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September 03 2010
NCBI ROFL: For some reason, women don’t volunteer for vaginal photoplethysmographs.
Volunteer bias in erotica research: effects of intrusiveness of measure and sexual background.
“Volunteer characteristics and volunteer rates across several laboratory experiments of sexual arousal were compared. Conditions were created to assess which component of the experimental setting was responsible for low volunteer rates in experiments using genital measurement. Subjects were 324 male and 424 female undergraduate students who had volunteered for an experiment on sexuality and personality. After completing several measures of sexual experience and attitude, subjects received a written description of one of the following conditions and were asked if they wished to volunteer: sexual film, sexual film and subjective rating of arousal, sexual film and assessment through forehead temperature, sexual film and assessment with a device that was placed over the clothes and measured genital heat flow, sexual film and assessment with the heat flow device while partially undressed, or sexual film and assessment with the vaginal photoplethysmograph or penile strain gauge while partially undressed. Men were significantly more likely to volunteer than women, and volunteer rates for both men and women decreased significantly when and only when subjects were required to undress. Multivariate analyses of variance revealed that both male and female volunteers were more sexually experienced, reported more exposure to erotic materials, and worried less about their sexual performance than nonvolunteers. No differences in volunteer characteristics occurred across the increasingly intrusive conditions for women while a few differences occurred for men. The present findings suggest that researchers should be cautious about discussing the generality of findings of studies involving exposure to a sexually explicit film alone as well as of experiments that involve self-report or physiological measures of sexual arousal.”
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: What kind of erotic film clips should we use in female sex research? An exploratory study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: For some reason, med students don’t want to show their genitals in class.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: An electrophysiologic study of female ejaculation.
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
Ad Depicts Google CEO as the Ice Cream Man From Your Nightmares
Annoyed by Google’s revised stance on “net neutrality“? Pissed off by the company’s power to collect personal data in applications like Buzz (which can show others who you Gmail the most) and Street View (which shows the locations of cars and faceless people)? Worried about the news that a Street View project gone awry mistakenly collected information from the Wi-Fi networks that Google’s mapping vehicles cruised past? The activist group Consumer Watchdog feels your pain. And to spread the anti-Google message further, the group is running the video ad below on a 540 square foot video billboard in Times Square.
The cartoon shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt giving children free ice cream, body-scanning them, and divulging their parents’ secrets. Consumer Watchdog hopes the video will inspire viewers to pressure Congress to make a ‘Do Not Track Me’ list, similar to the existing ‘Do Not Call List.’
As Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog says in a press release:
“We’re satirizing Schmidt in the most highly-trafficked public square in the nation to make the public aware of how out of touch Schmidt and Google are when it comes to our privacy rights…. America needs a ‘Do Not Track Me’ list and Google is Exhibit A in the case for it.”
Questioning Google’s views on privacy, the group cites a statement from Schmidt where he said that children hoping to avoid their internet past might change their names, and an earlier Schmidt interview, where he said:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
For an interesting look on privacy and the internet, check our DISCOVER’s special 30th anniversary issue this October, in which MIT internet and society expert Sherry Turkle questions where we are headed in the next 30 years.
Related content:
Discoblog: Beware! Prolonged Internet Use May Cause Psychotic Episodes
Discoblog: And the Survey Says: Google Is Not Making You Stupid8
0beats: Opinions: What Google and Verizon’s Plan for Net Neutrality Means
80beats: China Bans Electroshock Therapy For “Internet Addiction”
80beats: Have You Consumed Your 34-Gigabytes of Information Today
Nano Snacks! Researchers Say Edible Nanostructures Taste Like Saltines
We’ve asked tiny nanostructures to thwart counterfeiters, heal wounds, and boost computing power. Now, we want to eat them. Researchers have made “all-natural metal-organic frameworks”–and hope their creations’ edible frames may find use storing small molecules in foods and medical devices.
Though researchers have made similar metal-organic frameworks since 1999, most of the structures require chemicals from crude oil. As described in a recently published Angewandte Chemie paper, this team has devised a cheaper method employing starch molecules leftover from corn production.
The trick was to make a substance crystallize as a highly ordered, symmetrical, porous framework. Getting tiny symmetrical structures from non-symmetrical natural ingredients had seemed unlikely, but the team found the perfect molecule cages, using a special type of sugar (gamma-cyclodextrin) from the cornstarch and potassium salt. After dissolving gamma-cyclodextrin and potassium salt in water, they crystallized them to form the nano storage cubes.
Despite the sugar and salt combo, the nanostructures are not that tasty, team member Ronald Smaldone says in a press release:
“They taste kind of bitter, like a Saltine cracker, starchy and bland…. But the beauty is that all the starting materials are nontoxic, biorenewable and widely available…”
We also can’t imagine they’re that filling.
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Discoblog: How Butterfly Wing Patterns Could Thwart Counterfeiting Crooks
80beats: Nanoparticles + Stem Cells = Faster Healing Wounds
80beats: “DNA Origami” May Allow Chip Makers to Keep Up With Moore’s Law
80beats: Spitzer Telescope Finds Buckyballs… in Spaaace!
Image: flickr / Kerrie Longo
Undergrads Destroy NASA Satellite
On August 30th, after seven years gathering data on ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, a NASA satellite met its fiery end in the Earth’s atmosphere before plunging into the sea. And it was University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates plotted the satellite’s fatal course.
Happily this wasn’t the result of a Hacking 101 class gone awry, or a particularly sophisticated prank. The students’ destructive mission had NASA’s full endorsement.
NASA decommissioned the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat in July, before turning the show over to the students, who worked with experts from the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Students and faculty at the Laboratory control four other satellites for NASA and have also operated ICESat during its life, allowing the satellite to measure polar sea ice thickness, the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the heights of vegetation canopies and clouds. Even if the students were old pros at satellite steering, the chance to crash these multimillion dollar craft is rare–the last NASA satellite reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2002 and NASA did the job themselves.
After seven-day work weeks computing the satellite’s location and predictions for NASA tracking stations, the students transmitted the satellite’s final course and told it burn all remaining fuel. As Popular Science reports, its charred remains safely splashed down in the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia on Monday. Please tell me someone in that control room made an explosion noise.
Related content:
Discoblog: How to White Balance a Satellite: Aim It at Lake Tuz
Discoblog: Dang, What Was That? Astronomers Wonder What Just Whizzed by Earth
Discoblog: Want to Monitor the Earth’s Magnetic Field? There’s an App for That.
DISCOVER: Space Junk: How to Clean Up the Space Age’s Mess (gallery)
Image: Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado
September 02 2010
NCBI ROFL: When life gives babies lemons, they make cute faces.
Differential facial responses to four basic tastes in newborns.
“The distinctiveness and recognizability of taste-elicited facial expressions in newborns were examined in 2 studies. Sucrose, sodium chloride, citric acid, and quinine hydrochloride solutions were presented to 12 infants at 2 hours of age. In Study 1, the anatomically based Facial Action Coding System adapted for infants (Baby FACS) was used to obtain detailed, objective descriptions of the infants’ videotaped facial responses to each solution. Facial responses to sucrose were characterized primarily by facial relaxation and sucking. The responses to salty, sour, and bitter solutions shared the same hedonically negative upper- and midface components but differed in the accompanying lower-face actions: lip pursing in response to sour and mouth gaping in response to bitter. There was no distinctive facial expression for sodium chloride. These findings demonstrate that newborns differentiate sour and bitter from each other and from salt, as well as discriminating sweet versus nonsweet tastes. In Study 2, untrained adults viewing videotapes of the infants’ facial reactions made forced-choice judgments identifying the stimuli presented and rated the hedonic tone of the infants’ responses. While the judges accurately identified the newborns’ responses to sucrose, there were systematic errors in their judgments of the 3 nonsweet stimuli. The judges’ hedonic ratings, on the other hand, clearly differentiated between the infants’ responses to the bitter stimulus and the other 3 tastes. The findings are discussed in terms of the possible functional origins and communicative value of taste-elicited facial expressions in infants.”
Just for fun:
Photo: flickr/Chris Denbow
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Science: getting babies drunk since 1997.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Two Cute: Research that would make grad school snugglier.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: An ecological study of glee in small groups of preschool children.
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
India’s Red Rain: Still Cloudy With a Chance of Alien?
A group of researchers is questioning, again, if aliens visited India in 2001–in the form of red rain.
In 2001, a bizarre red rain showered India’s southern state of Kerala. Godfrey Louis, a physicist now in Cochin University of Science and Technology’s astrobiology department, decided to collect samples and take a closer electron-microscope look. He noticed some particles in the rainwater that looked like biological cells, but when he went looking for DNA, he found none. That enticingly strange result led Louis to speculate that he had found extraterrestrial bacteria.
The new paper (pdf) appears in Arxiv.org, not a peer-reviewed journal. But it repeats earlier work by Louis and a collaborator that they say shows the cell-like particles can survive and grow at high temperatures that would kill most life as we know it (around 250 degrees Fahrenheit). At room temperature, particles appear as inert as, well, odd looking red rain dirt.
Louis and his colleagues hypothesize that extraterrestrial cell-like particles could have traveled on a meteor that burst in Earth’s atmosphere and seeded the rain cloud responsible for Kerala’s unusual weather. That would provide support for the “panspermia” theory–the idea that life on Earth came from outer space.
Louis’s earlier paper in Astrophysics and Space Science made him a media sweetheart and a target for critics. Plenty of people weren’t buying Louis’s story. As Popular Science reported in 2006, other earth-origin red rain theories ran the spectrum from commonplace to bizarre, including algae, fungal spores, and red blood cells (which don’t have DNA) juiced out of meteor-struck bats.
Technology Review reports that the new paper seems sure to precipitate more controversy. The work again says that high temperatures cause “daughter” cells to form in “mother” cells, and also notes that after the team bombarded the cell-like structures with light their emission had “remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle planetary nebula and other galactic and extragalactic dust clouds.”
Related content:
Discoblog: Man Claims That Aliens Are Pelting His House With Meteorites
Discoblog: Alien Math Shows Why Grad Student Doesn’t Have a Girlfriend
Discoblog: How To Chat With an Alien: The Official Guide
DISCOVER: 10 Bizarre-Looking Tricks of the Weather (including red rain)
Image: Wikimedia / Louis and Kumar
September 01 2010
NCBI ROFL: [Insert sexist joke here].
More than “just a joke”: the prejudice-releasing function of sexist humor.
“The results of two experiments supported the hypothesis that, for sexist men, exposure to sexist humor can promote the behavioral release of prejudice against women. Experiment 1 demonstrated that hostile sexism predicted the amount of money participants were willing to donate to a women’s organization after reading sexist jokes but not after reading nonhumorous sexist statements or neutral jokes. Experiment 2 showed that hostile sexism predicted the amount of money participants cut from the budget of a women’s organization relative to four other student organizations upon exposure to sexist comedy skits but not neutral comedy skits. A perceived local norm of approval of funding cuts for the women’s organization mediated the relationship between hostile sexism and discrimination against the women’s organization.”
Bonus excerpt from the materials and methods:
“Participants in the sexist joke condition then read one neutral joke followed by four sexist jokes. The sexist jokes required the recipient to know various female stereotypes or gender role stereotypes to “get” the punch lines (e.g., “How can you tell if a blonde’s been using the computer? There’s White-Out on the screen!” and “A man and a woman were stranded in an elevator and they knew they were gonna die. The woman turns to the man and says, ‘Make me feel like a woman before I die.’ So he takes off his clothes and says, ‘Fold them!’”). Participants in the neutral joke condition read five neutral (nonsexist) jokes (e.g., “What’s the difference between a golfer and a skydiver? A golfer goes whack . . . ‘Damn!’ A skydiver goes ‘Damn!’ . . . whack”). Pretest ratings indicated that participants perceived the sexist jokes as more sexist but equally as funny as the neutral jokes (see Ford, 2000).”
Photo: flickr/dickobrien
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: [Insert joke about women drivers here].
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: [Insert oral sex joke here].
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Humor and death: a qualitative study of The New Yorker cartoons (1986-2006).
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
When the World Was Young, and Human Cannibalism Wasn’t Such a Big Deal
No dessert, caveman child, until you finish eating your human. Digging around in a Spanish cave called Gran Dolina, archaeologists have found butchered humans’ fossilized bones. Researchers say the bones show that cave dwellers skinned, decapitated, and enjoyed other early humans, before throwing their remains into a heap with animals bones from other meals.
The study, which appeared this month in Current Anthropology, says the 800,000-year-old Homo antecessor bones could indicate the most “ancient cultural cannibalism … known until now.” Adding to the nightmare: National Geographic reports that the hungry cavemen had a penchant for kids, since the 11 cannibalized humans uncovered were all youngsters. They speculate that the kiddos were easier to catch, and eating them was a good way to stop competitors from building their families.
Study coauthor José María Bermúdez de Castro, of the National Research Center on Human Evolution, told National Geographic that marks near the base of some skulls hint that the diners decapitated humans to get the brain goodness inside.
“Probably then they cut the skull for extracting the brain…. The brain is good for food.”
The researchers believe that eating other humans wasn’t a big deal back then, and probably wasn’t linked to religious rituals or marked by elaborate ceremonies. They draw that conclusion from the fact that butchered human bones were tossed in the scrap heap along with animal remains.
There is some debate as to how frequently human was on the menu, but these researchers note that the Sierra de Atapuerca region had a great climate and that cannibalism didn’t likely result from a lack of alternatives. I guess our ancestors were just that tasty.
Related content:
Discoblog: For Early Europeans, Cannibalism Was One Perk of Victory
Discoblog: Mad Cow Fears Keep Euro Sperm Out of U.S.
Discoblog: To Fight Cancer, Ovarian Cells Eat Themselves
80beats: New Guinean Cannibals Evolved Resistance To Mad Cow-Like Disease
Image: flickr / joanna8555
A Romantic Getaway for Japanese Men & Their Virtual Girlfriends
Don’t be fooled by the men taking solo vacation pictures and eating alone at the Japanese resort town of Atami. These guys may look lonely as they sit and poke at their video game devices, but love is in the air. In a promotion that ended yesterday, Atami teamed up with Konami, the manufacturer of the dating video game LovePlus+, to offer a place for players and their virtual girlfriends to get away.
The game, available on Nintendo’s handheld DS, allows players to win their girlfriend’s virtual heart by completing homework, working out, texting, kissing (using a stylus to touch the girl’s face), and calling (via the system’s built-in microphone). It made headlines last year when one player, SAL9000, decided to marry his virtual girl Nene Anegasaki (see video above, via Boing Boing).
Play the dating game just right and you win a virtual getaway to Atami. The recent promotion allowed players to visit the sites they’d seen in the game in real life, though with a little plus–their girlfriends’ faces plastered on everything from banners to fish cakes.
Atsurou Ohno, managing director of Atami’s Hotel Ohnoya, told the The Wall Street Journal in a video interview that Atami tried to create a real experience for the some 1,500 “couples” who flocked to the town.
“We place two of everything in the rooms, even if there is only one person.”
Some of the guests paid up to $500 for a night in Atami hotel rooms–which, we also note from the WSJ video, had two separate beds.
Related content:
Discoblog: Lust & Love Apps: Playboy Tames Down, Imaginary Girlfriend Steps Up
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Phone App Can Identify Strangers on the Street
Discoblog: Is Apple Taking Sexy Back? Raunchy Apps Vanish From the App Store
August 31 2010
NCBI ROFL: Proven tips for making your partner jealous.
An inventory and update of jealousy-evoking partner behaviours in modern society.
“The goal of the present study was to identify the most important jealousy-evoking partner behaviours and to examine the extent to which these behaviours evoke jealousy. Based on the literature, a questionnaire was constructed containing 42 jealousy-evoking partner behaviours, including a partner’s extra-dyadic involvement with someone else by means of modern communication devices, such as the Internet. A second study examined the extent to which undergraduates and a community sample experienced jealousy in response to these partner behaviours. Results showed that explicit unfaithful behaviours evoked most feelings of jealousy, followed by a partner’s emotional or romantic involvement with someone else by means of modern communication devices. In general, older individuals responded with less jealousy in response to a partner’s unfaithful and suspicious behaviours. Clinical implications are discussed.”
Photo: flickr/Furryscaly
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why Facebook is ruining your marriage.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: And September’s “No shit, Sherlock” award goes to…
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Gee, I wonder why guys don’t like lipstick?
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
Bronze Age Brain Surgeon: Volcanic Glass Scalpel, Please
Move over, Dr. Quinn. Sure, the fictional television doctor could perform surgeries in the Old West using nothing more than a spoon–but one researcher now argues that inhabitants of a small village in Turkey sliced skulls over 4,000 years ago, using shards of volcanic glass.
Working in a Bronze Age graveyard in Ikiztepe, Turkey, archaeologist Önder Bilgi has uncovered 14 skulls with rectangular cut marks. He believes the Ikiztepe people used obsidian “scalpels,” found elsewhere on the site, to treat brain tumors and fight-related head injuries, and to relieve pressure from hemorrhaging.
Bilgi also told New Scientist, which has a complete interview, that the skulls’ healing indicates that some patients survived at least two years after their surgeries. Though this isn’t the oldest evidence of brain surgery (researchers have found a hole drilled into a Neolithic skull), Bilgi argues that the Ikiztepe rectangular skull openings are much more “sophisticated.”
Bilgi, who in an earlier study analyzed arsenic absorption in Ikiztepe bones to determine their metalworking skills, told New Scientist that the tools themselves aren’t too worse for multiple millennial wear:
“The blades are double-sided, about 4 centimetres [1.6 inches] long, and very, very sharp. They would still cut you today.”
Related content:
Discoblog: Brain Surgery Enables Woman to Run 100-Mile Races
Discoblog: Why Michael Jackson Might Be Buried Without His Brain
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Image: flickr / Mykl Roventine
August 30 2010
NCBI ROFL: Factitious diarrhea: a case of watery deception.
“Falsification of illness occurs when a patient fabricates symptoms or induces a physical illness. A recent review of the literature covering the past 3 decades identified 42 published case studies of falsified illness in children younger than 18 years of age (1). The psychiatric term for illness falsification is “factitious disorder,” which is defined as an intentional, self-inflicted, or fabricated illness or symptom motivated solely by the individual’s need to assume the sick role, without external incentives (2). Children are at risk of developing a chronic pattern of illness falsification with the potential for serious self-harm as the sophistication of their fabrications increase. Therefore, early detection and intervention is essential (1). We report a unique case of a factitious illness in which an adolescent diluted stool samples with water to feign chronic diarrhea. The purpose of this report is to heighten awareness of the existence of factitious illnesses in childhood and adolescence and to discuss the diagnosis of factitious diarrhea.”
Thanks to Ari for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/EDgAr H.
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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: What do Jews do while they poo?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: “Back and forth forever” (or, DIY poop therapy).
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
Don’t Try This at Home: How to Stick Your Hand in Liquid Nitrogen
Remember those high school liquid nitrogen demonstrations? You know, the one where your teacher dipped a banana into the cloudy stuff, pulled it out, and then shattered it on the floor?
Well, Popular Science blogger Theodore Gray recently decided to stick in his hand. As you can see in a video over on their site, his hand survived the encounter. Though he stressed, and we reiterate, that this really isn’t a good idea unless you know what you’re doing, or unless you want your friends to call you Captain Hook, sticking your hand in the cold stuff isn’t necessarily a recipe for digit removal.
Since Gray’s hand was much warmer than the liquid nitrogen (which checks in at around negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit), the hand instantly created a layer of evaporated nitrogen gas–which shielded his skin, temporarily, from frostbite. Gray says on his blog:
“The phenomenon is called the Leidenfrost effect (after Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, the doctor who first studied it in 1756). I’d known about it for years, but when it came time to test it in real life, I have to admit that I used my left hand, the one I’d miss less.”
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JOE GENIUS: Chemistry Cafe
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Image: flickr / Lee Gillen
Activists Say Whale Burgers Have a Special Sauce of Poisonous Mercury
Anti-whaling activists are trying a different tack: Rather than focusing on the ethical problems with hunting and eating majestic and often endangered whales, they’re declaring that whale meat could be harmful to your health. Several groups want the World Health Organization to set guidelines for whale consumption, given the meat’s mercury content.
Though the World Health Organization does not currently have guidelines for the amount of whale meat someone should eat, it does list mercury as a chemical of public health concern, the BBC reports. Activist groups, including the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, argue that although fish may contain trace levels of mercury, the animals that consume those fish accrue much higher levels–and whales and dolphins, at the top of the food chain, could have dangerously high levels.
Questioning whale meat’s mercury content is not new, but many whaling nations argue that they already have their own consumption recommendations. But whether those recommendations are protecting citizens seems uncertain: In 2007, Japanese officials found that the amount of mercury in whale meat used in one whaling town’s school lunches greatly exceeded advised levels, and this spring researchers detected high mercury levels when they tested residents of another Japanese whaling town.
Activists argue that curbing whale meat consumption might help protect the smaller species of whales and dolphins not covered by the International Whaling Commission ban. Unsurprisingly, whale-eating nations such as the Faroe Islands aren’t thrilled with the activists’ suggestion. Kate Sanderson, of Faroes’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the BBC that the nation’s guidelines already recommend only one or two whale meals a month, and that completely forgoing whale meat would prove an economic burden:
“If we don’t have the whale meat and the blubber, what do we eat instead? … The sheep population is certainly not enough to serve the meat needs…. Pilot whales represent not only the traditional part of the diet that people value very much, but also something that’s free. It doesn’t have to be paid for as an import.”
Related content:
Discoblog: Say What? Japanese Whaling Ships Accuse Animal Planet of Ecoterrorism
Discoblog: Japanese Whaling Redux: American Scientists Say Slaughter Was Unnecessary
Discoblog: After 4,500 Whale Killings, Japanese Publish Their Research
Discoblog: Vladimir Putin Conducts Whale Research via Crossbow
Image: flickr / gromgull
August 27 2010
NCBI ROFL: Positioning the booty-call relationship on the spectrum of relationships.
Positioning the booty-call relationship on the spectrum of relationships: sexual but more emotional than one-night stands.
“Most research on human sexuality has focused on long-term pairbonds and one-night stands. However, growing evidence suggests there are relationships that do not fit cleanly into either of those categories. One of these relationships is a “booty-call relationship.” The purpose of this study was to describe the sexual and emotional nature of booty-call relationships by (a) examining the types of emotional and sexual acts involved in booty-call relationships and (b) comparing the frequency of those acts in booty-call relationships to one-night stands and serious long-term relationships. In addition, the manner in which sociosexuality is associated with the commission of these acts was also examined. Demonstrative of booty-call relationships’ sexual nature was individuals’ tendency to leave after sex and infrequent handholding. In contrast, the romantic nature of booty-call relationships was demonstrated through the frequency of acts like kissing. The results suggest the booty-call relationship is a distinct type of relationship situated between one-night stands and serious romantic relationships.”
Thanks to Eric for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/p373
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sex Differences in Approaching Friends with Benefits Relationships.
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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
Judge: Man Can’t Sue Over LHC’s Potential “Destruction of the Earth”
Back in 2008, a Hawaiian fellow named Walter Wagner claimed the Large Hadron Collider’s hunt for the Higgs boson would end in apocalypse, and sued to stop the collider from going online. His suit was soon dismissed by a federal judge, but with the fate of the world on the line, Wagner kept trying. Now an appellate judge for the United States District Court in Hawaii has foiled Wagner again by knocking down his appeal, as Symmetry reports. The judge found that Wagner failed to show “credible threat of harm” and also noted that the United States doesn’t control the collider, which spans the border of Switzerland and France:
The European Center for Nuclear Research (“CERN”) proposed and constructed the Collider, albeit with some U.S. government support. The U.S. government enjoys only observer status on the CERN council, and has no control over CERN or its operations. Accordingly, the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement.
This isn’t Wagner’s first run-in with particle physics. In 1999 he got worried about the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) that was then under construction, and wrote a letter to Scientific American regarding the chance that the machine could create a black hole that would swallow up Long Island–followed by the planet. Although Nobel Laureate Franck Wilcek published a response in the magazine declaring that scenario unlikely, he just happened to mention world-devouring particles called strangelets as a more likely but still very unlikely possibility, adding to Wagner’s panic and fueling a worldwide fiasco (pdf) of misrepresented science and ignorance.
Wagner failed to stop the RHIC, and Brookhaven, with Wilcek’s help, published the charmingly-named report “Review of ‘Speculative Disaster Scenarios’ at RHIC” (pdf) detailing how the collider would not bring about the apocalypse. The LHC has a similar report spelling out why the collider will not kill us with microscopic black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles, or magnetic monopoles.
Check out DISCOVER on Facebook.
Related content:
Discoblog: Will the Large Hadron Collider Create 12 Miles of Data?
Discoblog: Taking Particle Physics to Court
Discoblog: LHC Shut Down By Wayward Baguette, Dropped by Bird Saboteur
Discoblog: You Say Large Hadron Collider, I Say Sizeable Particle Crasher
Image: CERN
Sneak Peak: The Bad Astronomer Blows Things Up
What happens when you give a brainy, hyperactive astronomer his own TV show? Well first off, explosions happen.
The excitement here at Discover headquarters is palpable–only three days until we get to watch our Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, tear up the Discovery Channel with his new TV show, Bad Universe. In the inaugural episode Phil examines the threat of an asteroid impact on Earth, and gets his hands on a whole lot–seriously, a whole truckload–of explosives to model the potential disaster. But it’s not all doom and gloom; he also explains what we can do “to keep an impact from ruining our whole day,” as he says.
The show premieres this Sunday, August 29th at 10 p.m. Here’s a sneak peak:
August 26 2010
NCBI ROFL: Garlic: a way out of work.
“Two 18-year-old men were seen for second-degree burns to the dorsum of their knees, ankles, and feet. Upon investigation, it was revealed that the burns were self-inflicted and resulted from the application of crushed garlic with the intent of exemption from work. Reviews of the literature reveal that garlic-induced burns have been previously reported; however, only once before as a factitious dermatitis. The sharp demarcation line between normal and abnormal skin should suggest that a burn is not from hot liquids. Health care providers had best be advised of the side effects of natural remedies and be aware of how garlic may be abused to the advantage of an individual.”
Photo: flickr/Sebastian Mary
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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Oh, snap! You got burned!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: A foot needs a nipple like a fish needs a bicycle.
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
Vladimir Putin Conducts Whale Research via Crossbow
Required for biopsying a gray whale: one speed boat, one crossbow, and one Russian prime minister. Vladimir Putin recently spent some quality time in Olga Bay, helping the V.I. Il’ichev Pacific Oceanological Institute sort out the family tree for a group of gray whales.
As Nature’s blog The Great Beyond explains, the Institute hopes to determine if the whales descended from a Californian or extinct Korean whale population, and the crossbow holds a specially-designed arrow for taking a skin sample. The bold Russian prime minister, known for his shirtless fishing, fire fighting, and bear tracking, told the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS that science can be tricky but exciting:
“I had the sporting feeling, I missed the target thrice, but hit it the fourth time.”
He explained to the AP why he wanted to be involved with the project.
“Because I like it. I love the nature.”
But the International Fund for Animal Welfare isn’t buying his declaration of love for the natural world, given ongoing seismic surveys for oil drilling taking place in another area where gray whales teach their young to feed. Reuters has a statement from the IFAW:
“As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today helped scientists research the gray whale… [state run oil firm] Rosneft, continues its two-month seismic survey in the nearby shallow waters off Sakhalin Island… which gravely threatens a subpopulation of those same whales.”
Related content:
Discoblog: A Novel Geoengineering Idea: Increase the Ocean’s Quotient of Whale Poop
Discoblog: Say What? Japanese Whaling Ships Accuse Animal Planet of Ecoterrorism
80beats: Unique Russian “Plant Bank” May Be Saved by Presidential Intervention
80beats: Wayward Gray Whale Is the First Seen in Atlantic Region in Centuries
Study: Was Ötzi the Iceman Buried With Pomp and Circumstance?
In 1991, German hikers found a surprise on an Alpine trail: a dead body. It turned out the man had died some time ago–around 5,000 years earlier. Researchers guessed from his scattered belongings that the iceman had died a lonely death from the cold and an arrow wound in his shoulder. But now, based on the way his belongings were scattered and the timing of his last meal, some archaeologists think the iceman named Ötzi may have had a proper funeral.
Though many previous studies have looked at the body itself, ScienceNOW reports that archaeologist Alessandro Vanzetti and his team looked at all of the iceman’s gear. They used a modeling technique called spatial point pattern analysis to make a map of how Ötzi’s goods–including axe, dagger, quiver, backpack, and unfinished bow–got to their final resting places. Specifically, the analysis determines how Ötzi’s surroundings froze and thawed over time. The researchers say the scattering is consistent with a ceremonial burial and that Ötzi’s tribe may have placed his possessions around him on a nearby stone platform. The study, which ScienceNOW calls “provocative,” appears in Antiquity Journal.
Vanzetti’s team thinks this spatial analysis is consistent with evidence that Ötzi ate his last meal in April, while the pollen in the ice around him appears to have come from September or August–a sign that his burial crew waited for the ground to thaw. Others are skeptical, saying, among other things, that there is no evidence anyone moved Ötzi after death.
Regardless of whether or not he died cold and alone, Ötzi is now sitting pretty in a refrigerated tomb in Italy’s South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano (pictured above).
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Image: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano
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