood's mother, who suffered from MS and was in a wheelchair, commented that there were so many domestic devices beeping while Wood had popped out to the shops and so realised, Thats the atmosphere that little kids are growing up in. The Teletubbies became "technological babies, living in a technological environment.

Since then, Wood has worked on other hit shows In The Night Garden and Twirlywoos, and is still developing ideas today at the age of 82.

The Hollywood pitch

The year is 1996 and technology is everywhere: picture commuters rushing around listening to Walkmans, the BBC launching one of its first websites to document the Olympic Games and school children playing with Tamagotchis under their desks. Meanwhile, after 20 years working in childrens TV, Anne Wood is juggling looking after her ill mother with managing her own production company and fighting the influx of American shows on British childrens TV. Space travel, tech and transatlantic media collide as Wood adapts to a changing world, but will it be enough to save the UK's children's programming from an American takeover?

Tagline

Time for Tubby bye-bye? She's only just getting started

Who would play Anne Wood?

"It would have to be someone with a bit of acerbic-ness about them. Meryl Streep, lets say," says Wood.

The real story

Over the course of his career, Keith Chapman has dreamed up two of the biggest children's TV shows of all time, Bob The Builder and Paw Patrol, the former making 5 billion since it was created and the latter doubling that figure in the past six years alone.

Describing his life as one big cartoon, Chapman was always drawing as a child and his first cartoons got published in a local newspaper when he was just 12 years old. He went on to study graphic illustration at art college, after which he went to work in advertising, before moving to work for the Muppets' creator, Jim Henson.

Every night, he'd go home and work on his own ideas, testing them out on his three young boys. The character they'd always want to hear more of was, of course, Bob, who Chapman dreamed up after he saw a JCB outside his flat in Wimbledon Village. He pitched the idea to HIT Entertainment, who optioned the show and turned it into the stop-frame classic we're all now familiar with. From beating Westlife to a Christmas No1 with Can We Fix It?" to shows at the O2, the success of Bob The Builder was unprecedented and gave Chapman the opportunity to start his own company, Chapman Entertainment, which created shows such as Rory The Racing Car and Fifi And The Flowertots.

Unfortunately, the company was one of many to be hit by the Great Recession and eventually had to close down, with the bank selling the rights to their properties to Dreamworks. Paw Patrol came about a few years later when Chapman was approached by toy company Spin Master to create a show based on emergency vehicles and since then it's become a worldwide success. The work doesn't stop there, though. Currently Chapman has about 15 projects in the works, ranging from adult cartoons to feature-length films.

The Hollywood pitch

Christmas No1s, sold-out shows at the O2, billions of pounds' worth of merchandise sales: Keith Chapman is at the top of his game, riding high on the success of his hit show Bob The Builder and his growing production company. But nothing lasts for ever. Can he pick up the pieces after he's hit by hard times during the recession? A tale of resilience and creativity, there's only one thing that save him: his imagination.

Tagline

Life is one big cartoon. How you draw it is up to you.

Who would play Keith Chapman?

Sometimes people say that look like Alec Baldwin," says Chapman. "I cant see it myself, but a few people have so maybe him. Of course, he wouldnt get the accent, so it would have to be a British actor: Gary Oldman, hes a brilliant actor. Hes got London roots so hell probably get the accent.

Born in Leeds but raised in Liverpool, Brenton's childhood was spent playing outside and watching shows such as Danger Mouse, Grange Hill, Crackerjack and Play Away. Like Chapman, he also went to art college, but followed that up with a stint at drama college, where he and a friend set up a theatre company to pay the bills, often staging shows for children.

Eventually, Brenton landed a gig presenting on Playbus, where he copresented with Iain Lauchlan, who would later become his business partner. This is also where he learnt to write and direct and the pair began to write and perform in pantomimes in Coventry.

Their Bafta-winning show Tweenies was born when the duo got wind that the BBC had invited companies to pitch ideas for a follow-up from Teletubbies for a slightly older audience. While waiting in the wings at a production of Cinderella, ready to take the stage as an ugly step sister, he took his chance and asked the then director of BBC Children's, Roy Thompson, if he and Lauchlan could pitch an idea. The pair had already been creating a series of videos called Fun Song Factory, so this was the natural next step. Thompson sent them a brief and the pair got to work creating ideas until they won the slot. It was the Tweenies' first live tour that made the success of the show really sink in for Brenton. That year we sold more tickets than Robbie Williams and Britney Spears put together. It was huge.

The Hollywood pitch

Life as an aspiring young actor can be tough, but if you come at the industry from all directions, it might just let you in. Will Brenton becomes a multi-hyphenate long before millennials made it the norm, in a story that shows that determination and ingenuity can go a long way. Going from Coventry pantomimes to tours that sold more tickets than Robbie Williams and Britney Spears combined, Brenton's journey is far from conventional, but aren't those always the best kind of rides?

Tagline

Are you ready to play?

Who would play Will Brenton?

I asked my wife this and she said David Thewlis," says Brenton. "When I was still acting I was offered a part in a Yorkshire TV series called A Bit Of A Do, but I couldnt do it because I was doing a theatre show. The actor who ended up doing it was David Thewlis. It was his first TV part and it kicked everything off for him. He played it better than I would have done, but we were laughing about that, saying how it would be ironic if he would then one day play me in a movie.

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The British children's show creators worthy of the biopic treatment - British GQ

New Solar Orbiter Will Get the First Glimpse of the Sun’s Poles – HowStuffWorks

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A newly launched spacecraft promises to broaden our understanding of the sun. Called the "Solar Orbiter" or the "SolO" for short it left the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in central Florida Sunday, Feb. 9, at 11:03 p.m.

The new probe is part of an international collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Both parties contributed to its arsenal of scientific instruments. Some of these gadgets will remotely image the sun, its atmosphere and the materials it spews forth. Others are built to keep tabs on the spacecraft's immediate surroundings.

During the wee hours of Feb. 10, 2020, the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany got a signal confirming that orbiter's onboard solar panels were functioning correctly. So begins a seven-year planned mission. To paraphrase Robert Frost, the orbiter is supposed to take the route less traveled.

All the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun on the same general plane (give or take a few degrees). Called the "ecliptic plane," it's like a giant invisible disc one that very nearly lines up with the sun's equator.

Most of our spacefaring devices are gravitationally confined to this plane. But the SolO is meant to escape it.

By exploiting the gravity of Earth and Venus, the probe will orbit the sun on a unique and tilted pathway. This unique trajectory will give the SolO 22 close approaches to the sun (as close as 26 million miles or 35.4 million kilometers to the sun), as well as bring it within the orbit of Mercury to study the sun's influence on space. It will also give SolO the chance to do something no craft has ever done before: Take pictures of the solar poles.

Just like Earth, the sun has a north and south pole. In 2018, the ESA used data from the Proba-2 satellite to try and determine what the northern pole looks like. But Proba-2 couldn't photograph this region directly. If all goes according to plan, SolO will do just that. Its first close pass by the sun will be in 2022 at about a third the distance from the sun to Earth.

"Up until Solar Orbiter, all solar imaging instruments have been within the ecliptic plane or very close to it," NASA scientist Russell Howard noted in a press statement. "Now, we'll be able to look down on the sun from above."

And that's just the beginning.

Another mission objective involves SolO partnering up with the Parker Solar Probe. Launched in 2018, this spacecraft is able to fly much closer to the sun than the new Solar Orbiter ever will.

Comparing the feedback from both probes ought to tell us a great deal about the mysterious phenomenon called solar wind. Any polar pictures the SolO gives us should provide relevant insights, too. The sun's polar regions probably have a big effect on its atmosphere as a whole along with the charged particle streams (i.e., "winds") it unleashes.

SolO's unique travel plans will put it in contact with intense heat and extreme coldness. The new probe is going to revolve around the sun in a very long, very narrow oval-shaped orbit. As it nears the star, things will get rather toasty.

That's why designers fitted the Solar Orbiter with a reflective heat shield coated in titanium foil. According to NASA, this shield can withstand temperatures as high as 970 degrees Fahrenheit (521 degrees Celsius). It's also got radiators designed to ventilate excess heat produced within the craft itself.

Engineers can't be too careful about these things, you know. Certainly not when space travel is involved.

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Block Universe Theory: Is the Passing of Time an Illusion? – Interesting Engineering

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Is time travel possible? Is time just an illusion that our brains merely believe to be moving forward in a linear fashion? According to proponents of the box universe theory, the answer to both of these questions is, simply, yes.

The box universe theory describes 'now' as an arbitrary place in time, and states that the past, future, and present all exist simultaneously.

RELATED: 5 ALTERNATIVES TO THE BIG BANG THEORY

Much in the same way that your current location doesn't exclude the existence of other locations, the box universe theory claims that being in the present doesn't mean the past and future aren't currently taking place.

We take a look at different versions of the theory and how this static traversable perception of spacetime means that space travel, in theory, is possible.

The block universe theory, as explained by Dr. Kristie Miller last year,positsthat our universe might be a giant four-dimensional block of spacetime, containing all the things that ever happened and will happen in our traditional perception of time.

Dr. Kristie Miller, who is the joint director for theCentre for Timeat the University of Sydney, explained the theory in a piece published by ABC Science.Miller describedhowall moments that exist are relative to each other within three spatial dimensions and a single time dimension.

The block universe theory is also known in some scientific circles as Eternalism, in which the past, present, and future all co-exist 'now'. This is opposed to Presentism, which states that the past doesn't exist anymore and is constantly disappearing thanks to that pesky notion of 'present' time.

According to Miller, hypothetically speaking, yes, it is possible. But there is one big caveat. We would have to figure out how to travel at a speed close to the speed of light, allowing us to use a wormhole as a shortcut to travel into another "location" in spacetime. This would be possible due to a phenomenon known as time dilation.

However, if we were to be able to create the technology to allow us to travel in time, we would not be able to affect our present by changing the past, Miller says. That's because the present exists at the same time as the past and is, therefore, inextricably linked. No need to worry about killing an insect in the past leading to a snowballing chain of events that would set off another world war then.

"If I travel to the past, I am part of the past. Importantly, I was always part of the past," Miller says. In other words, going to the past would simply mean that we are simply fulfilling pre-ordained actions that are already written out in the block that is spacetime.

The box universe does, of course, have its detractors, as Big Think points out.PhysicistLee Smolin, for example,wrotethat"The future is not now real and there can be no definite facts of the matter about the future."He alsoaddedat a 2017 conference that what is real is just "the process by which future events are generated out of present events."

The idea, if true, would also lend weight to the philosophical idea of Predeterminism, which states that everything is preordained and therefore an individual has no agency over the outcome of their life and may as well just let it run its course. Not a very 21st Century idea.

A counter to the association with Predeterminism is another theory, growing block-ism ridiculous name, I know which posits that the block of spacetime is actually a growing entity that can be changed. The past and the present always exist, but the future would be more of a changing entity.

So, could a preordained life be closely linked to our ability to be able to time travel? The truth is that we are nowhere near knowing this for sure. The box universe theory for the moment is just that, a theory. We'd need the very tall order of a time machine to test the hypothesis.

Knowing whether all of history is happening at the same time is something that may never, you guessed it, happen. On the other hand, it might be happening right now.

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Block Universe Theory: Is the Passing of Time an Illusion? - Interesting Engineering

For a sight test that is out of this world? You should be going to Specsavers Coleraine – Coleraine Times

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Out of this world optical diagnostic technology that was - until a few years ago - only widely available in hospital eye departments will be available in Specsavers Coleraine.

Called OCT (optical coherence tomography), this eye health check is set to transform the industrys evaluation of a customers overall eye health on our high streets and is being rolled out across all Specsavers stores this month.

The innovation of OCT is pretty impressive, and testament to its credentials is the fact that NASA uses OCT technology on its International Space Station to measure the effect of space travel on the eye.

The OCT uses light to take more than 1,000 images of the back of the eye including the retina and optic nerve. A layered image is then created to allow the optometrist to view the deeper structures of the eye in more detail than ever before. From here, its future-gazing potential can then help detect preventable, sight-threating conditions up to four years earlier than a standard eye test.

These images are then stored, allowing the Specsavers team of optometrists to refer back to a customers results from their prior appointment and detect any subtle changes that can then be addressed.

Some of the conditions that can be picked up earlier and monitored with an OCT test include diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration and glaucoma. In some rarer cases, concerns relating to wider health issues like a brain tumour have been picked up thanks to the detailed scan.

Store director Judith Ball said: This is big news and we are proud to be part of a first nationwide roll out for the optical industry.

Our nationwide roll out of this innovation is one big step for mankind when it comes to accessing fantastic innovation and helping to preserve the nations eye health. To be able to bring this technology to our customers in Coleraine in the decade of 2020 feels extra poignant too.

To highlight the innovative new equipment revolutionising the high street, Specsavers has also launched a TV ad which sees an OCT machine floating alongside the Hubble Telescope in outer space.

To find out more about OCT or to book an appointment, visit the Diamond Coleraine, http://www.specsavers.co.uk or call 0287 032 6346

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For a sight test that is out of this world? You should be going to Specsavers Coleraine - Coleraine Times

Virgin Group reaches out to Nitin Gadkari for hyperloop – Economic Times

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NEW DELHI: Richard Branson-owned Virgin Group has reached out to transport minister Nitin Gadkari with a proposal to establish a hyperloop transportation system between New Delhi and Mumbai, after the Maharashtra government decided to shelve the companys proposed project in the state last month.

A source in the know told ET that Virgin Group has approached Gadkariwho is known for his openness to adopting new technologiesto develop a 1,300-km line between the national capital and Mumbai. Executives of the group are in India for the next two days and are meeting various stakeholders for the technology, the person said.

Hyperloop use magnets to levitate pods inside an airless tube, creating conditions in which the pods can shuttle people and freight at speeds of up to 1,200 km per hour.

Senior executives from the Virgin Group have met the transport minister to discuss this, the person cited earlier told ET. The talks are at a very preliminary stage and they may submit a formal proposal to Gadkari.

ET could not contact the Virgin Group immediately for an official comment.

Speaking at a public event here on Thursday, Gadkari also mentioned that he had met investors earlier in the day and discussed a bullet train-like project.

Virgin Hyperloop Ones proposed Pune-Mumbai link project was okayed by the BJP government in the state last year. The first phase of the plan entailed an 11.8 km-long track. The project would have needed up to $10 billion in investment and up in 2.5 years to be completed. Last month, the Uddhav Thackarey-led state government decided against implementing it amid doubts about its capsule technology, which is not yet operational anywhere in the world.

We do not have the capacity to experiment with hyperloop. We will concentrate on other modes of transport and, in the meantime, if that technology develops more with successful trials abroad, we can think about it, Maharashtras deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar had said in a recent statement.

An official ET spoke with said it may be visibly impossible to develop a 1,300 km-long line at this point when not even 1 km is operational anywhere in the world. The official did not wish to be identified.

Billionaire entrepreneur Bransons diversified conglomerate Virgin Group has interests in aviation, hospitality, music, telecom and space travel.

Commenting on the development, Virgin Hyperloop One spokesperson said Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) is committed to India and the State of Maharashtra. We are actively engaging with the Maharashtra Government as per the standard due process for the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop project. When we came to India we had a vision to connect all Tier One cities in under 2 hours. Delhi-Mumbai is a part of that national vision, but our focus remains on moving forward with the Mumbai-Pune project to the satisfaction of all concerned stakeholders.

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Virgin Group reaches out to Nitin Gadkari for hyperloop - Economic Times

Jordan B Peterson – YouTube

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My wife, Tammy, and I toured Australia and New Zealand in February 2019. I was lecturing about the topics covered in my book, 12 Rules for Life (and also Maps of Meaning, my first book). I had a number of the lectures professionally filmed. This highlight from my lecture in Auckland focuses on what might be done about crippling feelings of guilt.

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Is Jordan Peterson the New Ayn Rand? – Merion West

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(Flickr-Gage Skidmore)

I compare Peterson with Ayn Rand becauseas I read this bookher name constantly came to my mind (she is mentioned only once in the book).

The Left has long had intellectual gurus with cult-like followings: from Derrida to Foucault to Sartre to iek. This is a less frequent occurrence on the Right, so there are fewer intellectual gurus to be found there. Perhaps the last such figure was Ayn Rand, and, even thoughshe has been dead for more than three decades, her views remain quite influential for some young people.So, the time is ripe for a new right-wing intellectual guru, and it seems Jordan Peterson is playing that role.

If you are a male college student, you might not mind watching Petersons long lectures on Solzhenitsynor reading his technical articles on the psychology of alcoholism. However, the rest of us would prefer to have a ready-made concise CliffNotes version of his ideas, chiefly to judge whether this Peterson fellow is actually worth all of the fuss that accompanies him. Jim Proser provides such a guide in Savage Messiah: How Dr. Jordan Peterson Is Saving Western Civilization. It is a nice intellectual biography, written in a very engaging style; it is never dumbed-down yet full of anecdotes. It also quotes extensively from Petersons own books, lectures, and interviews.

I compare Peterson with Ayn Rand becauseas I read this bookher name constantly came to my mind (she is mentioned only once in the book). In Atlas Shrugged, the boogeyman is socialism, and the dominant theme of that very long book is individuals rejecting herd-mentality and taking responsibility for their own actions; Atlas is the mythological hero, who embraces this ideal by taking the world on his shoulders. In Prosers portrayal, Peterson is similarly fascinated with Atlas, as this excerpt from one of his lectures demonstrates: This is an old representation, right? Atlas with the world. Well, its a representation that says that thats the proper way to live, right? [It] is to pick up a load thats heavy enough so that if you carry it you have some self-respect.

Points along these lines may sound more like self-help motivational coaching than insightful scholarship. And indeed, throughout Prosers book, one may sympathize with Peterson, but I still wonder what all the hand-wringing surrounding him is all about. Dont misunderstand me, Peterson is a legitimate scholar, but I can think of many, many contemporary intellectuals that have far more interesting things to say.

Now, maybe Petersons singularity is that he struck a chord in the right place at the right time. Political correctness and identity politics have gone too far, and free speech does appear to be under siege at many North American universities. As Proser tells the story, Peterson courageously has taken a stand against of all this. Kudos to him for that. However, I worry that there is something darker lurking underneath Petersons crusade.

Apart from Ayn Rand, the other author that constantly came to mind as I read the book was Nietzsche. Proser paints Peterson as some sort of bermensch, a figure who in his youth lifted weights, a roughneck, a frontier cowboy from the lonely Alberta oilfields he grew up fighting for his place in a wolf pack of tough guys. And, now, Peterson has become this savage intellectual, who exists beyond the mediocrity of the restand thrives by killing the dragons of chaos, fighting hard to reestablish order.

Now, of course, Nietzsche was not guilty of the way his philosophy was abused by the Nazis. But, I do give credence to the thesis that his ideas did sow the seeds of totalitarianism.If you worry so much about being a Superman, then ultimately it is not so hard to conclude that weaklings must simply disappear from the face of the Earth.Likewise, I worry thatunderneath all the talk about responsibility, order, and anti-political correctnessthere may be something more sinister going on with Peterson.

Proser presents Peterson as a champion of the Enlightenment, who prioritizes science over ideology, and calls a spade a spade by reminding liberals that gender differences are real. That may very well be, but I doubt Peterson is really committed to the Enlightenment and its true liberal spirit. Actually, I think Matt McManus hits it on the head when he claims that Peterson is much closer aligned with postmodernism and the counter-Enlightenment than he would be willing to admit. The Enlightenment turned its back on faith and Christianity as a whole; Peterson says he does not believe in God, but he, very confusingly, seems to think religion will always be necessaryand that atheism inevitably leads to many depravities. The Enlightenment was cosmopolitan and had little patience for nationalism; by contrast, the counter-Enlightenment provided the intellectual rationale for modern nationalism, and Peterson is similarlyunhappyabout what he calls globalism. The Enlightenment had little patience for pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo; by contrast, Peterson seems to think that people who painted snakes in antiquity already knew about DNA

But, perhaps the more worrying aspect of Peterson is his obsession with what he calls neo-Marxism and its alleged pernicious infiltration of our civilization. This is the dominant theme of Prosers book. Yes, there are some fools in North American universities, and Peterson does a public service by confronting them. But, to believe that these clueless college students are actually a threat to Western civilization (and that Peterson is a kind of Medieval knight who must slew the terrifying monsters) is hyperbole. If History is any guide, totalitarianism begins with hyperbole about the dangers of particular people, whether it is Jews, the bourgeoisie, or the Kafir. Of course, Communism killed millions of people, but to obsess over it may actually pave the way for new forms of totalitarianism. Those youngsters who are fascinated with Peterson should know that Stalinism and McCarthyism are cut from the same clothand, unfortunately, Petersons obsession with neo-Marxism (whatever that means) is dangerously close to the kind of intellectual cleansing that infamous Senator from Wisconsin senator aspired towards.

Precisely because Peterson has this illiberal bone, nasty people can become very fond of him. The Alt-right is a case in point. Of course, one ought never be charged with a crime on the basis of association (again, one cannot entirely blame Auschwitz on Nietzsche). But in the case of Peterson, it should at least give pause that his ideas are being used to push for someeyebrow-raising agendas. While he still has a chance to escape such guilt by associations, Peterson must try harder to disavow some of the tendentious readings that people make of his words.

Proser has written a nice book, but he also makes for an example of someone who wants to use Peterson for his own agenda of ultraconservatism and American triumphalism. Take, for instance, his views on American imperialism. In the book, there is constant mention of the Soviet Evil Empire but no mention whatsoever of any American Empire. Proser scolds Noam Chomsky for saying that, the United States also wiped out communist uprisings in Latin America with the methods of Heinrich Himmlers extermination squads. Well, like it or not, Chomsky is right this time. The United States illegal involvement in Nicaragua(and other countries south of Rio Grande) was intended to wipe out communist uprisings. Proserin dismissing offhandedly this comparisonignores that the School of the Americas run by the CIA taught Latin American dictatorships how to torture in order to suppress communist movements.

Proser is so far to the right, that he thinks that Obama was, the de facto leader of the left since his election in 2008. Proser even claims that, Jordan [Peterson] recognized the election of Barack Obama and explosion of Occupy Wall Street as clear demonstrations that a radical Marxist storm had surged and was aiming to collapse Western traditions as it had before. I do not know if Peterson actually thought this; however, if he did, then there is something wrong with him. To think that Barack Obama, who bailed out banks and Wall Street belongs in the same category with Occupy Wall Street is nothing more than unhealthy conspiratorial thinking.

One can easily guess Prosers political views by looking at which thinkers he invokes and approves of. When speaking of the Intellectual Dark Web, he mentions respectable names such as Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro. But then, he includes Glenn Beck. Seriously? The same guy who rants about George Soros and toys with conspiracy theories over and over again? Someone who not only toys withbut rather fully embracesall sorts of conspiracy theories is Alex Jones. And Proser does seem to have a soft spot for him, too: Alex Jones would fall to de-platforming as social media monopolies Facebook, Google, and Twitter revealed themselves to be in the progressive camp by using the new standard hate speech is not free speech to throttle conservative, or as Jordan [Peterson] described himself, traditionalist voices.

It is nice to have someone to give young adults advice about discipline, order, and responsibility. It is also nice to have a professor on television telling woke crusaders that the State has no right to force people to use specific pronounsand that not everything is about race. But, if by talking so much about the Gulag, you forget about Guantanamo, we have a problem. No, I do not claim moral equivalency; the Gulag was certainly worse. But, I cannot emphasize enough that obsession with Stalinism can lead to McCarthyismor the Patriot Actand Peterson needs to think harder about how to prevent this.

He still has time to avoid going down the path of Ayn Rand. In her case, one can understand how closely witnessing the horrors of the Russian Revolution led to her extremist views. By contrast, Peterson has had the privilege of living in democratic nations his entire life. Sure, he has reason to strongly object to Communism, but his own unchecked views may be promoting a world that few sensible people would want. I worry thatin the endthis famous quotation by John Rogers may also apply to Petersons work: There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year olds life:The Lord of the RingsandAtlas Shrugged.One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Dr. Gabriel Andrade is a university professor. He has previously contributed to Areo Magazine and DePauw Universitys The Prindle Post. His twitter is@gandrade80

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Is Jordan Peterson the New Ayn Rand? - Merion West

Coyote Peterson on ‘Brave the Wild’ – Mental Floss

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As host of the popular YouTube series Brave Wilderness, Coyote Peterson is no stranger to going face-to-face with creatures many deem terrifyingthink great white sharks and pit vipersbut that he says are simply "misunderstood."

Animals have always been a big part of Peterson's life, even before he made a career out of being stung and bitten by ferocious critters. The Ohio native studied video production and directing at Ohio State University, and then decided to combine his two passionsfilm and all things wildto teach viewers about wildlife and the importance of conservation. His YouTube channel currently has more than 15 million subscribers.

Now Peterson is embarking on a new adventure with Animal Planet in the show Brave the Wild. He'll travel all over the world with wildlife biologist Mario Aldecoa and his crew, sharing creatures that aren't often in the spotlight and that viewers may find a little frightening. He recently chatted with Mental Floss about the importance of conservation, his thing for snapping turtles, and his close encounter with a jaguar and her three cubs.

Youve said your love of animals started with snapping turtles. Can you talk about the first time you saw one and what about them fascinated you so much?

The first snapping turtle I caught was when I was only 8 years old. I was always fascinated with turtles, because at first glance they look prehistoric, almost dinosaur-like. Growing up in Ohio, I never got to see any "exotic" animals. My favorite thing to watch on TV was Steve Irwin. Watching him wrestle crocs is what inspired me to catch my first snapping turtle, the most dangerous animal Ohio has to offer.

In Brave the Wild, you introduce animals that are often feared or misunderstood. What's the importance in exposing viewers to these creatures?

One of my goals through this series was to inspire people to overcome their fears of these seemingly dangerous animals and learn to admire them from a safe distance. The more you understand these creatures, the less you are afraid of them. One of the messages I try to convey in every episode is the importance of conservation.

Whats the most "misunderstood" creature you've encountered?

The most misunderstood creature that comes to mind is the carpet shark, which we filmed in season one. As I always say, peoples biggest fears are the three Ss (sharks, snakes and spiders). The carpet shark is found off the coast of Australia. They only bite humans in the case of mistaken identity. To some of these sharks a persons foot might look like a fish. Any time you enter a new environment you need to be aware of what you need to look for, not only to keep yourself safe, but the animal as well.

What goes into preparing for each encounter to make sure you and the animals come out alive?

With any new expedition, you need to come into the environment knowing exactly what to expect. When encountering a new animal, I try to stay as calm as I can and have no hesitation. If I stay calm, the animal stays calm, [and] I'm creating a safer interaction for myself. I use different tactics when I encounter different animals. It also depends on whether the environment is land or in water.

How do you keep your composure on camera when you're in a potentially dangerous situation?

Any situation I find myself in, I look at it as my job. For example, I would be afraid operating a crane, because that is something I don't do. If it's part of your job, it's something that you get used to. When I do my job, I make sure I'm focused and never hesitate. Before I encounter any animal, I know what I'm going to say to the camera. I say that, for the best show, we always need to have the camera rolling so the audience can see what is happening.

You were in Australia filming Brave the Wild during bushfire season. What was that like?

Visiting Australia was one of the best experiences I had filming the show. Australia is a fascinating country that has so many unique environments. We spent over 50 days in Australia and encountered more than 35 different species. We were there right before all these devastating fires started, and we got to witness the severity of the drought and all the different animals it impacted.

What was your favorite animal encounter in upcoming series?

Each encounter I have in the wild is special. I would have to say that the most exciting moment for me was when we were filming in Brazil and I saw a jaguar and three of her cubs up close. Not only did I get to see this in real life, but my amazing team was able to capture this special moment on tape. It is just so amazing seeing these animals survive and thrive in the wild while dealing with not only the dangers of the wild but human encroachment as well. Hands down, this was my favorite episode that we got to film.

Catch new episodes of Brave the Wild on Animal Planet, Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

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Coyote Peterson on 'Brave the Wild' - Mental Floss

Redskins’ Adrian Peterson in arbitration with Morgan Stanley in latest money dustup – The Athletic

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Last year, a lender sued Washington Redskins running back Adrian Peterson for allegedly not repaying a loan totaling $6.6 million plus interest, drawing renewed scrutiny to athletes who lose their money. Peterson earned just over $100 million so far on the field in his career but couldnt pay his obligations.

The lender and Peterson agreed to negotiate again, and no further court filings have emerged since in the case. But that has not ended financial disputes surrounding Peterson and his money. The likely future Hall of Famer is currently embroiled in arbitration with Morgan Stanley Wealth Management over a soured investment, sources said. Morgan Stanley confirmed the arbitration.

Part of the reason he needed to borrow from the lender who sued him for nonpayment, one of the sources said, was because of the alleged failed investment. So Peterson has taken the white-shoe firm to arbitration, the process required in lieu of litigation under the term of most...

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Redskins' Adrian Peterson in arbitration with Morgan Stanley in latest money dustup - The Athletic

Peterson takes over as new judge – Daily Astorian

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After nearly a month on the bench, Beau Peterson is settling in as the new Clatsop County Circuit Court judge .

The former senior deputy district attorney was appointed by Gov. Kate Brown in December to replace Paula Brownhill, who retired in November after 25 years. The position is up for election for a six-year term in May, and Peterson intends to run.

Beau Peterson replaced Judge Paula Brownhill, who retired in November.

Ive always liked public service, thats part of what drew me to being a DA, is you get to help people. And not everybody, and not always in the way that people want, but youre still helping the community and that feels good. And this is another way I can keep doing that, he said.

Peterson grew up in Portland and earned his bachelors degree and later his law degree from the University of Oregon.

While attending law school, he spent a summer working as a law clerk for Brownhill, and decided he wanted to live and practice law in Clatsop County.

He moved to the county after graduating and spent nearly 13 years as a prosecutor.

Peterson handled a range of cases, including vehicular manslaughter, assault, elder financial abuse, embezzlement, drunken driving, thefts and burglaries. He was the lead prosecutor on the trial that convicted Adeena Copell and Christian Wilkins in May for the murder of a Newport man.

It was a little bittersweet knowing I was going to leave an office that I really loved, and have to separate a little bit from some people that I really had come to care about, and were good friends. But personally, its a good challenge, Peterson said.

He had thought about being a judge earlier in his career, but said he didnt begin to really consider the possibility until former Judge Philip Nelson told him he thought it would be a good fit.

When I heard Judge Brownhill was retiring, I said, You know, maybe it is time for a change, Peterson said. I really did enjoy being a prosecutor. The trial work is something Im going to miss ... Ill still get trials, but it will be very different.

Peterson handled over 70 jury trials as a deputy district attorney. However, he said he also liked the idea of getting to learn new areas of law.

I went to law school because it seemed interesting to begin with, and when you focus in one area you get really good at it. But theres a lot out there I dont know, and getting to learn those things is kind of exciting, he said.

Im really thankful to be able to keep serving Clatsop County. Public service has been a big part of how I was raised, Peterson said.

He said his grandfather instilled in him the idea of public service. His grandfather served in World War II and spent the majority of his career working for the government as a bank auditor.

The two things he really instilled were, do the right thing, and if you can help, help. And this is a way I think I can help, Peterson said.

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Peterson takes over as new judge - Daily Astorian

A Controversial Study Claimed To Explain Why Women Dont Go Into Science And Tech. It Just Got A 1,113-Word Correction. – BuzzFeed News

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Women are underrepresented in science, tech, engineering, and math (STEM), and two years ago a study offered a counterintuitive explanation as to why. The authors pointed out that countries with more gender equality, like Finland, tended to have fewer women earning degrees in those fields.

But more women studied science and tech in countries with less gender-progressive policies, such as Algeria, reported the researchers, who called this phenomenon the gender-equality paradox in STEM education.

The 2018 finding drew widespread attention from mainstream media outlets, like the Atlantic and Ars Technica, as well as from conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute and Jordan Peterson, the controversial psychologist most famous for his YouTube videos addressing what hes called the crisis of masculinity. Peterson and others cited the study to argue that, free from societal constraints, women choose to stay away from technical fields a choice they make because of an innate lack of interest, not because of the patriarchy.

But outside researchers questioned that conclusion after they tried, and failed, to replicate the original study. Sarah Richardson, a science historian at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News that the study authors used a very selective set of data to produce a contrived and distorted picture of the global distribution of women in STEM achievement.

In December 2019, a lengthy 1,113-word correction was added to the paper, clarifying how the researchers had arrived at their conclusions and correcting several sentences and misleading figures. In a separate article and series of blog posts on Tuesday, Richardson and her colleagues at Harvards GenderSci Lab laid out what they saw as the significant problems with the studys methodology, including the researchers calculations for determining the percentage of women STEM graduates and the metrics they used to assess gender equity in each country.

And they called into question the studys fundamental premise: that the correlation the authors apparently found between national gender equity and women in STEM means the former directly affects the latter.

When we looked under the surface, this appears to be a case of massaging ones data selecting for different countries, particular gender measures, particular women-in-STEM measures to produce the narrative that you want to see, Richardson said.

In the end, we do not think that there is a gender-equality paradox.

But one of the studys authors, Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Essex, stands behind the correlation they found and argued that it remains even when using Richardsons preferred calculations. The problem with the critique, he said by email, is that they cannot explain the phenomenon we reported.

When the study came out in February 2018 in the journal Psychological Science, it provided fodder for the likes of YouTube channel Independent Man. Its not that women dont have the aptitude to take STEM subjects in the more egalitarian societies, explained one clip. They just choose not to.

This clip, which has been viewed more than 89,000 times, lives alongside videos like Debunking the Black Lives Matter Narrative and Toxic Femininity.

In an interview at the time, Peterson mentioned a great paper showing that as societies become more egalitarian, the enrollment gap between men and women in STEM fields increases. He added, And what do the feminists say about that? Pseudoscience.

And a member of the American Enterprise Institute cited it to argue that underrepresentation of women in STEM may actually be the result of the great advances in female empowerment, progress, and advancement that have taken place in recent decades, and not the result of systematic gender discrimination.

In the paper, a pair of psychologists Stoet and David Geary of the University of Missouri found that across most countries, girls are as good as boys, and often better, at math and science. But in countries with greater gender equality like Norway and Finland, women make up less than 25% of college graduates in STEM fields. In and of itself, this gender gap isnt news. But the researchers theorized that because these countries tend to be richer, women have the financial freedom to pursue their natural interests which drives them more toward the humanities.

In contrast, in countries with historically less gender equality, such as Algeria and Turkey, women make up much higher percentages of STEM degree-holders, according to their analysis. Because economic opportunities tend to be fewer there, those conditions may make relatively high-paying STEM occupations more attractive to women, Stoet and Geary wrote.

But Richardson thought a lot of these numbers seemed off. So she and a team tried to recreate the analysis with the publicly available data it was based on, including college graduation data from UNESCO.

The researchers had reported, for instance, that the percentage of women among STEM graduates in Algeria was 40.7%. But Richardson found that in 2015, UNESCO reported a total of 89,887 STEM graduates in Algeria, and 48,135 of them or 53.6% were women.

So where did 40.7% come from?

Eventually, Richardsons team would learn that Stoet and Geary had added different sets of numbers: the percentage of STEM graduates among women (in Algerias case, 26.66%) and the percentage of STEM graduates among men (38.89%). That added up to a total of 65.55%. Then they divided the percent of women STEM graduates by the total, producing a rate of 40.7%.

What they had done is create their own ratio of those two, which has never been validated or used in STEM research, Richardson said.

That metric was not explained in the paper. In the recently issued correction, the authors went into detail on the math theyd come up with.

After Richardson and her colleagues recalculated each countrys figures, they found that overall, the study underestimated the number of women STEM graduates worldwide by about 8%.

That wasnt the only problem. Even after Richardsons team learned about the study authors method of calculating the ratio, they still couldnt replicate all of their results. Richardson also took issue with the metric used to assess each countrys level of gender equity and the fact that the study did not examine trends over a long period of time.

Richardsons team found that there are large variations in the gender gaps between STEM graduates among countries, no matter how they are measured. These variations do not conform to simple patterns, Richardson and graduate student Joseph Bruch wrote in a blog post, adding that gender inequalities are not easily represented along a single dimension and with a single measure, as Stoet and Geary attempt to do.

Maria Charles, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies gender and STEM education and was not involved with Richardsons analysis, told BuzzFeed News by email, There is no evidence that gender stereotypes and unconscious gender biases are less pronounced in advanced industrial societies even in societies where women are well represented in universities, labor markets, and polities.

In a letter responding to Richardsons allegations, Stoet and Geary said they had chosen their metric to reflect a womans likelihood of completing a STEM degree compared to a mans. They also said that despite the specific approach to calculations theyd taken, the overall correlation that they had found between nations gender-equity levels and the number of women in STEM remained the same.

Richardson said she first emailed Stoet with questions about the source of his numbers in December 2018. He replied and then stopped writing back, she said, at which point she contacted the editors at Psychological Science.

Asked whether the paper should have been retracted instead of corrected, the editors, Tim Pleskac and Steve Lindsay, said by email: In our view, retraction is appropriate when the reported results have been convincingly shown to be fundamentally in error. In our view, the Stoet and Geary article, post-Corrigendum, was not fundamentally in error.

Richardson said that the messiness underlying the findings reinforces that there is no one factor that determines whether women pursue or succeed in science and technology.

Cultural patterns around womens achievement in and preferences for STEM are incredibly complex and incredibly diverse across the globe, she said.

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A Controversial Study Claimed To Explain Why Women Dont Go Into Science And Tech. It Just Got A 1,113-Word Correction. - BuzzFeed News