The dark world of animal “crush” films: ‘A Florida arrest reveals a disturbing genre — and how hard it is to punish the perpetrators…’ (Salon.com).

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‘The New York Times columnist and award-winning economist says America may be the most unequal society ever.’ (Salon.com).

‘When you’re looking for alien life, the best place to look is somewhere like Earth; the only place we know of that life exists. Kepler-186f, the first Earth-sized planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star, is the best bet we’ve ever found.

We’d heard details about this find a little while back, but now NASA has come out with the full announcement which adds more juicy information:

Kepler-186f is 1.1 times the size of Earth. Due to its size and location, it’s likely to be rocky. It’s (probably) not some gaseous ball. It’s 500 lightyears away from Earth. Scientists hypothesize it is at least several billion years old.

Its years are 130 days long and it gets one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun. So it’s chilly. On the chillest end of the habitable zone. At noon on Kepler-186f, its sun would be about as bright as ours is an hour before sunset. It has four brother planets, though none of them are habitable. They fly around their sun once every four, seven, 13 and 22 days, so they are way too close and too hot for life.’ (io9)

Want To Spot Earth’s First Cousin? Look For the Swan in the Sky

‘The Kepler-186 system is in the constellation Cygnus, which stargazers will know as the easy-to-spot swan in the northern hemisphere’s summertime sky. From here on Earth, some 500 light years away, we can’t see Kepler-186f at all. But you can still look in its direction. You won’t see how awesome Cygnus is by just looking up. Molecular dust clouds in the region form a veil called the Great Rift, which makes it hard to see anything more than a hint of what’s happening there. And, oh, is it happening. Cygnus is home to the Kepler system and our newly discovered first-cousin planet, but the constellation is also known for being a major star factory.’  (The Atlantic).

The nearly 5 million Census Blocks with zero population:
‘A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.

Green shading indicates unoccupied Census Blocks. A single inhabitant is enough to omit a block from shading…’ (mapsbynik).

‘Buy one part of the set — say, an AWS-100 digital scale — and Amazon’s “what other customers bought” feature will tell you the rest you need.’ (Boing Boing).

‘…[A] quick glance at the history of the federal government and capital punishment should provide a clear answer: no.’ — Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history at New York University Salon.com).

‘Some are clumsy (kakopo), others majestic (Christmas Island frigatebird), all are fighting for their survival.’ (Salon.com).

‘For the first time in history, scientists are witnessing the formation of a new moon in our solar system. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected a new moon forming in the edge of Saturn’s rings. Astronomers around the world are amazed about this incredible find, which they have named Peggy.*

It’s really exciting to see this happening in real time. Carl Murray—lead author of the paper describing Peggy—says that “we have not seen anything like this before. We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right.” According to Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, “witnessing the possible birth of a tiny moon is an exciting, unexpected event.” ‘ (Gizmodo).

‘Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.’ (NYTimes).

A Decade-Long Photographic Masterpiece at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Philosophy: ‘For nearly a decade, Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and Guggenheim Fellow Rachel Sussman has been traveling the globe to discover and document its oldest organisms — living things over 2,000 years of age. Her breathtaking photographs and illuminating essays are now collected in The Oldest Living Things in the World (public library) — beautiful and powerful work at the intersection of fine art, science, and philosophy, spanning seven continents and exploring issues of deep time, permanence and impermanence, and the interconnectedness of life.’ (Brain Pickings).

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‘This is a clay model of the final design for the life-size statue of Edgar Allan Poe that will be unveiled on October 5, 2014 at 2pm, at the corner of Boylston Street and Charles Street South in Boston, which is also named “Edgar Allan Poe Square.” It’s got Poe with his coat flapping in the wind, a suitcase, and raven heralding his arrival. Stefanie Rocknak’s design was selected out 265 other artists from 42 states and 13 countries with the proposal for “Poe Returning to Boston”…’ (io9).

‘

Late Monday night/early Tuesday morning will be an incredible time for skygazing. Not only is Mars bigger and brighter than it’s been in more than six years, you’ll also be able to witness the first total lunar eclipse of 2014. Here’s how to watch.’ (io9)

‘Under the Skin’ review: ‘Starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien creature trolling the streets for human prey, it’s a mesmerizing and haunting film that refuses to concern itself with traditional genre or even narrative conventions. The result is an unforgettable piece of art-house sci-fi that may alienate audiences used to the hyperkinetic spectacle that dominates most screens, but those that are able to slip under its spell will enjoy one of the most striking theatrical experiences this year.’ (The Verge).

‘A huge pyramid in the middle of nowhere tracking the end of the world on radar, just an abstract geometric shape beneath the sky without a human being in sight: it could be the opening scene of an apocalyptic science fiction film, but it’s just the U.S. military going about its business, building vast and other-worldly architectural structures that the civilian world only rarely sees.

The Library of Congress has an extraordinary set of images documenting the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Cavalier County, North Dakota, showing it in various states of construction and completion. And the photos are awesome.’ (Gizmodo).

Hondros (left) and friends

Here is a tribute to a great man,  photojournalist Chris Hondros, killed this week in Libya (Committee to Protect Journalists).

How did enlightenment thinkers distinguish between ‘drugs’ and ‘medicines’? And how should we? ‘…[T]he same novel sensory effects that made substances such as tobacco, opium and cannabis desirable to global consumers also made them fascinating for the earliest experimental scientists. But what did those drugs mean – for them, and for us? How did our modern binary between ‘illicit drug’ and ‘valuable medicine’ come into being?’ – Benjamin Breen (Aeon).

‘Some people found a baby seal crying for attention far away from the open sea, deep in the city of Sundsvall, in eastern Sweden. Apparently, instead of calling some emergency service, they just filmed her with their cellphones. A sad sign of the times, I guess…’ (Gizmodo)

‘Oarfish are freaky sea dragons. …[T]he fish usually live far down in the ocean — at depths up to 3000 feet. It’s relatively rare to catch them at a depth where humans have easy access. In this video, you can see tourists with a Shedd Aquarium travel program interacting with a couple of 15-feet-long oarfish in the Sea of Cortez. Definitely stick around to about 1:40 in the video, where you get some stunning underwater close ups of the oarfish.’ (Boing Boing).

‘Most of us have come upon it many, many times throughout our lives. But when was the last time any of us really saw it? Like so many of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s most storied photographs, this one flirts with sentimentality — but avoids that ignoble fate by virtue of its energy, and its immediacy. This is not a depiction of manufactured emotion, but a masterfully framed instant of authentic, explosive spirit.’ (LIFE.com, via kottke).

‘From access to healthcare and education, gender equality, attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, the U.S. looks like a second-rate nation…’ (Alternet).

‘A long-sought fugitive has been caught at the world’s largest particle accelerator. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider confirm that a provocative particle called Z(4430) actually exists – and it may be the strongest evidence yet for a new form of matter called a tetraquark.

Quarks are subatomic particles that are the fundamental building blocks of matter. They are known to exist either in groups of two, forming short-lived mesons, or in threes, forming the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. Researchers have suspected for decades that quarks might also bind together in quartets, forming tetraquarks, but they have not been able to do the complicated quantum calculations necessary to test the idea.’ (New Scientist).

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‘Though security vulnerabilities come and go, this one is deemed catastrophic because it’s at the core of SSL, the encryption protocol so many have trusted to protect their data. “It really is the worst and most widespread vulnerability in SSL that has come out,” says Matt Blaze, cryptographer and computer security professor at the University of Pennsylvania. But the bug is also unusually worrisome because it could possibly be used by hackers to steal your usernames and passwords — for sensitive services like banking, ecommerce, and web-based email — and by spy agencies to steal the private keys that vulnerable web sites use to encrypt your traffic to them.’ (WIRED).

‘Scientists have successfully regenerated an elderly organ in a mouse using a drug that targets gene activity. Get excited.’ (Science Alert).

David Foster Wallace (Photo credit: Steve Rhodes)

Do you care about the quality of your writing? ‘Here is DFW’s 2002 Pomona College handout on five common word usage mistakes for his advanced fiction writing class.’ (Farnam Street via kottke)

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‘First of all, congratulations to Colbert. Second of all, this is not gonna go well.’ (WIRED).

Conor Friedersdorf: ‘Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it’s also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not one meant to join couples for love and companionship alone.

That’s why it’s wrong to stigmatize all opponents of gay marriage as bigots, even if (like me) you’d find unobjectionable the forced resignation of a CEO who used anti-gay slurs, or declared that gays are inferior humans, or sought to deny gays even benefits unrelated to the definition of marriage, like the ability to be on a life partner‘s insurance. My position has always been that civil unions are not enough—that gays ought to have full marriage equality. But the pro-civil-union, anti-gay-marriage faction is instructive. Opposition to interracial marriage never included a large contingency that was happy to endorse the legality of black men and white women having sex with one another, living together, raising children together, and sharing domestic-partner benefits as long as they didn’t call it a marriage.

Does that clarify the inaptness of the comparison?’  (The Atlantic).

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‘The results of a new comprehensive feces audit of eight well-trodden dog-walking thoroughfares and a national survey of dog walkers in the United Kingdom suggest the problem may be much more complicated than imagined.’ (Pacific Standard)

‘In 1998, the antiretroviral drug efavirenz was approved for treatment of HIV infection. Though the drug was highly effective, patients soon began to report bizarre dreams, hallucinations, and feelings of unreality. When South African tabloids started to run stories of efavirenz-motivated rapes and robberies, scientists began to seriously study how efavirenz might produce these unexpected hallucinogenic effects. Hamilton Morris travels to South Africa to interview efavirenz users and dealers and study how the life-saving medicine became part of a dangerous cocktail called “nyaope.” ‘ (VICE).

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Why they’re actually more dangerous than you think: “By lying, we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information.” — Sam Harris in his 2013 book Lying (Four Elephants Press).

…By how much do we lie? About 10 percent, says behavioral economist Dan Ariely in his 2012 book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty (Harper)…. Lying, Ariely says, is not the result of a cost-benefit analysis. Instead it is a form of self-deception in which small lies allow us to dial up our self-image and still retain the perception of being an honest person. Big lies do not…’ (Salon.com).

“One of the most challenging outbreaks we have ever faced”: ‘Over 100 people in Guinea and Liberia have died in West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, calling it “one of the most challenging Ebola outbreaks that we have ever faced.”

In Guinea, there have been 157 suspected cases, 67 of which have been confirmed, and 101 deaths. In neighboring Liberia, there have been 21 cases, of which 5 have been confirmed, along with 10 deaths. There have been no confirmed cases yet in Sierra Leona, Ghana or Mali, although Sierra Leone has two “probable” cases. Of Mali’s nine suspected cases, the results back so far, from two, have been negative.’ (Salon.com).

‘Dictionary dude Samuel Johnson famously said that when a man tires of London, he’s tired of life. You might have heard a British cabbie who now lives in the suburbs relay that snippet to you. What the pocket-wisdom smart-asses who quote that to you every time you complain about airborne death particles and ATMs that charge you three dollars to access your own money don’t realize, is that while Johnson was a clever guy, he spent his life afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome. Which means your man probably spent as much time spouting involuntary bullshit as he did snappy witticisms.

The thing is, most people in London are tired of life. You’ve only got to witness the queues in the Westfield multistorey or the reaction to a crying baby on the Tube to realize that this is a city that exists permanently at the end of its rope. People can live in London and be simultaneously tired of it, because—unlike in Mr. Johnson’s time—London is no longer a few cobbled streets and a big old prison. It’s the last metropolis in a sinking country on a starving continent, an island within an island oozing out into the Home Counties like an unstoppable concrete oil spill.’ (VICE United States).

‘In New York, Wall Street people know they’re pricks. In Los Angeles, Hollywood people are too stupid to know they’re pricks. In San Francisco, tech bros think they’re saving the world with their crackpot schemes aka “start-ups.” They’re the fucking worst.’ (VICE United States).

‘When a strong earthquake rocked northern Chile on April 1, scientists were quick with an explanation: It had occurred along a fault where stresses had been building as one of the earth’s crustal plates slowly dipped beneath another. A classic low-angle megathrust event, they called it.

Such an explanation may seem straightforward now, but until well into the 20th century, scientists knew relatively little about the mechanism behind these large seismic events. But that all changed when a devastating quake struck south-central Alaska on March 27, 1964, nearly 50 years to the day before the Chilean quake.’ (NYTimes).

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The health effects of a world without darkness: ‘An eternal electric day is creeping across the globe, but our brains and bodies cannot cope in a world without darkness…’  – Rebecca Boyle (Aeon).

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‘The reality of climate change has already hit farms, ranches, and orchards around the globe, according to the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While some crops will grow better in a warmer world, the report found that the negative impacts—including widespread crop damage, smaller harvests, and higher food costs—far outweigh any upsides.

The report predicts that yields of major food crops like corn, wheat, and rice are likely to start decreasing by 2030 and will continue to decline by up to 2 percent a decade.

No particular crops are likely to disappear any time soon… [but] five bellwether foods… could be especially challenging to grow in a changing climate:’  avocados, almonds, grapes, milk and tree fruits (such as cherries and apples). (

National Geographic)

Insect road kill (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(The Independent).

Write your own text using the chemical elements of the periodic table and download as …PDF or PNG… A very simple algorithm is used to automatically select symbols: (bath becomes BaTh), add a ‘|’ sign between symbols to force a break: (B|ath becomes BAtH). (Periodic Table Writer)

‘Los Angeles architectural photographer Mike Kelley posted this awesome image of almost all the departures and some of the arrivals at LAX during a period of eight hours last Sunday.’ (Gizmodo).

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‘Wes Anderson’s new film The Grand Budapest Hotel does much to bring Zweig’s particular brand of elegiac to the screen. Once one of the world’s most celebrated living writers, Zweig had lapsed into an undeserved obscurity, and Anderson goes far to resurrect a wondrous sensibility. From Zweig’s almost cloying candy-colored atmospheres — virtually tailor-made for Anderson’s brand of visual whimsy — to the inevitability of global catastrophe, casting a pall over even the happiest moments of domestic comfort, The Grand Budapest Hotel manages to capture nearly all of Zweig’s most striking qualities. Yet the film’s final tragedies — the rise of a (spoiler alert!) Nazi-esque regime in the fictional republic of Żubrówka, the 11th-hour execution of the hotel’s effete concierge, the untimely death due to illness of our young protagonist’s new bride — veer from Zweig’s sensibility in the grandness of their scale, a grandness much more evocative of Hollywood than of Vienna in the 1930s.

What The Grand Budapest Hotel forgets, and what Zweig never does, is that what humans do, and leave undone, is no less catastrophic at the hearth than it is on the battlefield.’ (LA Review of Books)

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‘It appears to have been just bad luck that one British newspaper, The Independent, chose April 1 as the day to publish James Vincent’s science report about a significant animal-to-human communication breakthrough.

I hope it worries animal researchers at least as much as it worries me that I had to do some reading around and cross-checking to be sure that the report wasn’t an Onion-style April Fool’s Day hoax. But I found that The Daily Mail had already reported on the same finding on March 27, so I’m quite sure both newspapers are serious.’ (The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Music Critic

‘Should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds? Poptimism is a studied reaction to the musical past. It is, to paraphrase a summary offered by Kelefa Sanneh some years ago in The New York Times in an article on the perils of “rockism”: disco, not punk; pop, not rock; synthesizers, not guitars; the music video, not the live show. It is to privilege the deliriously artificial over the artificially genuine. It developed as an ideology to counteract rockism, the stance held by the sort of critic who, in Sanneh’s words, whines “about a pop landscape dominated by big-budget spectacles and high-concept photo shoots” and reminisces “about a time when the charts were packed with people who had something to say, and meant it, even if that time never actually existed.” ‘ (NYTimes.com).

When wildfires combine with wild winds, beautiful—and terrifying—things can happen. (The Atlantic).

John D. Rockefeller

‘Quick: Name a senator who served between the Civil War and World War I. Struggling? Now name a tycoon who bought senators during the same period. J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller … it’s easier.

And for good reason. The tycoons mattered more.

In the post-McCutcheon world, the 0.1 percent are far more important than most candidates. The press needs to treat them that way and subject their views to scrutiny.’  – Peter Beinart (The Atlantic).

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‘Making coffee is a complex thing. Long before the stuff makes it to your cup/glass/comically large thermos, it must be converted—from fruit to bean. Doing that requires that the fruit (the “cherries”) be harvested from “spindly, bush-like” coffee plants. The cherries must then be processed, their beans extracted from their pulp. The beans must then be dried, roasted, and otherwise converted into the thing most of us know as “coffee.”

This process is not only labor-intensive; it is is also wasteful. It results in, among other things, much of the coffee cherry being discarded.

Out in (yep) Seattle, there’s a startup, CF Global, that is trying to reclaim the coffee cherry. Its big idea is this: to take the remnants of the process that turns the coffee bean into a beverage … and turn them into food.

The result of this? Coffee Flour, a food ingredient that’s made from discarded coffee cherries. You take the pulp that gets separated from the coffee been in that initial extraction process and then dry it and mill it—the results being a flour that can, CF Global says, mimic traditional flour. Coffee Flour, the company claims, can be used in pasta and baked goods. It can work as a dry rub for meats. It can bring coffee flavor to sauces. It can even be used in energy drinks.’ (The Atlantic).

‘While some scientists fritter away their time searching for extraterrestrial life, two astronomers have performed a genuine public service for Earth by calculating the likely number of nearby planets inhabited by the undead.’ (io9)

‘Evidence has been piling up for a while that early humans in Europe had children with the Neanderthals who had been living there for probably 500 thousand years before humans arrived. Very few Neanderthal genes are left in humans today, so what difference does it make? A lot, both genetically and philosophically.’ (IO9).

An evocative and well-crafted portrait of one of my favorite writers, Peter Mattheissen, who is soon to take his leave of us. (NYTimes Magazine).

‘A Breitbart contributor, and former agent to director Steven Soderbergh, gave this disgusting response to Ft. Hood… The comment came as news swept Twitter of a shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas, where former Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people in 2009. The offending tweeter, Pat Dollard, himself tweeted news of the shooting as it broke, before making the aforementioned hideous statement (which, perhaps surprisingly, he has not deleted at the time of this writing).’ (Salon.com).

Passenger pigeon

With technology reminiscent of Jurassic Park, scientists plan to revive long-extinct species like the passenger pigeon. (Utne Reader)

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‘Russia isn’t only pursuing its territorial ambitions in Ukraine and other former Soviet states. It’s particularly active in the Arctic Circle, and, until recently, these efforts engendered international cooperation, not conflict. But the Crimean crisis has complicated matters.’  – Uri Friedman (The Atlantic).

‘Like the proverbial crook who returns to the scene of the crime, the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program are suddenly ubiquitous in its defense. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to be a coordinated effort. It’s just coincidence, mixed with the understandable belief that no negative repercussions will follow from doing so.’ (The Wire).

‘One of the upsides to the seemingly endless winter of 2014 was that you had time to think. And to ask futuristic questions, such as: What will the American Winter of 2114 be like?’ (The Protojournalist : NPR).

’13 “Top 100 Books” lists combined and condensed into one master list, for the benefit of your reading pleasure. 623 books in all — can you collect them all?’ (A List of Books)

‘Here’s a good deed you can do without parting with a single thing. Synthetic voices for people who have lost the ability to speak only come in generic types—think of Stephen Hawking‘s voice—but one fascinating project wants to build custom voices for each person. To do that they need your help: specifically, a recording of your voice.

VocalID is the brainchild of two speech scientists, who are turning their research into a much larger project. Voice is intensely personal and, like a prosthetic leg or arm, it makes sense it should be customized to each person.

Here’s how it works—and don’t worry, this does not mean someone will be walking around with the same voice as you out there:

After recording a couple hours of audio in, say, a quiet room with an iPhone, you send it to VocalID, where a program called ModelTalker chops it up into the basic units of speech that can be recombined as novel words and sentences. In that same step, characteristics of the patient’s voice—based on what limited sounds they can make—are blended in to the donor’s to create a whole new one. You can listen to how it works out on VocalID’s website.

VocalID is still in its beginning stages, and they’re looking for help from everyone including voice donors, financial support, and programmers. A priority is making voice donation even easier, cutting down recording time, especially for kids. But as it stands already, your voice is just about the easiest thing to donate.’ (Gizmodo)

‘A diagnosis of mental illness is more common than ever – did psychiatrists create the problem, or just recognise it?’ — Joseph Pierre, health sciences clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-chief of the Schizophrenia Treatment Unit at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center (Aeon). 

‘The same research that revealed the first-ever direct evidence of Big Bang inflation earlier this week also suggests the presence of alternate universes.

So, universes just like our own, except separate? Not exactly. Miriam Kramer explains:

The new research also lends credence to the idea of a multiverse. This theory posits that, when the universe grew exponentially in the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, some parts of space-time expanded more quickly than others. This could have created “bubbles” of space-time that then developed into other universes. The known universe has its own laws of physics, while other universes could have different laws, according to the multiverse concept.‘ (Gizmodo).

‘

It’s been almost five years since Gizmodo first reported on the Thirty Meter Telescope, a mega-telescope with a resolution ten times that of the Hubble. Now, it seems the long-delayed project’s time has come: Hawaii has agreed to lease a parcel of land for the telescope, and officials say construction could begin as soon as April.

The TMT dates back to the 1990s, when the idea was first broached by a group of California scientists. In the years since, their idea has taken on the details of a real plan: An almost 100-foot-wide mirror made up of just less than 500 segments, ensconced on a astronomy park atop a dormant volcano called Mauna Kea, where it will do everything from detect light from the earliest stars to search out evidence of dark matter.’ (Gizmodo).

‘Are the young Americans who volunteer for military service prepared for the ethical ambiguity that lies ahead? Can they be hardened against moral injury? Should they be?’ (The Huffington Post).

‘Sherlock Holmes’s mortal nemesis was Professor Moriarty.

Harry Potter’s nemesis was Voldemort.

Doctor Who had a nemesis named Morbius. So did Spider-Man. Morbius was also the name of the antagonist in The Forbidden Planet.

Frodo Baggins went through the mines of Moria to get to Mordor, where he met Sauron, who, as great a villain as he was, started out as the lieutenant of Morgoth, the original and darkest villain in the world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

H.G. Wells sent his time traveller into the future to encounter a cave-dwelling evil race called the Morlocks. He also created an evil genius called Dr. Moreau.

King Arthur was betrayed by Mordred.

The really scuzzy city in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is Morpork.

So what’s the deal with “mor”? Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy?’ (The Week).

‘The pilot of a passenger plane was partly sucked out of the cabin window onto the nose cone of the jet today after its windshield blew out at 23,000 feet. But he was saved by crew members who clung to his ankles for 15 minutes until the co-pilot landed the plane safely in southern England.

Several of the aircraft’s 81 passengers said they watched in horror as crew members frantically wrestled to pull Capt. Timothy Lancaster back into the cockpit. The plane went into a dive, but with half of Mr. Lancaster’s body hanging outside the co-pilot flew the aircraft to Southampton Airport, 70 miles southwest of London.’ (New York Times).

‘Leading scientists recently identified a dozen chemicals as being responsible for widespread behavioral and cognitive problems. But the scope of the chemical dangers in our environment is likely even greater. Why children and the poor are most susceptible to neurotoxic exposure that may be costing the U.S. billions of dollars and immeasurable peace of mind.’ (The Atlantic).

‘As you’ve probably heard, yesterday a team of scientists identified evidence of cosmic inflation right after the Big Bang, a finding which helps explain how the entire Universe originated. Amazing as that sounds, it’s way more important than you even imagine.

To truly grasp the significance, let’s start with what exactly it is that the Harvard team found. Forget analogies about ripples in ponds or whatever other over-simplified guff you’re read. Here’s what actually happened.’ (Gizmodo).

‘At the University of Oxford, a team of scholars led by the philosopher Rebecca Roache has begun thinking about the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. In January, I spoke with Roache and her colleagues Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen about emotional enhancement, ‘supercrimes’, and the ethics of eternal damnation. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation…’ (Gizmodo).

‘In the course of his research on the New Orleans trailer park culture that developed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Oxford anthropologist Nick Shapiro stumbled on something unexpected. At 250 square feet, the FEMA-issued mobile homes were scarcely fit to live in, but there was one thing about them that, for their occupants, represented the height of luxury: a scent evocative of the interior of a new car. This smell was also making them sick.’ (New Republic).

‘Like a landscape of the undead, the woods outside Chernobyl are having trouble decomposing. The catastrophic meltdown and ensuing radiation blast of April 1986 has had long-term effects on the very soil and ground cover of the forested region, essentially leaving the dead trees and leaf litter unable to decompose. The result is a forest full of “petrified-looking pine trees” that no longer seem capable of rotting.

Indeed, Smithsonian reports, “decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil.” …’ (Gizmodo).

Related articles

• Chernobyl’s Trees Won’t Decay, Increasing the Risk of Nuclear Forest Fire

‘As this Bloomberg map shows, Malaysian flight 370 is not the first flight to mysteriously disappear. 83 flights have vanished since 1948—80 of them never to be found again (the dots in yellow). This map only includes flights capable of carrying more than 14 passengers.

Some more curious stats:

• Five planes were missing in the famous Bermuda Triangle.
• The DC-3 is the airplane with the higher count of disappearances: 19.
• The average number of people missing: 13.
• The average number of vanished flight per year: 1.2.’ (Gizmodo).

Related articles

• Think planes don’t just disappear? Think again. 83 aircraft have vanished since 1948
• Flight MH370 – an ‘unprecedented aviation mystery’
• Aviation mysteries which have puzzled the world
• Cases of missing planes
• The New Bermuda Triangle?
• 10 aviation mysteries
• The mystery of flight MH370: other planes that vanished

‘Nationwide, roughly a third of all visits to emergency rooms for injuries are alcohol related. Now a new study suggests that certain beverages may be more likely to be involved than others.

The study, carried out over the course of a year at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, found that five beer brands were consumed most often by people who ended up in the emergency room…’ (NYTimes.com). Before you click through to the article, can you guess?

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Natural and social scientists develop new model of how ‘perfect storm’ of crises could unravel global system (theguardian.com).

‘How come we keep getting lost on our way to happiness and yet many of us are masters in the “art” of unhappiness?

To cut a long story short, here they are:

• Be, act and feel a victim!
• Be angry, you have reasons!
• Control everything, all the time!
• Do everything perfectly all the time!
• Please everyone!
• Be convinced that life is a jungle where only lions thrive!
• Be busy!
• Always be dissatisfied!
• Trust no one!
• Always expect the worst!’ (Medium).

‘Some of the worms Semenov cataloged with his photography were

previously undiscovered, and scientists have started the process of

identifying them.

Imagine all the other undiscovered terrors living in the deep.’ (Mashable).

‘…[W]hat’s possible? Mashable spoke to Todd Curtis, former aviation safety engineer at Boeing and creator of AirSafe.com, to find out.’ (Mashable).

‘Why Blair Witch remains one of the most frightening films ever made is precisely because of what all those so-called “reality” techniques don’t show. The found-footage and the first-person camera and even the low budget actually enabled a lack of information that allowed our imagination to fill in the blanks. It was the standard ghost story we’d all grown up with, but we were able to annotate it with whatever version of that story that had terrified us when we were seven. We wanted to believe. And we did. Some of us a little too much.’ (Gizmodo).

Related articles

• Newswire: Blair Witch director makes camping scary again, this time with Bigfoot’s help
• Lionsgate acquires new Bigfoot film from Blair Witch co-director
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• Independent film – The Blair Witch Project (Lauren Jackson)

John R. MacArthur: ‘As a presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in 2016 appears ever more likely, it’s a good moment to ask what alternative exists to lying down and letting such a campaign drown the body politic.

Time is short. The queen of cynics, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, already has pronounced her gorgon’s judgment on the inevitability of Hillary versus Jeb. “The looming prospect of another Clinton–Bush race makes us feel fatigued,” yawns the perpetually bored Dowd, who, on the contrary, relishes a future of easy columns mocking America’s two leading political dynasties.

What about the rest of us? Is it inevitable that we swallow the nomination of

the neo-liberal Clinton, whose support of Bush’s Iraq madness (not to mention Obama’s Afghan and Libyan stupidity) and her husband’s recklessly pro-“free trade,” pro-banker, pro-deregulation politics ought to send reasonable liberals fleeing? Is it predestined that principled conservatives accept the anointment of the thoroughly fraudulent Jeb, whose support of his brother’s interventionist folly, along with his own outrageous meddling as governor of Florida to “rescue” brain-dead Terri Schiavo, should give pause to even the greediest oil baron seeking patronage from a Republican administration?’ (Harper’s Magazine).

‘Can dogs survive nuclear fallout? Indeed they can.

In 1958, American scientists were stunned to find a canine survivor of the disastrous Castle Bravo test—the largest ever U.S. nuclear detonation. It also took a little politicking with American Airlines to rescue the pooch.

For science.

…If it wasn’t for [Ernest Williams, a trustee at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas], the atomic dog would have been left stranded on a contaminated Pacific atoll.’ (Medium).

‘Five countries signed an agreement this week committing to the protection of the Sargasso Sea, which occupies a vast stretch of the North Atlantic Ocean around Bermuda.

The Sargasso has long attracted the attention of conservationists and scientists because it hosts a rich diversity of wildlife, including leatherback sea turtles, humpback whales, and bluefin tuna. The animals eat and take shelter in a seaweed called sargassum, which floats in massive quantities in the area—some say it looks like a golden, floating rain forest—and gives the sea its name.

Fishing and shipping traffic threatens to unravel this biologically rich ecosystem, on top of broader threats like climate change and ocean acidification.

The new nonbinding agreement on the Sargasso, called the Hamilton Declaration, is a first for the high seas.’ (National Geographic).

‘Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, the country’s most powerful TV broadcaster, is threatening to take his network off the air. And that’s not such a bad idea.

On Tuesday, Moonves told CBS-owned CNet that his TV network could move to an internet direct-subscription model if the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Aereo, the service that lets you grab TV airwaves with a personal antenna for viewing on your PC, tablet, or phone…

[T]he case for an all-subscription model makes a surprising amount of sense  – especially when you consider that paying a la carte for what you watch is TV’s inevitable future. By going all-subscription now, the big networks would have a chance to define that future rather than becoming its victims.’ (Wired.com).

‘Move over, thundersleet and frost quake and all you other weird winter weather names. The undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champion of the climate-changed world is: bombogenesis!

This delicious buzzword, which is a portmanteau of “bomb cyclogenesis” and refers to the sudden intensification of storms after a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure, has been tumbling off lips this polar vortex winter. In the latest Science Graphic of the Week, you can see why.’ (Wired Science).

Greatest. blueshift. ever: ‘A giant black hole may have hurled a star cluster toward us at record speed ‘ (Scientific American).

‘Beltway writers have recently tried to outdo themselves with breathless profiles of a “new” Paul Ryan, deeply concerned about the poor. I’ve warned repeatedly that Ryan’s views on poverty are just warmed-over Reaganism, and now we have proof. McKay Coppins’ piece “Paul Ryan Finds God” should have revealed that his God is no longer Ayn Rand but Charles Murray, the man who put a patina of (flawed) social science on Reagan’s lyrical lie, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

But let me explain all of what it means to cite Charles Murray in 2014. Murray is so toxic that Ryan’s shout-out must be unpacked. First, Rep. Barbara Lee is absolutely right: Ryan’s comments about “inner city” men who are “not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” are, in fact, “a thinly veiled racial attack,” in the congresswoman’s words. “Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’” ‘ (Salon.com).

The company can start bidding for new leases as soon as next week (Salon.com).

“An extremely rare albino chimero coast redwood tree is growing in the small Sonoma County town of Cotati. Federal regulators say the tree must be chopped down because the genetically mutated redwood is too close to a proposed set of new railroad tracks. Preservationists are hoping to raise public awareness and save the tree. The tree is believed to be one of fewer than 10 albino chimero redwood trees in the world.” — Mark Frauenfelder (Boing Boing). 

‘Miles O’Brien, science correspondent for PBS NewsHour, has produced a series of three must-see investigative reports revisiting the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan. His stories explore how the radiation leaks triggered by the earthquake and tsunami are continuing to affect life there, and beyond.’ — Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing). Xeni, who is Miles O’Brien’s significant other, ends her post by letting us know that Miles recently suspended his reporting career after he lost his left arm in an accident while on assignment in the Philippines, but that he is healing well.

I am ecstatic! One of my closest friends, with an inoperable and highly malignant recurrent brain tumor, has experienced considerable regression of the tumor mass, recovery of function (and lengthening of life) with the experimental application of a noninvasive technique for focused ablation of the tumor (without opening the cranium) with ultrasound. The technique is called MrgFUS, “magnetic-resonance-guided focused ultrasound”, for short. This is the first time it has been used in this way anywhere in the world. Here is the press release. I’ll forgive the investigators their bragging rights in light of the result!

Related: Ted Talks on Focused Ultrasound

‘ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer has revealed the largest yellow star — and one of the ten largest stars found so far. This hypergiant has been found to measure more than 1300 times the diameter of the Sun, and to be part of a double star system, with the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star. Observations spanning over sixty years, some from amateur observers, also indicate that this rare and remarkable object is changing very rapidly and has been caught during a very brief phase of its life.’ (ESO).

‘I don’t even know what I’m looking at here. I think I see some eyes and a beak attached some oversized head attached to the body of a spider. It’s a pelican spider.

“They look like little birds,” says Hannah Wood of the University of California, Davis. The spider’s body is about the size of a grain of rice, with a front segment that has evolved into a stretched “neck” with a little round “head” on top. (The mouth is actually at the bottom of the “neck”). And a pair of jawlike fanged projections called chelicerae folds down against the neck, where a pelican would tuck its beak.

Fuck you, nature. Fuck. You.’ (Sploid).

‘To finally put an end to the age-old edibility debate, a team of students led by microbiology professor Anthony Hilton looked at the transfer of E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus (or the bacteria that causes Staph infection) from a variety of indoor floor types (carpet, laminate, and tiled surfaces) to a variety of foods (toast, pasta, cookies, ham, dried fruit, and last but not least a “sticky dessert”). Each tested round of contact lasted between three and 30 seconds.

In what will surely be validating news to five-second rule champions everywhere, the researchers found that “time is a significant factor in the transfer of bacteria from a floor surface to a piece of food.” It’s not just the precious seconds your meal spends on the ground that matters, though; the type of flooring also plays a pretty big role. For instance, food dropped on carpet is the least likely to pick up bacteria, while food that sits on a hardwood floor for over five seconds is almost guaranteed to pick up something unpleasant—and it’s a moist food item, forget about it.’ (Gizmodo)

‘When Henrik Ehrsson tells me that his latest study is “weird”, I pay attention. This is a man, after all, who once convinced me I was the size of a doll, persuaded me that I had three arms, and ripped me out of my own body before stabbing me in the chest. Guy knows weird.

Ehrsson’s team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm specialises in studying our sense of self, by creating simple yet spectacular illusions that subvert our everyday experiences. For example, it seems almost trite to suggest that all of us experience our lives from within our own bodies. But with just a few rods, a virtual reality headset, and a camera, Ehrsson can give people an out-of-body experience or convince them that they’ve swapped bodies with a mannequin or another person.

These illusions tell us that our sense of self isn’t the fixed, stable, hard-wired sensation that it seems. Instead, our brain uses the information from our senses to continuously construct the feeling that we own our own bodies. Feed the senses with the wrong information, and you can make the brain believe all manner of impossible things.

Loretxu Bergouignan joined Ehrsson’s team in 2009. She had been studying memory, and she wanted to know if that brittle sense of self is important for encoding our experience. After all, we take in all the events of our lives from inside our own bodies. As Bergouignan writes, “There is always an “I” that experiences the original event, and an I that re-experiences the event during the act of remembering.” If she put someone through an out-of-body illusion, could they still make new memories? Is that first-person perspective of the world important for storing information about it?’ — Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science).

Related articles

• What Happens When Memories Aren’t Seen In First-Person? Out-Of-Body Experiences Are Harder To Remember
• Relationship Between Body Perception and Memory
• Outside the body our memories fail us
• Memories Can Go Astray When We Step Outside Our Bodies
• Virtual Reality Reveals Why PTSD Victims Can’t Remember Their Trauma

‘A first-of-its-kind study that measured activity in dogs’ brains finds a key region only lights up when the animal is exposed to the smell of a familiar human being. Other dogs—even familiar ones—do not produce the same response.

“It is tempting to conclude that (this) response represents something akin to a positive emotional response to the scent of a familiar human,” writes the research team led by Gregory Berns of Emory University. Their study—including their speculative discussion of whether that’s truly the case—is in the journal Behavioural Processes.’ (Pacific Standard).

‘ “So you’re going to take LSD.” Thus begins a how-to manual by Lisa Bieberman, who was then a 25-year-old Harvard graduate and former assistant to Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary (aka Nixon’s “Most Dangerous Man in America”) in their famed LSD experiments. Published in 1967, the year before the hallucinogen was criminalized, the pamphlet was recently unearthed by Psychedelic Frontier, a blog for the “consciousness expansion” community.

Bieberman seems to have been an ardent but surprisingly down-to-earth acid adherent, and earnest about her task. This guide for beginners is mainly addressed to practical matters to promote the best possible “LSD session.” She is eager to correct disinformation (LSD does not make you think you can fly) and to dispel romantic illusions (LSD does not make you smarter, more creative or a better person). And because she believes that LSD’s benefits are almost entirely emotional or spiritual in nature—and that therefore you and your companions should stay in one room, sit still and say nothing—her advice leans heavily on what NOT to do…’ (Substance.com).

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: ‘…[David Foster] Wallace was perhaps one of the most careful (or care-full) writers of his generation. …[So] you might just have to admire the fine art of his syllabi. Well, so you can, thanks to the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which has scans available online of the syllabus for Wallace’s intro course “English 102-Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction” , along with other course documents. These documents—From the Fall ’94 semester at Illinois State University, where Wallace taught from 1993 to 2002—reveal the professionally pedagogical side of the literary wunderkind, a side every teacher will connect with right away.

…[I]f you squint hard, you’ll see under “Aims of Course” that Wallace quotes the official ISU description of his class, then translates it into his own words:

In less narcotizing words, English 102 aims to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, and to write—clearly, persuasively, and above all interestingly—about stuff you’ve read.

…Wallace’s choice of texts is of interest as well—surprising for a writer most detractors call “pretentious.” For his class, Wallace prescribed airport-bookstore standards—what he calls “popular or commercial fiction”—such as Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, Stephen King’s Carrie, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and James Elroy’s The Big Nowhere. The UT Austin site also has scans of some well-worn paperback teacher’s copies, with the red-ink marginal notes, discussion questions, and underlines one finds behind every podium…’ (Open Culture).

‘As their centennial approaches, it’s time to remember why the National Parks are so worth protecting.’ (Pacific Standard)

‘…In the psychiatric literature, the werewolf hallucinations and delusions the patient was experiencing are broadly classified as clinical lycanthropy, or lycomania. Because the “extremely rare” disorder has not received much academic scrutiny and is “poorly understood,” Blom recently took it upon himself to perform a rigorous multi-lingual search of historical documents and medical databases for any references to or extant case records on the condition between 1850 and May 2012.

Though the resulting analysis, published this month in the History of Psychiatry, only unearthed 13 case descriptions that satisfied the definition of “clinical lycanthropy proper,” the paper traces the evolution of the illness and provides a detailed description of symptoms, treatments, and divergent theories about its causes…’ (Pacific Standard).

‘Besides the fact that manufacturers sterilize the needles (so no real extra effort is needed), other sterilization procedures are also used in these executions for good reason.

You see, a stay of execution may happen at the last minute. If this happens, but then the condemned later dies from infection, a wrongful death suit could be filed against the state -a suit the state would likely lose.’ (Gizmodo).

‘Although some people are horrified by the idea of cooking lobsters alive or the practice of tearing claws from live crabs before tossing them back into the sea, such views are based on a hunch. We know very little about whether these animals — or invertebrates in general — actually suffer. In Elwood’s experience, researchers are either certain the animals feel pain or certain they don’t. “Very few people say we need to know,” he says.’ (Washington Post).

Related articles

• Do crustaceans feel pain?
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‘Our great shame is that we forget the past, or perhaps simply refuse to learn from it. We have traveled this path before. We have seen the worst of times for our most vulnerable citizens, for people who fought for many years for modest gains, only to see the self-interest of a powerful few whisk those gains away.’ — Paul Buchheit (Salon.com).

‘There’s some tentative science to suggest that the polar vortex may have been linked to climate change. There’s a near scientific consensus that the burning of coal and other fossil fuels is contributing to climate change — not to mention a host of public health threats. Hence the reason why environmental rules are expected to force about 6 percent of the nation’s coal capacity into retirement by 2020.

The way the coal industry sees it, however, this winter’s brutal weather demonstrates exactly why we should be calling for more, not less, dirty energy.’ (Salon.com).

‘The case wasn’t about bike paths per se — it was about whether or not the federal government retains its control over land that had been granted to railroad companies once it’s been abandoned.  But the decision undermines a federal “rails to trails” program, threatening the more than 1,400 bike and nature trails it’s created since its inception in 1983.’ (Salon.com).

5 ways the assault is about way more than abortion: ‘The GOP remains, as ever, a party that appeals largely to white men and married white women while falling further out of step with everyone else. While spitting vitriol about reproductive healthcare certainly alienates women voters and their allies, being vindictive about poverty, civil rights and other issues virtually annihilates the GOP’s chances of expanding its base….’ (Salon.com).