How about watching a gaggle of driverless cars meander through a fake city?
The selection process for DARPA’s third Grand Challenge is almost over, and the final race begins bright and early on Saturday. So if you’re anywhere near Victorville, California, grab a cup of coffee and go watch autonomous robots careen wildly through the streets, jump curbs and morph into giant aliens that, as it turns out, are fighting a civil war that began in a galaxy far, far away…
Well, we can only hope that they’re not going to jump any curbs. The selected vehicles are driverless, and they are robots, and they have to follow laws and drive judiciously as they navigate through a simulated city scene. Why? For the thrill of the ride, of course, and the Department of Defense would like to use them on the battlefields of the future. The event is open to the public; you can look at the schedule here.
from Nature News: A worldwide burp of volcanic gases caused the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and other creatures 65 million years ago, says research reported this week. It's the latest argument from a group that has been trying for some time to discredit the leading theory - that a meteorite striking Mexico led to the mass die-offs. The international team says that we should instead blame plumes of climate-altering gas given off by monumental lava flows that stretch hundreds of kilometres across India. The Deccan Traps, as they're called, have been suspected before of having some sort of global impact around the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary, known as the K-T boundary. Earlier research had dated the main outburst of the lava flows as occurring within 800,000 years of the boundary. But the new analysis uses tiny plankton fossils, trapped between lava layers, to date the flow to the boundary itself.
On MTV, of all the weird places, Barack Obama was asked if he would support Net Neutrality and appoint FCC commissioners that toe the same line. Short answer? "Yes."
In 1938, the preternaturally gifted Orson Welles stunned the nation with his "War of the Worlds" radio play, causing mass hysteria and panic. An article at CNet News asks, would we believe it in today's modern world, what with our high-speed Innernets and infotainers?
The article essentially concludes with a 'not really, unless you're a gullible douchebag,' but then goes on to examine the foundations of modern skepticism by speaking with experts and exploring modern-day hoaxes like the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite scandal in Boston.
Halloween is here — I know because some midget dressed as Jack Sparrow just beat me up for a Butterfinger. Don't even try to tell me it was a 'child,' because that little bastard was stronger than a bull.
But what, might you ask, does a Celtic celebration of the spirit world and chocolate-covered razorblades have to do with science? EVERYTHING. In a recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer, two physicists tackled the myths surrounding vampires, zombies and ghosts to show how popular conceptions of these supernatural beings collide head-on with the laws of science. Now, I know there's no such thing as vampires because I killed the last one, but if you require more empirical evidence than my infallible word, Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi go on to debunk them and other classic Monster Mashers in a variety of cool ways.
Halloween: you either love it or you hate it. But no matter how you feel about it, it is the one day of the year when you can throw away your socially appropriate garb and don whatever crazy persona you choose. On October 31, society gives us the A-OK to throw away our business suits and dress entirely in bubble wrap if we want to—allowing us, essentially, to become someone (or something) else. But I've always wondered: do crazy costumes also make us act a little crazy? Do we not just look out of character on Halloween, but also behave out of character—say, by drinking twice as much as we usually do, committing petty crimes, or having one-night stands?
Although the debate over the causes of autism is still vexed, arguments over the nature of the disorder itself rage, too. In the November 1 issue of Frontiers In Neuroscience [hat tip to Frontal Cortex for blogging it on 10/25], Henry Markram, Tania Rinaldi and Kamila Markram propose a new unifying theory. They call it “The Intense World Syndrome” and the basic idea is that the core problem in autism is not difficulty recognizing other people’s thoughts and motivations (the “theory of mind” theory), but a hyper-responsive brain that encodes most sensory input as overwhelming.
Kids knocking on David Zald's door tonight looking for a treat are in for a trick. Zald, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, decorates his house with skeletons and creepy fog. As children walk through his haunted house, Zald can see fear in their faces.
"They want the candy, but they're not sure they want to come up," Zald said.
Who would blame them? Especially when he's dressed in white polyester as Disco Stu from the "The Simpsons."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will begin an international climate change tour next week, stopping in Latin America, Antarctica and Europe, the UN announced on Tuesday. While 60SS can't join the tour in body. . .
Rising gas prices are biting everyone in the ass — I initially tried to save costs by diluting my gas with chocolate milk, but my well-tested hypothesis (if: chocolate milk makes me happy, then: chocolate milk makes cars happy) didn't work out so well in the real world.
Luckily, Slate's Brendan I. Koerner explains in his column "The Green Lantern" how a diligent stick-shift driver can improve gas mileage and reduce their carbon footprint by as much as 15 percent. These techniques are collectively called hypermiling, a term which I plan to now sprinkle liberally throughout my cocktail-party conversations because it sounds ultra-cool.
As the world population eats more crap and exercises less, the numbers of people afflicted with diabetes rises to match it: There were approximately 171 million diabetics in 2000, and researchers estimate 366 million people will have it by 2030. Diabetes diagnoses traditionally get split into type 1, which requires insulin injections to treat, and type 2, which can be managed with diet and exercise. But an article in NewScientist covers a disturbing trend in which newly diagnosed diabetics exhibit symptoms of both type 1 and type 2 diabetics.
More and more children exhibit some symptoms of both types, which some researchers informally call "type 1.5.," while increasing numbers of adults are developing full-blown symptoms of both — a condition known as "double diabetes." These diagnoses present new treatment challenges for physicians and call the very classification of the disease into question.
The $100 laptop isn't $100 anymore, but it's still taking off. The government of Uruguay has placed the first official order for the One Laptop per Child's XO laptop, purchasing 100,000 systems for schoolchildren ages 6-12. If the program is successful, the government may move to provide every child in the country with a laptop by purchasing an additional 300,000 systems by 2009.
Who among us hasn't wondered that? While munching on stale peanuts, I've concocted entire scenarios to prepare myself for survival — my plan always involved simply holding on to the door's edge and pulling myself back in, but then again, maybe you don't have forearms resembling tightly coiled, steel pythons like I do.
A woman on a flight from Orlando to Dallas with an unfortunate attack of adult-onset crazy decided to test this action-movie staple in midair, but she luckily didn't succeed. You see, airplane doors open inwards, and the pressurized air in the cabin keeps the door from opening. The air pushes hard enough that it's practically impossible to open the door at 30,000 feet (except for me — pythons, remember?), which is surely a comfort to nervous air passengers everywhere. The crew had to restrain her and make an emergency landing in Houston. You can bet that lady didn't make any friends on that flight.
Still, I can't help but feel a bit of sadness at the passing of another Hollywood cliche. Next thing you know, we'll learn that Steven Seagal doesn't have any actual martial arts skills, and that's a truth I can't handle.
Lame name aside (it's no Pablo 247), Personal Home Robot can water plants, control lights and appliances, play music and remind owners to take their medication. Unfortunately, it didn't remind Trinh to take his naming creativity pills or use paper clips in his design. But Trinh, of Towson, MD, still gets $5,000 in cash. That's a lot of paper clips.
With uncanny timing, given the current droughts in the American Southeast, an exhibit saturated with facts and figures about water will open at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on Saturday.
Yes, the supermassive magma plume beneath Yellowstone National Park is overdue for an eruption, which would dump inches of ash over the entire continent, plunge the globe into a decade-long nuclear winter, and kill a billion people. But that's a small risk to run in return for its real value: keeping the Pacific Northwest earthquake-free.
Beneath Washington and Oregon, the Pacific oceanic crust is crunching into and under the North American continent -- which should result in enough seismic chaos to prevent people from stacking two Legos on top of each other, much less building a worldwide coffee empire. Luckily, the so-called "Yellowstone plume" acts like earth's own Astroglide, lubing up the tectonic plates and ensuring the world's continued access to Pumpkin Spice Lattes.
Sure, sure, we all saw that haunting illustration of a bat’s wings that won first place for informational graphic in Science magazine’s 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. And we saw the other winners, too, including the arresting photo of “What’s Behind our Nose?” and that Irish moss, pulled from the sea, that looks like an alien made entirely out of hands and fingers. (Click here to check out the winners’ gallery.)
But I’ve seen little mention of a video that explains, with elegance and simplicity, a nifty utensil from the geometer’s toolbox. (Th
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: A comet that until recently was invisible to the naked eye has become a shining star in the night sky, easily seen even through the bright lights of the Pittsburgh region. Comet Holmes last week was orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter when it inexplicably brightened about a million times. It went from being a nondescript object difficult to see through a telescope to a luminous, fuzzy blob -- without a discernible cometary tail -- that's visible virtually all night in the constellation Perseus, moonlight and light pollution notwithstanding. "We certainly have seen comets that have had a brightening period, a burst of some level, sometimes quite dramatic, but nothing a million fold," said John Radzilowicz, the Carnegie Science Center astronomer. "So that's got everybody's attention."
Polar bears are the best animal mascots to come along in, well, maybe ever; whales, lynxes and spotted owls should all fire their agents. Global warming is a great start, but I see big things for polar bears — you wanna be in pictures, kid? Polar bears are so cuddly that even if I was getting torn apart by one, I think I'd be yelling "you're ...sooo... cuuute...must.... give...savings ...to... IPCC...aaaaaghggh!" with my dying breath.
But ExxonMobil recently funded research into the impact of climate change on polar bear populations. The researchers, including Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, contradicted previous research and took a big dump on Al Gore's PowerPoint presentations by concluding that polar bears aren't threatened. The results were published as "viewpoint" and not peer-reviewed, which has naturally drawn the ire of the scientific community and the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology. From NewScientist:
If the polar bear is listed under the Endangered Species Act, steps to protect its habitat could directly hurt ExxonMobil's economic interests, subcommittee chair Brad Miller wrote in an open letter to the oil giant.
Just when fMRI told me about why I was optimistic about my chances on Everest, it had to come back and kick me in the nuts. A new article published by a group of Spanish doctors in the American Journal of Medicine uses magnetic resonance imaging to show consistent brain damage in nearly all of the professional and amateur high-altitude mountaineers surveyed.
Only 1 in 13 of the Everest climbers had a normal MRI; the amateur showed frontal subcortical lesions, and the remainder had cortical atrophy and enlargement of Virchow-Robin spaces but no lesions. Among the remaining amateurs, 13 showed symptoms of high-altitude illness, 5 had subcortical irreversible lesions, and 10 had innumerable widened Virchow-Robin spaces. Conversely, we did not see any lesion in the control group.
In the nuclear physics version of "how much ya bench," Thomas Baumann and his homies at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University get bragging rights on Quark Beach for creating a new nucleus, aluminum-42, which possesses 29 neutrons and shouldn't be stable, but is, according to their report this week in Nature. Even competing researchers can't help but shed tears at Baumann and co.'s bulging, glistening neutrons.
"It's beautiful," says Olivier Sorlin, an experimenter at the French laboratory GANIL in Caen. "I'm quite surprised that they found it. We tried and did not succeed."
The MSU team didn't say so, but you're never gonna break the 28-neutron drip line rule without blasting your lats — the French always forget to work the lats.
New Mexico was once again the site of interstellar shenanigans (I'm looking at you, Roswell) as the X Prize Cup rocket expo ended with Armadillo Aerospace's entry into the 2007 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge exploding in spectacular fashion.
In a last-ditch attempt to win the prize, Armadillo took the engine out of another, more powerful rocket called Pixel – which it had planned to fly in the more difficult level 2 challenge – and used it as a replacement for Module 1's cracked engine.
But the engine exploded in a fireball at launch, producing a bang that was audible from more than a kilometre away. Armadillo declared an emergency and fire trucks rushed to the scene, but the fire quickly burned itself out without any intervention or injuries.
Nine teams entered, but only Armadillo Aerospace was actually prepared to compete in time to win the prize. Armadillo was founded by John Carmack, creator of iD Software and the games Doom and Quake.
Earlier this month you may have noticed all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. Actually you wouldn't have, because while a group of students and faculty at North Carolina State's PULSTAR nuclear reactor fired the most powerful antimatter beam ever created earlier this month--deep breaths everybody--they only made one of them.
Illinois Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill) has announced his plan to introduce legislation aimed at reigning in superbugs causing hospital infections, including the infamous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. Durbin's legislation would require hospitals to follow federal infection control guidelines and report their infection rates to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a a report released last night by the Chicago Tribune online.
A new study looks at the cost of biofuels - specifically ethanol and biodiesel - as an alternative to the CO2-emitting stuff we currently pump into our cars. It concludes: it ain't cheap.
Nearly one in four Americans say the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for at least some period of time according to a new poll by Zogby International and 463 Internet Attitudes. At its snippiest the press release touts that "Not surprisingly, the percentage was highest among singles, of which 31% said it could be a substitute." Thanks for the judgment, Internet. I love you a little less now.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/University of Colorado
Remember the first time you saw the rings of Saturn? They're mysterious and beautiful, eerie and perfect, and 10 years ago, NASA's Cassini spacecraft blasted off to explore them.
The most recent report from Cassini's voyage to the Great Ringed One suggests that the disks are the result of cosmic catastrophes. The outermost main ring, called the "A" ring, is littered with tiny holes shaped like airplane propellers. In the most recent issue of Nature, astronomers report that these propeller-shaped gaps point to the existence of thousands of "moonlets," giant boulders (some as large as city blocks) embedded in the ring of dust.
In 1938, the 
Halloween is here — I know because some midget dressed as Jack Sparrow just beat me up for a Butterfinger. Don't even try to tell me it was a 'child,' because that little bastard was stronger than a bull.
Rising gas prices are biting everyone in the ass — I initially tried to save costs by diluting my gas with chocolate milk, but my well-tested hypothesis (if: chocolate milk makes me happy, then: chocolate milk makes cars happy) didn't work out so well in the real world.
The $100 laptop isn't $100 anymore, but it's still taking off. The government of Uruguay has placed the first official order for the 
Dammit. I guess Pablo 247, my robot made from paper clips, didn't win
Polar bears are the best animal mascots to come along in, well, maybe ever; whales, lynxes and spotted owls should all fire their agents. Global warming is a great start, but I see big things for polar bears — you wanna be in 
Just when 
In the nuclear physics version of 
