If it's accurate that would require a 2nd scotch and a phone call...

It's nose looks like a shower head.

More on Tardigrades..

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If high school/college sciences classes were taught by guys like that I don't think the US would be so behind academically.

:thumb:

badass

Well they do call the tardigrade a "water bear" so your argument is sort of moot.

I swear I saw it in the Star Wars Cantina

http://news.yahoo.com/extraterrestri...145506511.html

Extraterrestrial Life May be Common Around Binary Stars

Planets orbiting binary star systems have to deal with the stresses of more than one star. But new research reveals that close binaries could be as good as singles when it comes to hosting habitable planets. Low-mass twins could make the best hosts, because their combined energy extends the habitable region farther away than would exist around a single star.

After modeling a variety of binary systems, two astronomers determined that stars 80 percent as massive as the Sun, if close enough together, could allow for conditions that would be ideal for hosting habitable planets.

"Potentially, life could exist even more in binary systems than it does in single systems," Joni Clark, an undergraduate at New Mexico State University, told Astrobiology Magazine. Clark worked with astrophysicist Paul Mason of the University of Texas at El Paso.

Pushing the boundaries

Low-mass stars are two to three times more common than the Sun. Their sheer numbers may give them greater odds for hosting planets. But their smaller size also means they have more ultraviolet radiation early in the life of the star and dangerous solar winds in the habitable zone, both important when it comes to maintaining a niche for life to exist. Planets must lie extremely close to small single stars to reap the benefits, a position that brings a number of challenges. Such planets are more prone to be tidally locked, with one face permanently turned toward its sun, and to receive the brunt of any stellar activity. [9 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

But when two such stars are closely paired, their combined energy extends the habitable region farther away and makes it larger, minimizing some of the threats faced by planets orbiting low-mass stars.

"We have much more room here for planets to hang out," Clark said.

Not just any binary system will work, however. Habitable zones receive the best effect when the low-mass stars are close together, circling each other every ten days or less. Radiation of all types coming from two such closely bound stars would be more consistent, and the planets orbiting them would resemble that of a planet orbiting a single star.

But when the stars are farther apart, the planet's orbit is more likely to be unstable as it feels the tug of gravity stronger from first one star and then the other. When stars are spread out over a distance, orbiting planets would experience significant changes in temperature. With a large enough gap, planets would travel around only one star, with the possibility of occasionally entering the danger zone of the other.

"There are many regions around binary star systems where having a stable orbit simply isn't possible," said Stephen Kane, of the California Institute of Technology. Kane, who studies the habitable zones of planets orbiting binary stars, was not involved in Clark and Mason's research.

Living conditions

Living conditions on the planets would vary based on cloud cover, which could help to both insulate the planet and shelter it from ultraviolet radiation. Such cloud cover could help to protect the planet from the changes it would encounter as it orbits closer first to one star and then to the other.

"How the temperature at the surface of the planet will vary depends on the properties of the atmosphere and its ability to absorb this flux and temperature variation," Kane said.

Clark and Mason simulated a number of close binary systems, calculating the temperatures and radiation that could exist for planets in orbit over the lifetime of the star. They presented their results at the American Astronomical Society meeting in January. After factoring in cloud cover and flux from the stars, they determined that the steadiest situations would come from binary twins, stars of approximately the same mass. Of these, a pair of stars 80 percent as massive as the Sun would hit what Clark called "the sweet spot," though a range of twins and other special combinations would also work well.

For close twin stars, "because they're similar masses and so close, it is very likely that they were, if you will, born at the same time," Clark said.

Such stars would have similar lifetimes, dying out in approximately the same time frame, but have a habitable zone 40 percent farther away than the single star counterparts. In the case of the lower-mass stars, such periods could far supersede the Sun's lifetime, lasting as long as twenty billion years.

"Other groups have recently shown that planets close to stars of any type suffer water loss, like Venus, and atmosphere erosion, mostly early in the star’s life. These effects may occur even for planets with magnetic field protection," Mason said. "The beauty of close binaries is that their habitable zones are located farther out."

Tatooine system

Kepler-47 provides a different system with fascinating properties. Instead of twins, the famous "Tatooine" system contains one star as massive as the Sun, and another only a third the size. A single planet orbits in the habitable zone, though it is too massive to be considered a good candidate for life. Eventually, the larger star will suffer the same fate as our Sun, swelling up into a massive red giant and changing the survivability for the planets orbiting the pair. The smaller star would live on, scant comfort for the planets that saw their habitable regions shift. Still, over the lifetime of the more massive star, the smaller star would provide extra light and heat that could be a bonus to potential life. [How 2 'Tatooine' Planets Orbit Twin Stars (Infographic)]

Because low-mass stars are so pervasive, and because most stars in the galaxy are locked in binary pairs, the chances of finding close, low-mass binaries is high, according to Clark and Mason. Though they caution that they haven't run the exact numbers, Mason says that such systems would be "not uncommon at all," potentially ranking such pairings as numerous as Sun-like single stars.

"I can imagine that a 0.8 solar mass binary, with a separation of less than a tenth of an astronomical unit [the distance from the Earth to the Sun], would have many possibilities of stable orbits within the habitable zone," Kane said.

http://mashable.com/2013/03/11/veti-gel/

College Student Creates Gel to Stop Bleeding Instantly

Camille Bautista1 day ago
In alternate realities like Mass Effect's video game galaxy or Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, all-purpose medicinal salves serve as a rapid cure-all for any ailment or injury.

Joe Landolina, a student at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, is one step closer to bringing this medical cure to market. Landolina created Veti-Gel, a substance that closes up wounds to major arteries or organs to immediately stop bleeding.

The product uses genetically modified plants and can be stored at temperatures from 33 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Check out the video, above, to see how it works.

It's a synthetic form of the extracellular matrix, or ECM, a part of body tissue that holds cells together and activates the clotting process. When a part of the body is injured, Veti-Gel binds to the ECM to form a cover that mimics skin and eliminates the need to apply pressure to the wound, reports TechNewsDaily.

While there are other products designed to quickly heal wounds, such as QuikClot, a clotting gauze used by the military, they require several minutes of pressure.

Veti-Gel can be used for both external and internal bleeding as well as severe burns, plus, it works in an instant. Landolina is looking to test out the substance in the veterinary field and ultimately get FDA approval.

What do you think of the healing gel? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

True, I could just think of them as tiny little bad ass bears.

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So we're pretty much even more sure that we've found the Higgs Bosson..


Physicists Say They Have Found a Higgs Boson
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 14, 2013 at 4:34 PM ET

GENEVA (AP) — It helps solve one of the most fundamental riddles of the universe: how the Big Bang created something out of nothing 13.7 billion years ago.

In what could go down as one of the great Eureka! moments in physics — and win somebody the Nobel Prize — scientists said Thursday that after a half-century quest, they are confident they have found a Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic speck sometimes called the "God particle."

The existence of the particle was theorized in 1964 by the British physicist Peter Higgs to explain why matter has mass. Scientists believe the particle acts like molasses or snow: When other tiny basic building blocks pass through it, they stick together, slow down and form atoms.

Scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced in July that they had found something that looked like the Higgs boson, but they weren't certain, and they needed to go through the data and rule out the possibility it wasn't something else.

On Thursday, they said they believe they got it right.

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving about 3,000 scientists.

Whether or not it was a Higgs boson had to be demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said. The data "strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson," it said.

The discovery explains what once seemed unexplainable and still is a bit hard for the average person to comprehend. But it means the key theory that scientists use to explain everything works — for now, at least.

Its discovery could be a strong contender for the Nobel, though it is uncertain whether the prize would go to the 83-year-old Peter Higgs and the others who first proposed the theory, or to the thousands of scientists who found it, or to all of them.

Finding it wasn't easy. It took more than two decades, thousands of scientists and mountains of data from trillions of colliding protons.

And it needed the world's biggest atom smasher — CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which cost $10 billion to build and run in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border — to produce the extreme surge of energies simulating those 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang.

The Higgs boson is so elusive that only about one collision per trillion will produce one of them in the collider.

CERN said it is open question whether this is the Higgs boson that was expected in the original formulation, or the lightest of several Higgses predicted in some theories that go beyond that model.

"We found a new particle and we want to know how it behaves, and maybe it behaves the way it was predicted in 1964, maybe it's a little bit different," said physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology, who isn't involved in the research.

Finding a Higgs more or less as expected is actually a bit deflating, Carroll said, because physicists had also hoped that an unexpected type of Higgs might open windows into yet more mysteries of the universe.

"Scientists always want to be wrong in their theories. They always want to be surprised," he said. "It's a bittersweet victory when your theory turns out to be right, because it means, on the one hand, you're right, that's nice, but on the other hand, you haven't learned anything new that's surprising."

Some of the remaining mysteries including why gravity is so weak and what is the dark matter that is believed to make up a large part of the total mass in the universe, said Patty McBride, who heads a center at the Fermilab in Chicago.

Lots of future potential...

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Water & Sound
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Thats pretty frikken cool

"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

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Just don't bring back velociraptors..

Or any insects larger than the ones we see today.

Or Megalodon.

Or Neanderthals. That could be weird.

Oh yes, they should.

They say if you wrap your house in like a 1/4 or 1/8 inch of this stuff, you could heat your home with a candle.

Is this stuff easily manufactured? Or is it basically like saying if everyone had windows made of diamonds we'd never have to worry about those kids across the street breaking them with their baseball.

I found this to be very interesting.
Makes me want to do this.


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It is currently manufactured I believe, just incredibly expensive. Might be awhile before the price comes down.

Looks to me that the tone is resonating the tube, which 'flings' the water into that pattern.

This didn't happen in MID AIR!!

Jeez. And here I was all proud of myself for hooking up the vent on my electric clothes dryer with a box filter, and using the exhaust to add supplemental household heating.

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A new paper has found bat-eating spiders exist on every continent except Antarctica, with bats falling prey more often than expected.

Though bats are typically preyed on by vertebrates (with hawks, snakes and owls their most common predators), there are some invertebrate species quite partial to the taste of bat. We've previously written about the giant Venezuelan centipede Scolopendra gigantea, which hangs from cave ceilings and snatches bats as they pass (http://on.fb.me/ZYIdcT). However, spiders eating bats was thought to be quite rare.

When two recent studies both reported spiders having bat for dinner, researchers wondered if this behaviour was more common than suspected. After analysis of over 100 years worth of reports, together with interviews from bat and spider researchers, they found over 50 cases worldwide of spider attacks on bats.

90% of these attacks happened in habitats around the equator and 40% occurred in the neotropics (South America and tropical regions of North America). Interestingly it wasn't just web-spinning spiders - 12% of attacks were by spiders such as huntsmen and tarantulas, which forage rather than make webs. In one case, a fishing spider was seen attempting to kill an immature bat (though it was scared off by photographers).

The authors point out that bat captures are likely still rare. It's probable bats can detect webs using their echolocation abilities and even if a bat does fly into a web, only the strongest webs can take the impact without breaking. Unsurprisingly smaller bats are more vulnerable to spider web entanglement (and in some cases, it was exhaustion and dehydration resulting from this entanglement that killed bats rather than direct spider attacks).

To read the paper: http://bit.ly/13Z3QwT

Photo: A small bat entangled in the web of a Nephila pilipes spider in Australia. The spider appeared to be feeding on the dead bat. Credit to Carmen Fabro.
__________________

I have these at my shop, they can actually break tanks

Some people may find this to be really cool, but to me, it's extremely depressing, because it's likely we will never see someone forego wealth to that extent for the good of millions.

Damn.

Float like a Butterfly, sting like a Mantis Shrimp...

He's what you'd calla hero. Shame we probably won't see anything like what he did, again.

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Ants are so fascinating....

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What we know about different species on Earth...

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The Universe Is 13.82 Billion Years Old

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The Universe is a wee bit older than we thought. Not only that, but turns out the ingredients are a little bit different, too. And not only that, but the way they’re mixed isn’t quite what we expected, either. And not only that, but there are hints and whispers of something much grander going on as well.
So what’s going on?

The European Space Agency’s Planck mission is what’s going on. Planck has been scanning the entire sky, over and over, peering at the radio and microwaves pouring out of the Universe. Some of this light comes from stars, some from cold clumps of dust, some from exploding stars and galaxies. But a portion of it comes from farther away…much farther away. Billions of light years, in fact, all the way from the edge of the observable Universe.

This light was first emitted when the Universe was very young, about 380,000 years old. It was blindingly bright, but in its eons-long travel to us has dimmed and reddened. Fighting the expansion of the Universe itself, the light has had its wavelength stretched out until it gets to us in the form of microwaves. Planck gathered that light for over 15 months, using instruments far more sensitive than ever before.

The light from the early Universe shows it’s not smooth. If you crank the contrast way up you see slightly brighter and slightly dimmer spots. These correspond to changes in temperature of the Universe on a scale of 1 part in 100,000. That’s incredibly small, but has profound implications. We think those fluctuations were imprinted on the Universe when it was only a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, and they grew with the Universe as it expanded. They were also the seeds of the galaxies and the clusters and galaxies we see today.

What started out as quantum fluctuations when the Universe was smaller than a proton have now grown to be the largest structures in the cosmos, hundreds of millions of light years across. Let that settle in your brain a moment.

And those fluctuations are the key to Planck’s observations. By looking at those small changes in light we can find out a lot about the Universe. Scientists spent years looking at the Planck data, analyzing it. And what they found is pretty amazing:

• The Universe is 13.82 billion years old.
• The Universe is expanding a bit slower than we expected.
• The Universe is 4.9 percent normal matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, and 68.3 percent dark energy.
• The Universe is lopsided. Just a bit, just a hint, but that has profound implications.

What does all this mean? Let’s take a quick look, one at a time, at these results.

More: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...ion_years.html

This is why you cannot win the Cinnamon Challenge. And why it's a bad idea...

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Looks like Chiefs fans are a bunch of CORFs

Whoah...

Immune System Kills Cancer

T-cells engineered to attack B-cells sent adults’ acute leukemia into remission.

By Kate Yandell | March 27, 2013

Gene therapy has rid three adult patients of acute leukemia. The patients have been cancer-free for 5 months to 2 years, according to a study published last week (March 20) in Science Translational Medicine. Two other patients received the therapy, but one died for reasons believed to be unrelated, and the second died after relapsing.

“We had hoped, but couldn’t have predicted that the response would be so profound and rapid,” Renier Brentjens, lead author of the paper and an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, told The New York Times.

The patients all had B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and had relapsed following chemotherapy. The outlook for patients in this category is typically bleak.

The researchers filtered the patients’ blood for T-cells and engineered them with a virus carrying genetic material that would make them recognize CD19, a protein expressed on the surfaces of B-cells. When put back into the patients, the T-cells were meant to attack the B-cells, whether cancerous or normal. The patients experienced unpleasant and dangerous immune reactions, but four of them, including the one that eventually died of an unrelated blood clot, went into remission.

The four patients who went into remission also received bone marrow transplants following the therapy, although it is unclear whether the transplants contributed to their recovery.

This is the first time T-cell therapy has been used successfully to treat adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Another treatment based on training T cells to attack cancerous cells is being developed at the University of Pennsylvania and is being used to treat childhood leukemia and chronic leukemia in adults.

The Sloan-Kettering approach for treating B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia will be tested in a second trial of 50 patients, New Scientist reported. The same idea could also be used to treat other cancers.

“Although it's early days for these trials, the approach of modifying a patient's T-cells to attack their cancer is looking increasingly like one that will, in time, have a place alongside more traditional treatments," Paul Moss, a cancer researcher at the University of Birmingham, told New Scientist.

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Q: Since pi is infinite, do its digits contain all finite sequences of numbers?

Mathematician: As it turns out, mathematicians do not yet know whether the digits of pi contains every single finite sequence of numbers. That being said, many mathematicians suspect that this is the case, which would imply not only that the digits of pi contain any number that you can think of, but also that they contains a binary representation of britney spears’ DNA, as well as a jpeg encoded image of you making out with a polar bear. Unfortunately, to this day it has not even been proven whether every single digit from 0 to 9 occurs an unlimited number of times in pi’s decimal representation (so, after some point, pi might only contain the digits 0 and 1, for example). On the other hand, since pi is an irrational number, we do know that its digits never terminate, and it does not contain an infinitely repeating sequence (like 12341234123412341234…).

One thing to note is that when mathematicians study the first trillion or so digits of pi on a computer, they find that the digits appear to be statistically random in the sense that the probability of each digit occurring appears to be independent of what digits came just before it. Furthermore, each digit (0 through 9) appears to occur essentially one tenth of the time, as would be expected if the digits had been generated uniformly at random.

While tests performed on samples can never unequivocally prove that a sequence is random (in fact, we know the digits of pi are not random, since we know formulas to generate them) the apparent randomness in pi is consistent with the idea that it contains all finite sequences (or, at least, all fairly short ones). In particular, if we generate a number from an infinite stream of digits selected uniformly at random, then there is a probability of 100% that such a number contains each and every finite sequences of digits, and pi has the appearance of being statistically random.

The following rather remarkable website allows you to search the digits of pi for specific integer sequences:

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

Tory can do it :) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UXkGtJUP0WE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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Pareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers

This is an example of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, the human tendency to read significance into random or vague stimuli (both visual and auditory). The term comes from the Greek words "para" (παρά), meaning beside or beyond, and "eidolon" (εἴδωλον), meaning form or image. Though animals or plants can "appear" in clouds and human speech can do the same in static noise, the appearance of a face where there is none is perhaps the most common variant of pareidolia (this includes the subgenre of spotting Jesus or Mary in anything from toast to a crab).

Pareidolia was once thought of as a symptom of psychosis, but is now recognized as a normal, human tendency. Carl Sagan theorized that hyper facial perception stems from an evolutionary need to recognize -- often quickly -- faces. He wrote in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World, "As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper."

Humans are not alone in their quest to "see" human faces in the sea of visual cues that surrounds them. For decades, scientists have been training computers to do the same. And, like humans, computers display pareidolia.

Though there is something basely human about the tendency to see faces in the non-human shapes around us, to anthropomorphize odd pieces of hardware or rocks on a hillside, that computers see humans where there are none should not be all too surprising. Facial-recognition software is a tough technological feat, and in the process, computers are bound to come up with false positives. Does this make the computers more like us? Have they taken on our most human cognitive errors? In a superficial sense, yes, computers do make errors that are similar to pareidolia, and this seems very human. But as you look into these computer false-positives a bit more, you find a different story.

In an awesome little creative trick, New York University researcher Greg Borenstein applied open-source software FaceTracker to a Flickr pool of examples called Hello Little Fella. In some instances, FaceTracker found a face just where you or I would:

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Like a human, the computer has found a false-positive. That humans and computers share some instances of pareidolia seems to underscore the human-like nature of those computers, brought about by their human-led training. In that sense, a computers' errors make the computers seem somehow more human.

But maybe the reason a computer "sees" a face in that key is very simple: Things around us do sometimes actually have the shapes that constitute a face. How can we say this is pareidolia, a strange phenomenon that is supposedly the byproduct of millions of years of evolution, and not just the basic truth that sometimes shapes do look like things they are not?

A project from Phil McCarthy called Pareidoloop pushes us to think about these questions. By combining random-polygon-generation software and facial-recognition software, McCarthy's program builds its own series of randomly generated faces. Out of layers upon layers of mish-mashed shapes, the software "recognizes" the faces, and the fine tunes them into human likenesses. (McCarthy notes that a lot of them kind of resemble old pictures of Einstein.)

The computer is "seeing" faces where there are just random shapes! But wouldn't anyone? The results are clearly faces, so much so that recognizing them as such cannot be labeled pareidolia any more so than recognizing faces in a painting of a face is pareidolia. Where is that line? If it's pareidolia to see a face in the two windows and door of a house, why not in a sketch of two eyes and a nose? Faces are, after all, just a series of well arranged polygons. We'll see them in the world around us because sometimes, inevitably, shapes will be arranged in the formation of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. How can we identify pareidolia in a way that is distinct from the "accurate" identification of an artistic representation of a face? How can we say pareidolia is a phenomenon of the human mind at all?

Borenstein's work with computers provides a way out of this, answering a most human question by looking at the idiosyncrasies of algorithms. He writes:

Facial recognition techniques give computers their own flavor of pareidolia. In addition to responding to actual human faces, facial recognition systems, just like the human vision system, sometimes produce false positives, latching onto some set of features in the image as matching their model of a face. Rather than the millions of years of evolution that shapes human vision, their pareidolia is based on the details of their algorithms and the vicissitudes of the training data they've been exposed to.

Their pareidolia is different from ours. Different things trigger it.

In Borenstein's sample, FaceTracker found faces in only seven percent of the images, meaning that even though the program did display this human tendency, it did so at a rate much lower than the human judges who created the Flickr pool. That said, we do not know how many false positives the program would spot in the world around us that humans didn't include in the pool, though we get a sense from the "mistakes" the program made, sometimes missing the obvious "face" and spotting another. Such mistakes are useful for seeing just how particularly human pareidolia is in the first place. Here's an example:

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The computer's false-positive is, as any human could tell you, wrong -- the wrong wrong answer, selecting B where a human would say A, and the answer is actually D, for none of the above. The mistakes of a computer are so other, so less-than-human, that we can see that pareidolia is not the recognition of just any old assemblage of eyes, nose, and a mouth, but specific ones, ones that must come from within the human observer, that are not inherently available in the shapes as they appear in the world.

And it shows us something more. Although a computer may, like a human, find false positives in the world around it, its sensibility for what makes a set of polygons a face is still, somehow, off. On its surface, a computer's a tendency to pareidolia, this very human phenomenon, seems human-like. In a strange echo of the tendency to see human faces in random shapes, we see our reflection in a machine's cognition -- a sort of pareidolia of the mind. We look at a computer's pareidolia and think, We make those very same mistakes!

But, in fact, we don't. The mistakes are different. A computer's flaws are still very machine -- and ours are very human.

Google image search Pareidolia for more fun: https://www.google.com/search?q=pare...og&sa=N&tab=wi

Ain't no cryin in space, bitches......

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Duck Penis.... what you didn't know....

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Why I Study Duck Genitalia
Fox News and other conservative sites miss the point of basic science.


In the past few days, the Internet has been filled with commentary on whether the National Science Foundation should have paid for my study on duck genitalia, and 88.7 percent of respondents to a Fox news online poll agreed that studying duck genitalia is wasteful government spending. The commentary supporting and decrying the study continues to grow. As the lead investigator in this research, I would like to weigh in on the controversy and offer some insights into the process of research funding by the NSF.

My research on bird genitalia was originally funded in 2005, during the Bush administration. Thus federal support for this research cannot be connected exclusively to sequestration or the Obama presidency, as many of the conservative websites have claimed.

Since Sen. William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards in the 1970s and 1980s, basic science projects are periodically singled out by people with political agendas to highlight how government “wastes” taxpayer money on seemingly foolish research. These arguments misrepresent the distinction between and the roles of basic and applied science. Basic science is not aimed at solving an immediate practical problem. Basic science is an integral part of scientific progress, but individual projects may sound meaningless when taken out of context. Basic science often ends up solving problems anyway, but it is just not designed for this purpose. Applied science builds upon basic science, so they are inextricably linked. As an example, Geckskin™ is a new adhesive product with myriad applications developed by my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts. Their work is based on several decades of basic research on gecko locomotion.

Whether the government should fund basic research in times of economic crisis is a valid question that deserves well-informed discourse comparing all governmental expenses. As a scientist, my view is that supporting basic and applied research is essential to keep the United States ahead in the global economy. The government cannot afford not to make that investment. In fact, I argue that research spending should increase dramatically for the United States to continue to lead the world in scientific discovery. Investment in the NSF is just over $20 per year per person, while it takes upward of $2,000 per year per person to fund the military. Basic research has to be funded by the government rather than private investors because there are no immediate profits to be derived from it.

Because the NSF budget is so small, and because we have so many well-qualified scientists in need of funds, competition to obtain grants is fierce, and funding rates at the time this research was funded had fallen well below 10 percent. Congress decides the total amount of money that the NSF gets from the budget, but it does not decide which individual projects are funded—and neither does the president or his administration. Funding decisions are made by panels of scientists who are experts in the field and based on peer review by outsiders, often the competitors of the scientists who submitted the proposal. The review panel ranks proposals on their intellectual merits and impacts to society before making a recommendation. This recommendation is then acted upon by program officers and other administrators, who are also scientists, at the NSF.

This brings us back to the ducks. Male ducks force copulations on females, and males and females are engaged in a genital arms race with surprising consequences. Male ducks have elaborate corkscrew-shaped penises, the length of which correlates with the degree of forced copulation males impose on female ducks. Females are often unable to escape male coercion, but they have evolved vaginal morphology that makes it difficult for males to inseminate females close to the sites of fertilization and sperm storage. Males have counterclockwise spiraling penises, while females have clockwise spiraling vaginas and blind pockets that prevent full eversion of the male penis.

Our latest study examined how the presence of other males influences genital morphology. My colleagues and I found that it does so to an amazing degree, demonstrating that male competition is a driving force behind these male traits that can be harmful to females. The fact that this grant was funded, after the careful scrutiny of many scientists and NSF administrators, reflects the fact that this research is grounded in solid theory and that the project was viewed as having the potential to move science forward (and it has), as well as fascinate and engage the public. The research has been reported on positively by hundreds of news sites in recent years, even Fox news. Most of the grant money was spent on salaries, putting money back into the economy.

The commentary and headlines in some of the recent articles reflect outrage that the study was about duck genitals, as if there is something inherently wrong or perverse with this line of research. Imagine if medical research drew the line at the belt! Genitalia, dear readers, are where the rubber meets the road, evolutionarily. To fully understand why some individuals are more successful than others during reproduction, there may be no better place to look. The importance of evolutionary research on other species’ genitalia to the medical field has been recently highlighted in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Generating new knowledge of what factors affect genital morphology in ducks, one of the few vertebrate species other than humans that form pair bonds and exhibit violent sexual coercion, may have significant applied uses in the future, but we must conduct the basic research first. In the meantime, while we engage in productive and respectful discussion of how we envision the future of our nation, why not marvel at how evolution has resulted in such counterintuitive morphology and bizarre animal behavior.

You try so hard to look smart that it makes you look stupid.

Did you read my post after that? I didn't remember since it's been so long since I posted that, but I assumed there was a pressure change in the absence of sound.

Of all threads, I thought surely this would be one that was accepting of intelligent scientific dialogue.

Enter Beach tribe, who I didn't know existed before this dickhole post, to buzz kill.

What is so wrong with having scientific conversations? I wasn't an ass to him. Damn.

Have already won twice. It's a total piece of cake. Will accept wagers :D

It really is amazing... how on Earth, did we make such a technological jump in such a short time.

Its almost like we had a shortcut

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White House confirms NASA plan to ‘lasso’ and bring asteroid near Earth.

President Barack Obama’s administration will seek $100 million in funding for a mission to tow an asteroid closer to Earth for the purpose of helping future expeditions to Mars, NBC News reported on Saturday.

This corroborates an announcement made by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) on Friday. As the Associated Press reported, Nelson, who chairs the Senate Science and Space Subcommittee, said the request would be made in Obama’s proposed budget for 2014, with $78 million set aside for the mission to grab the asteroid and $27 million for helping NASA identify asteroids that could endanger the planet, a $7 million increase from current spending.

NASA’s mission proposal, adapted from a scenario (PDF) designed by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, calls for a robotic probe to grab an asteroid measuring approximately 500 tons and 25 to 35 feet in width in 2019 and bringing it into orbit near the moon, which would shorten future asteroid expeditions by months, on top of providing access to the asteroid’s natural resources.

Donald Yeomans, who leads the agency’s Near Earth Object program, told the AP those dimensions would make the designated asteroid unlikely to damage Earth even if it entered the atmosphere, since it would burn up before reaching the ground.

Watch Newsy Science’s report on the potential benefits of NASA’s budding asteroid hunt, posted on Saturday, below.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/0...id-near-earth/

America, **** yeah!!!!

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Fire up the HAL 9000.... NASA is going to Europa!

NASA Receives Seed Money For Europa Mission

Two weeks ago President Barack Obama signed a bill that outlines government spending for the remainder of the fiscal year (until September 30). The bill, H. R. 933, which was passed by the House and Senate before reaching President Obama, includes an increase in funding for NASA’s planetary science research program. One line in particular is peeking the interest of planetary scientists. On page 64, the bill reads: “$75,000,000 shall be for pre-formulation and/or formulation activities for a mission that meets the science goals outlined for the Jupiter Europa mission in the most recent planetary science decadal survey.” NASA has received $75 million to begin developing technology for a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

Europa is slightly smaller than our own moon. It is primarily made out of silicate rock, likely has an iron core, has a thin atmosphere composed primarily of oxygen, and its surface is composed of icy water. Recently Europa made headlines after planetary scientists, led by Mike Brown from the California Institute of Technology, discovered the presence of magnesium sulfate salt (Epsom salt) on Europa’s surface. The presence of magnesium sulfate suggests a cycling of Europa’s salty oceans, and possibly an ecosystem beneath the surface.

The “Jupiter Europa mission” hasn’t been specified yet, but many supporters of a mission to Europa believe this indicates government support for the Europa Clipper mission. The Europa Clipper is a concept mission that is currently under study by NASA. This mission would require placing a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter that would gather information visually about Europa and investigate whether the moon is suitable for life. This theorized Europa Clipper mission would perform 32 flybys of Europa with altitudes varying from 25 km to 2700km.

This is great news, but NASA can’t make it to Europa on $75 million. Last year NASA’s planetary budget was cut by 20%. This is an optimistic step forward, but don’t stop advocating. Keep telling Congress to double NASA’s budget.

Take a look inside the brain. Without making a mess with the hatchet and hacksaw....

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See-through brains clarify connections
Technique to make tissue transparent offers three-dimensional view of neural networks.

A chemical treatment that turns whole organs transparent offers a big boost to the field of ‘connectomics’ — the push to map the brain’s fiendishly complicated wiring. Scientists could use the technique to view large networks of neurons with unprecedented ease and accuracy. The technology also opens up new research avenues for old brains that were saved from patients and healthy donors.

“This is probably one of the most important advances for doing neuroanatomy in decades,” says Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, which funded part of the work. Existing technology allows scientists to see neurons and their connections in microscopic detail — but only across tiny slivers of tissue. Researchers must reconstruct three-dimensional data from images of these thin slices. Aligning hundreds or even thousands of these snapshots to map long-range projections of nerve cells is laborious and error-prone, rendering fine-grain analysis of whole brains practically impossible.

The new method instead allows researchers to see directly into optically transparent whole brains or thick blocks of brain tissue. Called CLARITY, it was devised by Karl Deisseroth and his team at Stanford University in California. “You can get right down to the fine structure of the system while not losing the big picture,” says Deisseroth, who adds that his group is in the process of rendering an entire human brain transparent.

The technique, published online in Nature on 10 April, turns the brain transparent using the detergent SDS, which strips away lipids that normally block the passage of light (K. Chung et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12107; 2013). Other groups have tried to clarify brains in the past, but many lipid-extraction techniques dissolve proteins and thus make it harder to identify different types of neurons. Deisseroth’s group solved this problem by first infusing the brain with acryl*amide, which binds proteins, nucleic acids and other biomolecules. When the acrylamide is heated, it polymerizes and forms a tissue-wide mesh that secures the molecules. The resulting brain–hydrogel hybrid showed only 8% protein loss after lipid extraction, compared to 41% with existing methods.

Applying CLARITY to whole mouse brains, the researchers viewed fluorescently labelled neurons in areas ranging from outer layers of the cortex to deep structures such as the thalamus. They also traced individual nerve fibres through 0.5-millimetre-thick slabs of formalin-preserved autopsied human brain — orders of magnitude thicker than slices currently imaged.

“The work is spectacular. The results are unlike anything else in the field,” says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a lead investigator on the US National Institutes of Health’s Human Connectome Project (HCP), which aims to chart the brain’s neuronal communication networks. The new technique, he says, could reveal important cellular details that would complement data on large-scale neuronal pathways that he and his colleagues are mapping in the HCP’s 1,200 healthy participants using magnetic resonance imaging.

Francine Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, says that more tests are needed to assess whether the lipid-clearing treatment alters or damages the fundamental structure of brain tissue. But she and others predict that CLARITY will pave the way for studies on healthy brain wiring, and on brain disorders and ageing.

Researchers could, for example, compare circuitry in banked tissue from people with neurological diseases and from controls whose brains were healthy. Such studies in living people are impossible, because most neuron-tracing methods require genetic engineering or injection of dye in living animals. Scientists might also revisit the many specimens in repositories that have been difficult to analyse because human brains are so large.

The hydrogel–tissue hybrid formed by CLARITY — stiffer and more chemically stable than untreated tissue — might also turn delicate and rare disease specimens into re*usable resources, Deisseroth says. One could, in effect, create a library of brains that different researchers check out, study and then return.

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child's play

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Wow, that's really incredible. Thanks for posting.

That was awesome!

And the best part was at the end, where he said that they made the entirety of their experiment available online for free, in hopes that someone will decide to invest in it. THAT'S how it's done!

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That's another great one. Vsauce really is the best.

Scientists have been actively searching for Dark Matter for about 12 years now. And these guys are 99.81% certain they've found it. 99.81...LOL...

Dark Matter Signals Recorded in Minnesota Mine
Detectors at the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search have recorded three events that may represent collisions from weakly interacting massive particles

More hints of dark matter have emerged from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), which hunts for the theorized particles from the depths of a mine in Minnesota.

Eight silicon detectors recorded three events that may represent collisions from weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Physicists have found hints of the existence of WIMPs before, but they remain elusive. Two other possible detections from the CDMS search, reported in 2010, turned out to be indistinguishable from background collisions from other, non-WIMP, sources. The same may yet hold true for the latest findings.

The work was reported on 13 April at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, and is published at arXiv.org. “We do not believe this result rises to the level of a discovery, but it does call for further investigation,” said Kevin McCarthy, a CDMS team member from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

CDMS-II, the second generation of the search, ran between 2003 and 2008. The earlier WIMP suspects were spotted in its 19 germanium detectors. The new work comes from a subset of its 11 silicon detectors, which are more sensitive than germanium to collisions from low-energy particles.

Cooled to a temperature of just 40 millikelvins, the CDMS-II detectors sense heat given off when a particle collides with one of their crystals. The challenge is distinguishing a possible WIMP collision from the many collisions of other particles, such as neutrons.

The CDMS tries to get around that by shielding its detectors as much as possible and by precisely calculating the rate of expected collisions from other, background sources. The three possible WIMP events popped out of data in which 0.7 similar events would be expected from background, McCarthy said. Two of them occurred in the same detector.

He reported the signal at a 99.81% confidence level, or around three sigma in statistical language. “We favor the WIMP plus background hypothesis,” he said.

But the CDMS-II result would imply a WIMP with a mass of 8.6 gigaelectronvolts, far lighter than physicists might expect. The experiment’s successor, SuperCDMS, is now running in the Soudan mine and may yet yield more insight.

Other dark-matter experiments are searching for WIMPs with tanks of liquid xenon. These include LUX in South Dakota’s Homestake mine and XENON1T in Gran Sasso, Italy. They may soon help to narrow down the possibilities for WIMP dark matter, says Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The next time you make a stupid Facebook post about lolcats, remember that Science made it possible...

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The ASAP science videos are much better than Vsauce. Vsauce vids are way too long and filled with tangents.

Can't wait until 2023.

These things always interest me though.

According to Futuretimeline, we should have text by thinking and 4320p tvs by then. http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stce...m#generation-x

Common misconception... there is no such thing as a Brontosaurus....

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Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed

It may have something to do with all those Brontosaurus burgers everyone's favorite modern stone-age family ate, but when you think of a giant dinosaur with a tiny head and long, swooping tail, the Brontosaurus is probably what you're seeing in your mind.

Well hold on: Scientifically speaking, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus.

Even if you knew that, you may not know how the fictional dinosaur came to star in the prehistoric landscape of popular imagination for so long.

It dates back 130 years, to a period of early U.S. paleontology known as the Bone Wars, says Matt Lamanna, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

The Bone Wars was the name given to a bitter competition between two paleontologists, Yale's O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. Lamanna says their mutual dislike, paired with their scientific ambition, led them to race dinosaur names into publication, each trying to outdo the other.

"There are stories of either Cope or Marsh telling their fossil collectors to smash skeletons that were still in the ground, just so the other guy couldn't get them," Lamanna tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. "It was definitely a bitter, bitter rivalry."

The two burned through money, and were as much fame-hungry trailblazers as scientists.

It was in the heat of this competition, in 1877, that Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, Lamanna says he used the head of another dinosaur — thought to be a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton.

"Two years later," Lamanna says, "his fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus."

But it wasn't a different dinosaur. It was simply a more complete Apatosaurus — one that Marsh, in his rush to one-up Cope, carelessly and quickly mistook for something new.

Although the mistake was spotted by scientists by 1903, the Brontosaurus lived on, in movies, books and children's imaginations. The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh even topped its Apatosaurus skeleton with the wrong head in 1932. The apathy of the scientific community and a dearth of well-preserved Apatosaurus skulls kept it there for nearly 50 years.

That Brontosaurus finally met its end in the 1970s when two Carnegie researchers took a second look at the controversy. They determined a skull found in a quarry in Utah in 1910 was the true Apatosaurus skull. In 1979 the correct head was placed atop the museum's skeleton.

The Brontosaurus was gone at last, but Lamanna suggests the name stuck in part because it was given at a time when the Bone Wars fueled intense public interest in the discovery of new dinosaurs. And, he says, it's just a better name.

"Brontosaurus means 'thunder lizard,'" he says. "It's a big, evocative name, whereas Apatosaurus means 'deceptive lizard.' It's quite a bit more boring."

I actually really like how long their videos are.

I thought I'd be posting a report today on private firm Orbital Sciences' Antares test launch from NASA's Wallops Island, VA (WHERE?) facility. The mission got scrubbed however; maybe 48 hrs for a re-try.

Wallops Island is on the Eastern Shore of VA, very near me. I've been to Chincoteague, VA a few times and driven right around the Wallops Island base to get there. It's in the middle of a swamp, actually. They've been launching smaller rockets there for decades, but this is the first big one.


So, ultimately, no science today.

This is bullshit.

Iphones can't print Polaroids.

<a href="http://www.space.com/12957-nasa-giant-rocket-space-launch-system-infographic.html"> <img src="http://www.space.com/images/i/12138/i02/space-launch-system-new-nasa-rocket-110914d-02.jpg?1316103640" alt="See how NASA's new mega rocket, the Space Launch System, measures up for deep space missions in this SPACE.com infographic." width="575" border="1"/></a><br /> Source: <a href="http://www.space.com">SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration</a>


Amazing.

After 50 years, this country proves how far it's fallen by managing to reinvent the Saturn V and the Apollo command module.

What's next, the Wright plane?

Just mind bottling....

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This moment made possible by science developed by NASA...

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Very cool.

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Wanted: Curious, adventurous, sociable individuals who dislike oxygen, feeling the warm sun on their neck when they are walking in the sunshine without a spacesuit and taking a dip into the ocean. Got an annoying ex (or mother-in-law)? Want to put 140 million miles (225 million km) between you?

If you meet most of the criteria above (or are just a crappy neighbor who gets in trouble for being too loud), you may be the perfect candidate for a permanent settlement on Mars! Yes. You read that right, M-A-R-S. The freaking red-planet!!!

A company based in the Netherlands, Mars One; is looking for four individuals that are up to the task of traveling to, and living on, Mars. However, if you get there and decide that red is a bad color or that the decrease in surface gravity makes your butt look weird, you are kind of screwed, as the return flight is scheduled two weeks from the first of never! That's right, no return trip for this flight will occur. The colonists that make the trip will ultimately have to adapt to the environment of the planet, which is frankly cold, dry and kind of rusty. (Literally rusty. Mars has lots of iron oxide. Hence the red.)

All satire aside (and admit, you love it), if you would like the opportunity to be a part of one of the most historic and important milestones for humanity, you can sign up here (for a small fee of $38 and a contract on the soul of your first born child): http://applicants.mars-one.com/

In typical hunger games fashion, the candidates

At the time of my writing this, the crew departure is expected to occur in 2022, with two prior missions (and 8 test flights) to set up camp before the crew arrives 7 months later. The first of these missions will occur as soon as 2016.

On the plus side, regardless of the schematics, at least Curiosity, Opportunity and Spirit will have some company in the flesh. The little green Martian men speak really bad human.

- Jaime

For More Information:

"Private Mars Colony Won't Seek Life on Red Planet:"
http://www.space.com/20773-mars-colo...-for-life.html

Q:A What are the qualifications?
http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/21-faq...alify-to-apply

Additional Reading:

Mars: The Red Planet:
http://tinyurl.com/mars-fqtq

Terra-forming Mars:
http://tinyurl.com/terraforming-mars-fqtq

To quote men in black "1,500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

Super-powered battery breakthrough claimed by US team

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A new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles.

The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful.

It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech.

However, safety issues still remain.

Details of the research are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Battery breakthrough
The researchers said their innovation should help address the issue that while smartphones and other gadgets have benefited from miniaturised electronics, battery advances have failed to keep pace.

Batteries work by having two components - called electrodes - where chemical reactions occur.

In simple terms, the anode is the electrode which releases electrons as a result of a process called oxidation when the battery is being used as a power source.

The cathode is the electrode on the other side of the battery to which the electrons want to flow and be absorbed - but a third element, the electrolyte, blocks them from travelling directly.

When the battery is plugged into a device the electrons can flow through its circuits making the journey from one electrode to the other.

Meanwhile ions - electrically charged particles involved in the anode's oxidation process - do travel through the electrolyte. When they reach the cathode they react with the electrons that travelled via the other route.

The scientists' "breakthrough" involved finding a new way to integrate the anode and cathode at the microscale.

"The battery electrodes have small intertwined fingers that reach into each other," project leader Prof William King told the BBC.

"That does a couple of things. It allows us to make the battery have a very high surface area even though the overall battery volume is extremely small.

"And it gets the two halves of the battery very close together so the ions and electrons do not have far to flow.

"Because we've reduced the flowing distance of the ions and electrons we can get the energy out much faster."

Repeatable technique
The battery cells were fabricated by adapting a process developed by another team at the university which is designed to make it faster to recharge the batteries than lithium ion (Li-on) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) equivalents.

It involves creating a lattice made out of tiny polystyrene spheres and then filling the space in and around the structure with metal.

The spheres are then dissolved to leave a 3D-metal scaffold onto which a nickel-tin alloy is added to form the anode, and a mineral called manganese oxyhydroxide to form the cathode.

Finally the glass surface onto which the apparatus was attached was immersed into a liquid heated to 300C (572F).

"Today we're making small numbers of these things in a boutique fabrication process, but while that's reliable and we can repeat it we need to be able to make large numbers of these things over large areas," said Prof King.

"But in principle our technology is scalable all the way up to electronics and vehicles.

"You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone."

Safety fear
Other battery experts welcomed the team's efforts but said it could prove hard to bring the technology to market.

"The challenge is to make a microbattery array that is robust enough and that does not have a single short circuit in the whole array via a process that can be scaled up cheaply," said Prof Clare Grey from the University of Cambridge's chemistry department.

University of Oxford's Prof Peter Edwards - an expert in inorganic chemistry and energy - also expressed doubts.

"This is a very exciting development which demonstrates that high power densities are achievable by such innovations," he said.

"The challenges are: scaling this up to manufacturing levels; developing a simpler fabrication route; and addressing safety issues.

"I'd want to know if these microbatteries would be more prone to the self-combustion issues that plagued lithium-cobalt oxide batteries which we've seen become an issue of concern with Boeing's Dreamliner jets."

Prof King acknowledged that safety was an issue due to the fact the current electrolyte was a combustible liquid.

He said that in the test equipment only a microscopic amount of the liquid was used, making the risk of an explosion negligible - but if it were scaled up to large sizes the danger could become "significant".

However, he added that he soon planned to switch to a safer polymer-based electrolyte to address the issue.

Prof King added that he hoped to have the technology ready to be trialled as a power source for electronic equipment before the end of the year.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team is one of several groups attempting to overhaul the way we power gadgets.

Researchers in Texas are working on a kind of battery that can be spray-painted onto any surface while engineers at the University of Bedfordshire are exploring the idea of using radio waves as an energy source.