Via The New York Times: ‘Health-scare stories, even those that are not overblown, draw their special power from the fact that we go through the days denying our mortality. Each one reminds us anew that there’s no way out. Unable to avoid this tragic and absurd-seeming condition, we lash out against our fates by finding fresh reasons to make a villain out of the one thing that is doing its part to keep us alive: food. We add salt to the psychic wound when we momentarily trick ourselves into believing that bugs, worms and dirt are the only things fit for human consumption. I’m not falling for it anymore. I’m going back to bologna and cheese…’

‘A full moon, harvest moon, super moon, and total eclipse of the moon—this one has it all.’

Source: National Geographic

(Of course, lunar eclipses are always full moons…)

‘If you think America is unpopular in the world now, listen to some of the stuff they said about the country (and continent) in the late 1700s. European scientists came up with the “Theory of Degeneracy” to explain how terrible America was.’

Source: io9

Not only do we have a propensity for lying, we have built-in barriers that prevent us from detecting others when they do… People are social beings who require constant interaction and communication in order to survive. If we were constantly suspicious that everyone was lying, we’d probably all be holed up in a cabin like the Unabomber.

Source: Big Think

There was a time when the Food and Drug Administration was so sluggish and conservative in approving new drugs that people who desperately needed access to medicines would die waiting.

But fast forward to the early 1990s. By then, Congress had created four programs to expedite the development and approval process for new pharmaceuticals. These pathways were intended to push innovative new drugs — drugs to treat rare, serious, or life-threatening diseases — through the FDA more quickly.

Since these medicines were sorely needed, the idea was that rushing them through, often on the basis of more limited and preliminary clinical trials data, would help patients languishing with unmet medical needs.

Today, the FDA is now considered the fastest regulatory agency in the world. But there’s some concern that these expedited pathways are being used by drug companies to speed through medicines that aren’t actually helping patients with unmet medical needs — and that often aren’t any improvement over what’s already on the market.

Source: Vox

Attention driver’s license holders from the great lands of New York, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and American Samoa: The Department of Homeland Security has no love for you.

[Update: Let’s add Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington to the list.]

In 2016, the final phase of the Real ID Act—passed in Congress way back in 2005 under the recommendation of your friends at the 9/11 Commission (never forget)—goes into effect. The Real ID Act defines “real IDs” as those that are obtained only with proof of U.S. citizenship. In the aforementioned States of the Damned, driver’s licenses do not require proof of citizenship and are considered “non-compliant” with the Real ID act, and thus they will no longer be acceptable forms of identification when boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft. This is a significant setback, as Travel + Leisure reports, because 38% of Americans don’t have passports.

Source: Flygirl

‘Earlier this year, a scan of 100,000 galaxies showed no signs of alien mega-civilizations, dashing the hopes of those longing for a close encounter of the extra-terrestrial kind. A follow-up analysis of the data suggests it’s even worse than we thought, concluding that advanced galaxy-spanning civilizations don’t exist in the local universe.’

Source: io9

“And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”. The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers.

Only it was a fake. It’s fairly easy to find photo or video ‘evidence’ to bolster a scurrilous political position (in this case, the anti-immigration argument that we are allowing Islamist infiltration), and the resulting misinformation can easily go viral. Corrections by investigative journalists or private citizens do not get anything like the notice that the original lies did. Here are six tools for digital information verification.

Source: Gizmodo

It’s normally just researchers that get to experiment at the LHC. But one physicist has decided to invite a series of bands to play around at the world’s largest science lab — and this is the result.

The first event of a new an initiative called Ex/Noise/CERN, that’s led by Dr. James Beacham, saw the experimental indie band Deerhoof set up their gear in CERN’s magnet test facility. In a press release, Beacham described what he was hoping to achieve:

“Musical curiosity is similar to scientific curiosity and, on a personal level, Deerhoof has inspired me as much as Einstein. They’re explorers and this sense of exploration is what you feel in the air at CERN right now, and so the pairing of Deerhoof and CERN was natural.”

This particular musical outing was in honour of the LHC’s recent ramp up to 13 TeV. The idea was to “draw inspiration from CERN physics and create impromptu musical arrangements amongst CERN equipment.”

The video below captures some of what happened during the day. It might not be melodic indie pop, but it is certainly interesting and exploratory kind of hard to understand, a bit like a musical version of what happens at CERN.

Source: Gizmodo

Via Flightclub: ‘Club Concorde, a group of ex-pilots, maintainers, engineers, airline execs and ConcVia : ‘orde enthusiasts has unveiled a plan that aims to put a Concorde back in the air by 2019, and supposedly they have a pile of cash to see their plans through to fruition.

It has been more than a decade since Concorde took its last flight, ending its career on October 24th, 2003. Examples are now strewn across the globe in the aviation museums and science centers where they were sent with no intention of ever flying again. As such, it is not as if you can just go out and buy a surplus Concorde.

…Or can you?..’

Via Motherboard: ‘On Thursday, Science magazine published a crucial and overdue commentary lamenting the current state of wildfire management on US public lands. Among the authors was Malcolm North, a plant ecologist at the US Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station in California.

As it turns out, the USFS was none too pleased about the piece or North’s name being attached to it. According to Valley Public Radio, the central California NPR affiliate, the agency has barred North from discussing the paper and had even attempted to prevent Science from publishing it.

“The Pacific Southwest Research Station says its role is to conduct and publish research, not to evaluate land management policy,” VPR’s Amy Quinton reports. “Editors at Science refused to hold the article from publication or remove North’s name and affiliation. A disclaimer was added telling readers that the content does not necessarily reflect the views of the US Forest Service.”

The Science commentary, which Motherboard covered in more depth here, basically argues that we’re doing wildfires all wrong. 98 percent of all fires are quashed before they can grow in size and consume their host forests’ overaccumulation of fuels. And so the accumulation continues year after year until a deadly, catastrophic wildfire hurricane shreds 70,000 acres in a weekend…’

Via BBC – Earth: ‘We think of psychological disorders like anxiety and depression as uniquely human problems, but many other species could be suffering from them too…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘Last Friday evening, numerous people in Jakarta, Indonesia reported and recorded mysterious, low trumpet-like sounds in the sky. Listen for yourself below. Scientists often try to explain away these strange noises as “Earth sounds” caused by shifting tectonic plates, atmospheric phenomena, geomagnetic activity, or the like. But we all know it’s really the trumpets of the apocalypse…”

Via Boing Boing: ‘Omar Ghabra won Twitter with these photos, and this quip: “An Arab-looking man of Syrian descent in a garage w/his accomplice building what appears to be a bomb. Arrest them.”The tweet was a response to the story everyone’s outraged about today: Ahmed Mohamed, the kid in Texas whose wonderful homemade clock sparked a racist reply by his school, and by authorities.Apple founder Steve Jobs, seen here in classic “garage” photos with Steve Wozniak, was the son of a Syrian migrant to the United States…’

Via The Ohio State University (thanks to Boing Boing): ‘Scientists have developed and validated a new method to identify which people are narcissistic: Just ask them.In a series of 11 experiments involving more than 2,200 people of all ages, the researchers found they could reliably identify narcissistic people by asking them this exact question (including the note):To what extent do you agree with this statement: “I am a narcissist.” (Note: The word “narcissist” means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)Participants rated themselves on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me).(How narcissistic are you? Take the test here.)Brad BushmanResults showed that people’s answer to this question lined up very closely with several other validated measures of narcissism, including the widely used Narcissistic Personality Inventory….’

Via Gawker: ‘After nearly three hours of monotone droning by a bunch of sweaty old people who will almost certainly never be president, tonight’s Republican debate finally delivered with a bizarre question about potential Secret Service names that produced incredibly absurd answers from every single candidate.

The final segment of the debate was devoted to free association-style questions. The dais was first asked which woman they would put on the $10 bill, with the most popular answer being: myyyy wiiiife. Then each candidate was prompted to offer what their Secret Service code name would be if they were elected president, and holy hell was each answer absolutely nuts.Here are the candidates’ real, actual answers, each of which delivers such a perfect morsel of conservative id:

• Chris Christie: “True Heart”
• John Kasich: “Unit One”
• Carly Fiorina: “Secretariat”
• Scott Walker: “Harley”
• Jeb Bush: “Ever-Ready”
• Donald Trump: “Humble”
• Ben Carson: “One Nation”
• Ted Cruz: “Cohiba”
• Marco Rubio: “Gator”
• Mike Huckabee: “Duck Hunter”
• Rand Paul: “Justice Never Sleeps”

Cohiba! Duck Hunter! Justice Never Sleeps! Secretariat!!!I swear this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.’

 

Via The Independent: ‘French scientists are preparing to wake up a 30,000-year-old ‘giant’ virus.

A team from the French National Centre for Scientific Research discovered the prehistoric virus, called Mollivirus sibericum, underground in north-eastern Siberian permafrost, reports CNET.

And now they plan to give it its first “wake-up call” since the last Ice Age…’

Via NASA: ‘New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.

“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa…’

Via i09: ‘A provocative new paper published in Nature suggests that neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may be transmissible through certain medical procedures. It’s an alarming claim—but one that will require more proof if it’s to be accepted by the scientific community.

… While performing an autopsy on eight individuals who died between the ages of 36 and 51, and who caught their CJD from contaminated HGH injections, the researchers unexpectedly discovered severe to moderate grey matter and vascular amyloid beta pathology in four of them. This was a surprise because of the relatively young age of the subjects, and because none of these patients had problematic mutations or predispositions to Alzheimer’s.

The researchers suspect that, when these individuals were administered their HGH treatments, the growth hormone was also contaminated with the amyloid beta protein, which then spread through their brains. This would suggest that the “seeds” responsible for certain neurodegenerative diseases can be transmitted during certain medical procedures or via contaminated surgical instruments…’

Via io9: ‘A small but vocal contingent of researchers – addressing fields ranging from physics to medicine to economics – has maintained that many, perhaps most, published studies are wrong. But how bad is this problem, exactly? And what features make a study more or less likely to turn out to be true?

We are two of the 270 researchers who together have just published in the journal Science the first-ever large-scale effort trying to answer these questions by attempting to reproduce 100 previously published psychological science findings…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘According to a New York Times article published in June 1927, a man with the name and address of Donald Trump’s father was arraigned after Klan members attacked cops in Queens, N.Y.nyttrump In an article subtitled “Klan assails policeman”, Fred Trump is named in among those taken in during a late May “battle” in which “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all.”

…To be clear, this is not proof that Trump senior—who would later go on to become a millionaire real estate developer—was a member of the Ku Klux Klan or even in attendance at the event. Despite sharing lawyers with the other men, it’s conceivable that he may have been an innocent bystander, falsely named, or otherwise the victim of mistaken identity during or following a chaotic event…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘The National Geographic magazine has been a nonprofit publication since inception in 1888, but that ends today. The long-running American publication becomes very much for-profit under a $725 million dollar deal announced today with 21st Century Fox, the entertainment company controlled by the family of Rupert Murdoch.Murdoch is a notorious climate change denier, and his family’s Fox media empire is the world’s primary source of global warming misinformation. Which would be no big deal here, I guess, were it not for the fact that the National Geographic Society’s mission includes giving grants to scientists…’

Via Big Think: ‘Near the end of his life, during a trip to Asia in 1968, Trappist monk, poet, theologian, and social activist Thomas Merton (shown below) came away from seeing ancient carved Buddhas deeply moved. “I don’t know what else remains,” Merton wrote, “but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.” Merton studied comparative theology not to reduce other faiths to some shadow of his own Christianity, but rather to synthesize them into some deeper, common belief that “pierced through the surface” to get “beyond the shadow and disguise.”

Zen Buddhism struck a chord within Merton as achieving the same sense of interior wholeness that mystics such as Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross had in the Christian tradition. For Merton, a man deeply steeped in words, however, writing failed to convey the wordless qualities of Zen. A Hidden Wholeness: The Zen Photography of Thomas Merton, a new exhibition to mark the centennial of Merton’s birth, demonstrates how Merton found in photography the perfect medium for his Zen studies, not just to make images of Zen, but also to practice Zen itself…’

For those of you still reading this as a weblog, at Follow Me Here… , you know the sidebar is still here, it is just hidden. You can click on the icon (three horizontal bars) in the upper right corner to reveal. How do you like the redesign?

“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

Via Quanta Magazine: ‘Explore the deepest mysteries at the frontier of fundamental physics, and the most promising ideas put forth to solve them….’

Via The Atlantic: Getting rid of belongings is generally seen as positive, even healthy—but when the need becomes compulsive, it can be a sign of a life-consuming disorder. And the cultural embrace of decluttering can make it hard for someone who does it compulsively to get help.

Via NYTimes.com: ’For generations, freshmen cadets at the United States Military Academy have marked the end of a grueling summer of training with a huge nighttime pillow fight that is billed as a harmless way to blow off steam and build class spirit.

But this year the fight on the West Point, N.Y., campus turned bloody as some cadets swung pillowcases packed with hard objects, thought to be helmets, that split lips, broke at least one bone, dislocated shoulders and knocked cadets unconscious. The brawl at the publicly funded academy, where many of the Army’s top leaders are trained, left 30 cadets injured, including 24 with concussions, according to West Point…’

9to5Google, via Paper

Via Boing Boing: ‘In the book The Man Who Wasn’t There, Anil Ananthaswamy explores mysteries of self, including the weirdness of autoscopic phenomena, a kind of hallucination in which you are convinced that you are having an out-of-body experience or face to face with your non-existent twin. From a BBC feature based on one of the book chapters…’

Of the lectures I have given, one of those that most fascinated my audience, and which I have therefore rolled out over and over to entertain, has been a roundup of odd and offbeat psychiatric disorders. These include autoscopic phenomena, as noted above, as well as Fregoli, Cotard’s, apotemnophilia, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, Munchausen’s (of course) and my personal favorite, Capgras, about some of which I have written here in the past and all of which challenge fundamental aspects of our perception of reality. Do a Google search on “odd unusual psychiatric|psychological syndromes” to explore these topics further.

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Via Vox: ‘On Sunday, the Obama administration announced that the peak formerly known as Mount McKinley will henceforth be known as “Denali,” its traditional Native Alaskan name.The mountain was officially named after President William McKinley in 1917, a gesture originally proposed by an Alaska gold prospector in recognition of McKinley’s support for the gold standard.The Denali name is widely supported by Alaskans regardless of ethnicity.Politicians from McKinley’s home state of Ohio are leading the opposition to the change.’

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Via The Atlantic: ‘From Berlin to Beijing, it seems just about anywhere is a bit like New York’s hippest borough….’

Via Salon.com: ‘The monster hunter isn’t quitting.

Do not believe the news reports that pinged around the world last month faster than the flick of a dragon’s tail.

Steve Feltham, full-time professional seeker of the Loch Ness Monster, holder of the Guinness World Record for longest continuous vigil for “Nessie,” has reached no conclusions about the cryptid that may or may not inhabit this freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands.

He has not determined that Nessie is a giant catfish. He has not ended his search. He is not walking away from his dream.

“I’m not leaving Loch Ness,” Feltham, 52, says in a video filmed inside the van where he lives and posted to his website. “Never have intended to. Never will, until we solve this mystery.”..’

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• Torn From The Headlines: Scary Beasties Of British Folklore…
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Via Salon.com: ‘Mike Huckabee. Scott Walker. Ben Carson. Each candidate’s grasp of basic biology is more tenuous than the next’s..’

Via Independent.UK: ‘Put simply, Danish researchers behind a new study believe that without humans, most of northern Europe would be home to bears, elephants and rhinoceroses: areas where they were historically hunted to extinction by Homo sapiens…’

Unsurprising.

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Via Matti Viikate – Newsvine: ‘Synthetic marijuana, also referred to as ‘replacement cannabis’, ‘K2’, and ‘Spice’, is a lab-produced mind-altering drug that aims to mimic the effects of marijuana, but is known to have unpredictable and sometimes dangerous effects, despite its marketing as a safe, legal alternative to marijuana. New York City’s police commissioner, William Bratton, recently said that the drug, which he referred to as “weaponised marijuana” is of “great and growing concern” to the city’s police force, which has seen a spike in hospitalisations from the drug..’

Via IFLScience: ‘After the heartbreaking tale of the famous lone Grand Canyon wolf, the first one in the area for 70 years, that was shot dead around Christmas last year, it’s time we had some good news. A pack of wolves has managed to establish itself in California…’

Via Antonia Malchick – Aeon: ‘For decades, Americans have been losing their ability, even their right, to walk. There are places in the United States – New York City, for example – where people walk as a matter of habit and lifestyle, commuting in ways familiar to residents of London or Paris. But there are vast blankets and folds of the country where the ability to walk – to open a door and step outside and go somewhere or nowhere without getting behind the wheel of a car – is a struggle, a fight. A risk…’

Via Walter Glannon – Aeon: ‘New brain implants can restore autonomy to damaged minds, but can they settle the question of whether free will exists? …’

Via IFLScience: ‘Forget LSD: eyes are the new high. Of course, we’re not talking about consuming them, but rather staring intensely into a pair for a prolonged period of time. Apparently, this can make people enter into an altered state of consciousness.

This intriguing discovery was made by vision researcher Giovanni Caputo from the University of Urbino in Italy, but it isn’t his first staring contest study. A few years ago, the scientist recruited 50 volunteers and got them to gaze upon their reflections in a mirror for 10 minutes in a dimly lit room. For many of them, it took less than one minute to start experiencing something trippy.

Their faces began to warp and change, taking on the appearance of animals, monsters or even deceased family members; a phenomenon imaginatively named the “strange-face illusion.” But it seems the bizarre effects are even more dramatic when the mirror is swapped for another person…’

Via National Geographic: ‘On International Orangutan Day, we take a look at these lovable tree-dwelling apes, whose numbers are plummeting fast due to deforestation.

Solitary and intelligent, the orangutan is the only great ape native to Asia—but it’s possible the continent may soon have none. That’s because orangutan numbers are dwindling as the animals are driven from their habitats by deforestation for palm oil plantations.

The island of Borneo may house only 54,000 of the endangered animal, and on Sumatra (map), just 6,600 remain, according to WWF. That’s a drop from possibly 230,000 of the primates a century ago.

But there’s one bright spot for this fiery-furred ape: Many companies have committed to only using palm oil from areas that weren’t destroyed by logging…’

Via IFLScience: ‘In what is sure to be highly controversial research, a new study claims to be able to predict a person’s risk of committing suicide with over 90% accuracy, using only a blood test coupled with a questionnaire.

According to the researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine, they have developed a simple test that looks for 11 biomarkers in a patient’s blood. When they coupled this with an app-based questionnaire, they say they were able to predict which individuals in a group of patients already being treated for psychiatric disorders would go on to develop suicidal thoughts over a period of two years…’

Via Quanta Magazine: ‘The physicist James Bullock explains how a complicated “dark sector” of interacting particles may illuminate some puzzling observations of the centers of galaxies…’

Via National Geographic: ‘After a Yellowstone grizzly with cubs killed a hiker, the park’s chief faced an agonizing decision—whether to let the bear go free or put her down…’

Via Motherboard: ‘A remotely operated underwater vehicle owned by BP was doing a routine check near one of its rigs off the coast of Angola when it stumbled across a giant glob of No Thank You…’

Via io9: ‘The Perseids is my favorite meteor shower of the year, and this year is likely to be the best one in recent memory. Here’s when, where, and how to watch it—and just what is going to make this year so spectacular…’

Via The Awl: ‘“A new report from Facebook into how users express laughter shows that ‘haha’ and its variants are by far the most common terms used on the social network. They accounted for 51.4 percent of mirth in the anonymized comments and posts looked at by Facebook’s data team, with laughter emoji claiming 33.7 percent, and ‘hehe’ and its cognates 13.1 percent. The once-mighty ‘lol’ only appeared in 1.9 percent of the text sampled by Facebook — a pretty staggering fall for an expression that was once synonymous with online txt speak. Although not surprising for such a venerable term, ‘lol’ proved slightly more popular with older users. Differences between generations were not heavily pronounced, but it was emoji that were most popular with users with the youngest median age, while ‘haha,’ ‘hehe,’ and ‘lol’ were favored by progressively older individuals.”..’

Via Neuroskeptic: ‘Meta-analyses are systematic syntheses of scientific evidence, most commonly randomized controlled clinical trials. A meta-analysis combines the results of multiple studies and can lead to new insights and more reliable results.

However, according to Italian surgeon Giovanni Tebala writing in Medical Hypotheses, meta-analyses are becoming too popular, and are in danger of taking over the medical literature.

…Why is this? Tebala suggests that researchers are turning to meta-analyses to bolster their CVs:

Randomized controlled trials require hard work and financial commitment, whereas meta-analyses and systematic reviews can be relatively easy to perform and often get published in high impact journals. Many researchers might decide to devote themselves to the latter approach.

…Tebala doesn’t actually spell out why the glut of meta-analyses is a problem for science; he seems to be concerned at the unfairness of meta-analysts getting credit for their work with “someone else’s data”.

Nonetheless I think there is a scientific problem, which is that as the ratio of meta-analyses to actual data increases, the scientific literature becomes dominated by interpretation and analysis resting on a limited amount of evidence. Put simply, the risk is that science will get “top heavy”…’

Via IFLScience: ‘We’re all screwed. Well, if you’re planning to stick around for a few more billion years.

Researchers have found that galaxies are losing energy at a rather alarming rate, and confirm that all energy in the universe will eventually dissipate into nothingness. A study of 200,000 galaxies found they had lost half their energy in just two billion years. “The universe is slowly dying,” a statement from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) somberly says.

The theory that the universe is dying through an increase in entropy is not new, but this is the most extensive analysis yet of what’s going on. The energy output of a large portion of space containing the galaxies was measured more precisely than ever before. It was studied in 21 wavelengths, from ultraviolet to the far infrared, and all were found to be decreasing…’

Via Gizmodo: ‘A Los Angeles County child is recovering from the plague, and public health agencies are searching the wilderness for the source of the infection.

It’s the third case of plague this year in the U.S. The first two both happened in Colorado, and both were fatal. Earlier this week, an adult in Pueblo County, Colorado, died of the plague, and back in June, the disease killed a Larimer County high school student.

There are about 7 cases of plague in the U.S. every year, mostly in the West, where the disease is endemic among wild mammals, especially rodents, in rural or wilderness areas…’

Via Gizmodo: ‘The Moon may be Earth’s kid brother, but Saturn’s moons seem more gnats on an elephant in this incredible image captured by the Cassini probe.

Pictured here are Saturn’s moons Mimas (right) and Dione (left) staring up at their behemoth of a planet, with the unilluminated side of the rings angled about one degree from the ring plane. They’re certainly large enough to be spotted, but at 240 and 698 miles across respectively, Mimas and Dione are quite a bit smaller than Earth’s moon (2160 miles across). And they’re total pipsqueaks on the scale of the Saturn system: The gas giant itself measures 75,400 miles across, and its ring system extends more than a thousand fold further out into space.

We all grew up learning that the gas giants are massive, but images like this really help put the numbers in perspective….’

Via Big Think: ‘In his final soliloquy, Stewart offered a three-part analysis of the bullshit being slung in America today, along with a warning….’

Via IFLScience: ‘Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created the animation to display the number of nuclear explosions that went off between 1945 and 1998: a staggering 2,053.

Beginning with the Manhattan Project’s first nuclear device detonated near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the number of explosions starts slowly at first and then quickly speeds up right through to Pakistan’s own nuclear tests in 1998.

Each explosion corresponds to a beep and a flash of color, with the totals for each country rapidly stacking up. It is especially poignant given that today is the 70th anniversary of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, “Little Boy”, at the end of World War Two.

Hashimoto created the animation in 2003, which is why more recent nuclear tests such as those by North Korea in 2006, 2009 and 2013 are excluded.’

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For the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, The New Yorker has published online the full text of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” to which the magazine devoted the entire editorial space of its August 31, 1946 issue. “It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon,” wrote the magazine’s editors, “and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”

Via IFLScience: ‘Picture the Arctic and you’re probably imagining vast expanses of pure, white ice or enormous cliffs of jagged glaciers surrounded by icy waters. However, the ice sheets of the Arctic are melting so quickly and in such large amounts that maps of the world must reflect these momentous changes. Atlas of the World makers National Geographic announced last year that there would be major changes made to the 10th edition of its map. In his announcement of plans to fight global warming, President Obama referred to these changes in a speech given at the White House. “Shrinking ice caps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart,” Obama said….’

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Via IFLScience: ‘It’s pretty hard to fathom just how big some things in the universe are, but this possible feature is so large that it borders on the ridiculous.

Astronomers think they have found a ring of nine gamma ray bursts (GRBs) inside galaxies that, together, measure 5 billion light-years across. For a comparison, that’s about 50,000 times bigger than the Milky Way, or more than one-ninth the size of the observable universe. The research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A GRB is an intense flash of gamma rays caused by a supernova, the dramatic death of a fiery star, and thus their detection indicates the presence of a galaxy – suggesting all nine of the GRBs are in separate galaxies. They are the brightest electromagnetic events in the universe, releasing more energy in a few seconds than the Sun in its entire 10 billion-year lifetime, and thus they can be used to detect distant galaxies.

While it is not one physical whole structure, the Hungarian-American team who made the discovery think the nine galaxies are gravitationally bound to each other – just as our Local Group contains the Milky Way and a few dozen other galaxies.

In this case, all the GRBs studied by a variety of observatories are about 7 billion light-years away from Earth, suggesting that we are seeing the structure “face on.” Alternatively, we may be seeing a projection of a “sphere.”

But there’s one problem. The structure, if confirmed, would break our current models of how large things can be; a previous theoretical limit stood at 1.2 billion light-years. On large scales, the cosmos should be uniform and not have structures like this….’

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Via Public Radio International: ‘While the graying Hiroshima Generations who survived the atomic bomb attack seven decades ago are struggling to pass their memories to the younger generations, much of the world has allowed that fateful morning on Aug 6, 1945 to slip from their minds.

About 66,000 people, mostly civilians, perished, according to a report prepared by the US Army one year after the attack. Another 69,000 were injured and tens of thousands more were affected by radiation disease.

But how to show the damage more clearly? We’ve developed an application that allows you to visualize the damage of the same atomic bomb on another location in today’s world, such as your hometown. You may be surprised at the extent of the damage….’

Via Big Think: ‘A vaccine that did not exist a year ago has proven 100 percent effective at preventing people who are at extremely high risk of infection from contracting the Ebola virus.

The recent trial took place in Guinea, a West African nation that, along with Liberia and Sierra Leone, was hit hard by an Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people since December 2013…

The vaccine, called rVSV-ZEBOV, is composed of “an attenuated livestock virus engineered to produce an Ebola protein…

Still, the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine is considered a first-generation tool, especially since it must be stored at –80° C and it protects against a limited number of species of the Ebola virus. Researchers are already hard at work developing second-generation iterations….’ 

Via Gizmodo: ‘When hitchBOT the hitchhiking robot started his journey in Boston two weeks ago he wanted to see the entire country. Unfortunately, he never made it out of the Northeast. The researchers who built hitchBOT announced today that they need to stop the experiment because hitchBOT was vandalized in Philadelphia.

From the researchers who built hitchBOT:

hitchBOT’s trip came to an end last night in Philadelphia after having spent a little over two weeks hitchhiking and visiting sites in Boston, Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead, and New York City. Unfortunately, hitchBOT was vandalized overnight in Philadelphia; sometimes bad things happen to good robots. We know that many of hitchBOT’s fans will be disappointed, but we want them to be assured that this great experiment is not over. For now we will focus on the question “what can be learned from this?” and explore future adventures for robots and humans.

The goal of the hitchhiking trip was to see how humans would interact with hitchBOT. And apparently the answer was “not well.” HitchBOT has been around the world, including trips across the entirety of Canada and Germany without major incident. But America is clearly a hard land for our robot brothers and sisters….’

Via io9: ‘Schulz, the author of the New Yorker piece, feels safe enough to continue spending her summers in the Northwest, the area that will be affected by the earthquake. In her follow up bit about survival advice, she strongly suggests that readers avoid spending even one night in the tsunami inundation zone.

“Of the almost thirteen thousand people expected to die in the Cascadia event, one thousand will perish in the earthquake,” Schulz writes. “The others will be killed by the tsunami—and they amount to nearly one in five people who are in the zone when the water arrives. That’s a grim enough figure that it changed my own beach-going behavior in the Northwest. Go to the coast by day, for sure. But if you’re staying overnight, book a vacation rental, hotel room, or campsite outside the inundation zone.”…’

Via Gizmodo: A former robotics researcher who helped develop military robots says they cannot do anything for which they were not programmed. And besides, the bad guys don’t play by the rules. Make any sense??

Related articles

• Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Call for Ban on Autonomous Military Robots

Via Salon.com:

‘Future president Lindsey Graham declares victory in the war with Iran he’s probably (definitely) going to start…’

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• Lindsey Graham Destroys Cell Phone

I recall seeing De Düva at the late lamented Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge in the early ’70’s. After twenty minutes or so, a member of the audience suddenly stood up in the front row, threw his arms heavenward, and shouted out to the audience, “My God! I’m so stoned I can understand Swedish!”

A De Düva lexicon, via The New York Times:

‘Mooska: Cow

Zooner-or-lätsker: Eventually

Skå she vinska, you godda set her freesk: If she wins, you must set her free.

Me yoost haf dis schmatte waschen: I just had this clothing washed.

H20ska: Water

Phalliken zymbol: Cigar…’

Related articles

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ViaThe New York Times: ‘While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become the steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governing: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies. That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.

“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction….’

Via Gizmodo: ‘Utter the words—and we don’t suggest you do—“charge my phone 100 percent” to Siri, and your iPhone will try and call the emergency services, after a five-second grace period in which you can cancel it. But why?

It might be a bug. Or, as The Verge suggests, it could be a feature that allows you to secretly call the police if you’re in trouble. It seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened (like a woman getting in touch with Pizza Hut to save her from a knife attack). So far Apple is yet to confirm why it’s a thing. Any ideas?…’

Gull in harrying pursuit after eagle grabs one of its mates out of a nest Guess who won?

Via io9

Via io9: ‘For its size, the coffee berry borer makes your caffeine consumption look almost laughably manageable, downing an amount that relative to its body mass would be like a person taking 500 shots of espresso in one day—and its habit is becoming a real threat to coffee supplies….’

Murray Gell-Mann lecturing in 2007

Via io9: ‘After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they’ve found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks.

Quarks are a series of charged sub-atomic particles that come together to form larger particles—such as protons and neutrons, which are each made of three of the things (a class of particle referred to as baryons). First proposed in 1964 by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, their existence changed the way people thought about particle physicists.

But quarks can come together to form other entities, too. For a long time, people have speculated that another class of quark ensemble, called the pentaquark, could in theory exist. The pentaquark is, perhaps unsurprisingly, supposed to be made up of five smaller entities—four quarks and an anti-quark. Now, for the first time, researchers working on the LHCb experiment at the Collider have found evidence for their existence….’

Via Vox: ‘— and he will be a particularly towering figure in the history of American progressivism….’

Via Vox: ‘Iran hawks displeased with the nuclear deal struck between Iran, Russia, China, the United States, and the European Union have an awful lot of complaints. But if you look closely at what they are saying, you’ll notice something funny. They don’t actually have any arguments about what Obama has done wrong or how a different administration would park the situation in a better place. What they have instead are a lot of talking points, MacGuffins, red herrings, and distractions that aim to divert attention from the core issue — hawks’ desire to avoid diplomacy and have a war….’

Related articles

• Here’s the full text of the Iran nuclear deal

Via Vox: ‘The political battle over the Iran deal is going to be the biggest foreign policy fight of Obama’s presidency. Congress has the power to destroy the deal, and Republicans will do their damnedest to try to use it, however unlikely it is that they’ll succeed.

But this is more than just a policy dispute, and that’s why the fighting is taking place in more than just Congress. Cable news is spinning itself into a froth over whether the Iran deal is a horrifying catastrophe or a golden day in global progress. Odds are good that you’ve already gotten sucked into, or at least worked to avoid, an argument on Facebook over this.

People have strong feelings about this deal — very strong feelings. Maybe that’s partly because they are just that emotionally invested in the details of arms control agreements, or in the triangulations of American Middle East policy. Or maybe there’s something more going on here….’

Via Vox: ‘Why nuclear experts love the Iran deal…’ 

WIRED.

Via National Geographic: ‘A new study makes the case for building a supersize space telescope that would create images five times sharper than Hubble’s….’

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• Astronomers call on peers to dream up deep-space telescope of the future

IFLScience.

Via IFLScience: ‘In the wake of World War II, the United Sates military was suddenly worried about and keen to test out the threats posed by biological warfare. They started experiments looking into how bacteria and their harmful toxins might spread, only using harmless stand-in microbes. They tested these on military bases, infecting soldiers and their families who lived with them, but eventually they stepped things up a notch. Disclosed in 1977, it turns out that the U.S. military carried out 239 secret open-air tests on its own citizens….’

Boing Boing.

Via Boing Boing: ‘A mama bear with two cubs made a habit of sneaking into a mobile home in British Columbia, Canada and raiding the freezer. On one of these visits, conservation officer Bryan Casavant was ordered to kill all three bears. But after putting down the mama bear, he didn’t have the heart to kill the babies.

For his good deed, Casavant is now suspended from his job and under investigation. Fortunately, he’s got a lot of public support for his heroic act….’

Via Boing Boing: ‘The kind of man whose handlers have to explain that he doesn’t actually want to fuck his own daughter is not the kind of man the press lets go quietly into the night….’

Boing Boing.

 Via 3quarksdaily: ‘Prosopagnosia is a neuropsychological condition that impairs the sufferer’s ability to recognize faces. It’s also known as face-blindness, and those who are afflicted lack a skill that comes naturally to most humans, forcing them to find ways to work around this deficit….’

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Via Gizmodo: ‘At a UNESCO climate conference last week, scientists declared (once again) that climate change is already happening. The evidence is our wacky weather—even Paris, where the conference was held, was broiling in a historic heatwave. But the biggest red flag is the rise in peak global mean temperatures: Which means rising sea levels will almost certainly be a reality, too.

As a lead up to the bigger UN climate conference this fall, scientists are now modeling two different warming scenarios to help humans plot a roadmap for how to avoid these futures. Status quo—or even going back to “preindustrial levels”—is no longer an option, even if we ceased all carbon-emitting activity right now. One scenario is if the planet will warm by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which would be very bad. The other is if the planet will warm by 4 degrees Celsius, which would be very, very bad.

In this month’s Science, a study looked at these warming trends and made some estimates for how these temperature increases would help to accelerate the melting of polar ice sheets. Two or three degrees Celsius would see a rise in sea levels of at least six meters. That’s about 20 feet.

So say we manage to only raise temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius—the best-case scenario. A map made by Climate Central allows you to visit any city to see exactly how much coastlines will change. While there are plenty of usual suspects in this list—Miami would be totally underwater, of course, and we got previews of how rising ocean levels would affect New York City and New Orleans during Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina—there are also some areas that will see a surprising loss of land….’

Of course, I went right to my home city, Boston. The results were quite scary… and that’s only 2 degrees.

Via io9: ‘New Horizons is racing to Pluto so quickly, we’re literally learning new things every single day. Exploration is a true planet-wide “Today I learned…” moment: we now know what makes up Pluto’s atmosphere, what makes up its ice cap, and exactly how big it is….’

WIRED.

Via The Week: ‘You might think that TV and movies and the general mobility of the population would mean accents are getting more and more similar across the country. This turns out not to be the case. Kids don’t learn their accents from TV; they learn them from the people around them. And different regions are in some ways becoming more different from each other….’

Via Neuroskeptic:

‘This is without a doubt the strangest thing I’ve ever read in the pages of a scientific journal. It far outshines the previous record-holder. Otto Rössler is himself a remarkable researcher. A few years ago he was part of an effort that unsuccesfully sued CERN in an attempt to prevent the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from switching on. Rössler expressed concern that the high-energy physics of the LHC might create a black hole, and thus destroy the world….’

Via Mind Hacks: ‘According to a report from BBC News the Pope ‘plans to chew coca leaves’ during his visit to Bolivia. Although portrayed as a radical encounter, this is really a return to cocaine use after a long period of abstinence in the papal office….’

Via The New York Times: ‘Welcome to calcio storico, a centuries-old competition in Florence with very few rules and the sort of human wreckage generally associated with the gladiators….’ .

Via io9: ‘Since the Hubble launched, we’ve been seeing stunning image of the crowded universe. Most of the images come accompanied by assurances that what we see in the images is just the start. Astronomers have been excitedly guessing at the amount of faint, distant galaxies that they can’t see. Lurkers surely outnumbered visible galaxies.

New simulations done on Blue Waters, a supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications indicate that that isn’t the case. Researchers at Michigan State University simulated the formation of the early universe. The number of bright, luminous galaxies that the simulations predicted just about synced up with the data we can see from the Hubble. But the simulations indicated that number of faint galaxies, which the Hubble can’t see, wasn’t anywhere near what previous predictions had estimated. Conservative estimates reduce the number of faint galaxies ten times, but it’s just possible that the universe has only one hundredth the faint lurker galaxies we previously thought it did….’

Via Salon: ‘Bill Kristol believes we’re on our way to polygamy, while Bobby Jindal shows GOP is the party of stupid after all…’

Via Salon.com: ‘The real story about the NATO buildup that the New York Times won’t tell you.

Our leaders and media push time-worn nonsense about American innocence, while taking aggressive moves. Look out…’

Via Gawker: ‘Appearing on Marc Maron’s podcast today, President Obama addressed what is perhaps one of the longest-living conspiracies in America: the existence of black helicopters. They’re real!

“There are black helicopters,” he said, “but we generally don’t deploy them on U.S. soil.”…’

Via Salon.com: ‘Half of it is nuts, and about half of it could come from a more-or-less mainstream racist politician of the Jesse Helms or Lee Atwater school.

It gives the lie to the ruling conservative meme that Roof was just a loan wacko with no affinities with the white-militia movement that the respectable right has tried to keep offstage. It also shows how the accused killer of nine in a Charleston church has roots in weird ideas that are part of even the think-tank culture of the right: Roof’s manifesto is a kind of distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection of Tea Party-era conservative white America’s core beliefs, and it shares the ahistorical way many conservatives deal with race….’

Via Motherboard: ‘Your body is capable of simulating suffocation in one highly bizarre and accidental circumstance known usually as sleep paralysis. It’s a sensation-slash-circumstance potent enough to generate enough folklore throughout human history to fill volumes, most of it gravitating towards the victim being tortured by witches or demons. In a human history full of flayings, scaphism, and other wildly creative ways to induce misery in others, sleep paralysis remains even beyond our reach: the realm of demons.

For whatever reason, the witch or demon left me alone for about 10 years. Between 2000 and 2003, they were after me every night, sometimes several times before morning, and I thought for sure that eventually I’d wake up once just in time to die for real. The distance between what sleep paralysis felt like most times and actual death felt to be about three or four heartbeats and one terrifyingly labored breath. Although that’s not totally accurate.

The distance often didn’t feel like anything at all. Sleep paralysis itself feels like just-death or the crux of the dying process, or what you might imagine it to feel like when you’re being afraid of dying….’

Via NYTimes ‘The feminist writer Germaine Greer once declared: “Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.” This year, that just might happen for good.

Nina Simone is striking posthumous gold as the inspiration for three films and a star-studded tribute album, and she was name-dropped in John Legend’s Oscar acceptance speech for best song. This flurry comes on the heels of a decade-long resurgence: two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, and the sampling of her signature haunting contralto by hip-hop performers including Jay Z, the Roots and, most relentlessly, Kanye West.’

Via Boing Boing: ‘At 6:35PM last night a man with his hand wrapped in a towel flagged down the police, apparently seeking help. The police thought he had a gun under the towel on his extended arm, and ordered him to drop it. At least one officer fired and hit the victim in the head, leaving him in critical condition. He was unarmed….’

Via Boing Boing: ‘In just three days 10,000 dogs will be poisoned, beaten, killed and cooked as part of Yulin, China’s annual dog-eating festival. Many of these dogs are family pets stolen from people’s homes. Although this festival is in its eighth year, protesting has never been as strong as it is this year, with close to a million #StopYulin2015 tweets leading the way. Animal rights groups around the world are working to stop this year’s canine mass murder, including many in China….’

This is a country poised to join the community of ‘civilized’ nations??

Stephen Burt in The New Yorker: ‘This pedestrian term is actually the key to my historical period.

A disputatious panel at last year’s professional conference revealed the surprising state of the field (it’s as bad as you think).

My historical period, properly understood, includes yours.

What looked like a moment of failure, confusion, or ugliness in this well-known work is better seen as directions for reading the whole.

A problem you thought you could solve defines your field; you can’t imagine the field without the problem.

The only people able to understand this work properly cannot communicate that understanding to you.

Those two apparently incompatible versions of a thing are better regarded as parts of the same, larger thing.

Quantitative methods have an unexpected use.

Analytical tools developed for, and strongly associated with, a well-defined set of things in fact apply to a much larger set of things.

A public event simultaneous with, but apparently unrelated to, a famous art work in fact shaped that work’s composition or reception.

This famous thing closely resembles, and therefore responds to, that slightly earlier, less famous thing.

If you teach that old thing in this new way, your students will like it.

If you teach that old thing in this new way, your students will like you.

Before a given date, a now obscure, once omnipresent theory meant that all of culture was somehow different.

After a given date, a new technology meant that all of culture was somehow different.

The name we’ve been using for this stuff is anachronistic. Here’s a better name.

Truth-claims from our discipline cannot be properly judged without expertise that almost no one in our discipline has.

Our discipline should study its own disciplinary formation; that study proves that our discipline shouldn’t exist.

An old, prestigious thing still deserves its prestige, but for a heretofore undiscovered reason.

This feature of modern life began slightly earlier than you thought, and my single text proves it.

Please adopt my buzzword.

This author, normally seen as opposed to certain bad things, in fact supported them without realizing it.

This author, normally seen as naïve or untrained, is in fact very self-aware, and hence more like us.

That obscure, élite thing once had a popular audience.

This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.

A supposedly fanatical, militant movement that readers have been taught to fear makes perfect sense to those who support it.

The true meaning of a famous work can be recovered only through juxtaposition with this long obscure historical moment or artifact.

I found a very small thing in an archive, but I can relate it to a big thing.

To see what this thing meant to its first readers, you must attend meticulously to the physical contexts in which the thing first appeared.

This is why we can’t have nice things….’

‘

What separates living things from everything else? From AI to viruses, the line is fuzzier than we might expect..’ (Aeon Video).