’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?

Related articles

• ARGH! ARGH ARGH ARGH!!!!! – Reporting science isn’t that hard.
• If you drink these beers…
• Beer Injury Update
• Beer and Bullwhip: What happens as you drink?

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
• The Blair Witch Project (1999)
• Mel’s 5 Second Review: The Blair Witch Project
• 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?
• Sorry, It Looks Like Lobsters and Crabs Feel Pain
• Crabs nurse their wounds and may feel pain
• Do invertebrates feel pain?
• Lobsters and crabs “feel pain”

‘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).

Why you should care about the kakapo: ‘Conservationists in New Zealand are celebrating after an extremely rare kakapo chick hatched from a cracked egg held together by nothing more than tape and glue. The bird joins a global kakapo population of just 125 birds – but what makes these animals so unique and why are they worth saving?

‘The United States Geological Survey (USGS) issued a press release yesterday indicating that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake that struck Prague, Oklahoma in 2011 was unintentionally human-induced.

The USGS claims that the magnitude 5.0 earthquake triggered by waste-water injection the previous day “trigger[ed] a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, [which] has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from waste-water injection.”

Injection wells are considered by some to be the most environmentally sound method of disposing of waste-water — which is a byproduct of both hydrofracking and conventional oil production — because they use the earth itself to both filter and contain the pollution.

The decade-long explosion of energy-producing facilities in the central United States has, according to a recent article in the journal Geology, led to an 11-fold increase in the number of earthquakes occurring in areas that are typically tectonically calm, including Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado in the past four years alone…’ (The Raw Story).

How can we practice religion if we can’t discriminate? ‘The “liberty” crowd, led by Ross Douthat of the Times, braces itself for persecution of its views.’ (Salon.com)

“It’s unimaginable that a woman acting in self-defense, who injured no one, can be given what amounts to a life sentence,” Free Marissa Now spokeswoman Helen Gilbert said in a statement on the proposed sentence. “This must send chills down the spine of every woman and everyone who cares about women and every woman in an abusive relationship.” (Salon.com).

‘Cam Magee and Caitlin S. Griffin created a infographic that crosses Shakespeare with the people from bathroom signs. It shows every death from the tragedies, plus one of the most famous stage directions ever, from The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” ‘ (io9).

‘The fact is that Russia’s Ukraine move is an act of weakness, not strength — an act, as Kerry aptly characterized it, anachronistic in both moral and strategic terms. The fact that Russia is trying something like this exposes the country’s global strategy as fundamentally mismatched to 21st century realities. There isn’t a new Cold War.’ (ThinkProgress).

‘Western leaders are stunned because they haven’t realized Russia’s owners no longer respect Europeans the way they once did after the Cold War. Russia thinks the West is no longer a crusading alliance. Russia thinks the West is now all about the money.’ — Ben Judah (POLITICO Magazine).

‘BOISE, Idaho — TO the chief counsel of the Idaho State Legislature:

In light of the bill permitting guns on our state’s college and university campuses, which is likely to be approved by the state House of Representatives in the coming days, I have a matter of practical concern that I hope you can help with: When may I shoot a student?’ (NYTimes op ed).

‘How a rebel psychologist challenged one of the 20th century’s biggest—and most dangerous—ideas…’ (Medium).

‘A team of oddball inventors claim they are developing a headset that translates a canine’s thoughts into words.’ (Salon.com).

Acclaimed French Filmmaker Is Dead at 91: I was obsessed with ‘L’Annee Derniere a Marienbad’ for several years…  (NYTimes.com obit).

Kevin Underhill, the very funny lawyer behind Lowering the Bar, a very funny law-blog, has published a book of weird laws through the ages, called The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance and Other Real Laws That Human Beings Have Actually Dreamed Up, Enacted, and Sometimes Even Enforced…

Humanity’s inventiveness in making dumb rules is really boundless. Underhill’s snarky commentary brings to life such rules as:

* Ala. § 34-6-7, which forbids secret passages leading from billiard rooms

* Ark. HR Con Res 1016, which sets out the official possessive form of Arkansas (it’s “Arkansas’s”)

* Ga. Code Ann § 43-43A-I, which establishes that a pay toilet is not a coin-operated amusement

* Or. HR Con Res 12, which sets out Oregon’s official state microbe (brewer’s yeast!)

* Tex. penal code § 43.23(g) which exempts Texas lawmakers from the state’s five-device-limit on sex-toys

* Australia’s Goods and Services Tax Act § 165-55, which gives tax commissioners the power to “treat a particular event that actually happened as not having happened;” and “Treat a particular event that did not actually happen as having happened” (and a lot more contrafactual goodness)

* Lei No 3.770 of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, which requires cellular phone companies to extend a 50% discount on airtime to stutterers

* German Civil Code §§960-61, 962, 963 and 964, which set out the rules requiring beekeepers to chase after their errant swarms, rules for adjudicating the mingling of swarms chased by more than one beekeeper; and rules for removing your swarming bees from other beekeepers’ hives…’ (Boing Boing).

‘Perfect icebreakers to jumpstart a conversation are difficult to come by. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of depressing facts that are a surefire way to get people talking. Regale fellow party-goers with tales of the world’s loneliest animal, or bring down the mood with some harrowing statistics regarding our favorite medical practice.’ (Mashable).

‘To the country at large, he insisted on remaining a breezy entertainer with all the gravitas of a Jimmy Durante or Dean Martin. Fortunately, that image is now being deeply reëxamined. This month, the publication of Thomas Brothers’s “Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism” and the Off Broadway opening of Terry Teachout’s “Satchmo at the Waldorf” (which follows his 2009 biography, “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” which was reviewed in the magazine by John McWhorter) provide a rich, nuanced picture of what was behind Armstrong’s public face.’ (The New Yorker).

‘People in a vegetative state showed signs of awareness after electric brain stimulation – and minimally conscious people were able to communicate again…’ (New Scientist).

‘Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.’ (NYTimes Magazine).

‘Storms lashing the British coast last month revealed a strange new sight off the west coast of Wales, near the village of Borth: the stumps of hundreds of tree trunks, rising out of the sand, like broken teeth.

Could this be part of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a mythical kingdom believed to have disappeared beneath the waves thousands of years ago? Has Wales’s very own Atlantis been found?’ (National Geographic).

‘NASA astronomers nearly doubled the number of alien worlds known to humanity on Wednesday, reporting the discovery of 715 planets located in nearby solar systems.

The discoveries bring the total number of known planets outside our solar system—so-called exoplanets—to roughly 1,700.

Launched in 2009, NASA’s $591 million Kepler Space Telescope has now discovered most of the planets orbiting nearby stars.

“We’ve hit the motherlode; we’ve got a veritable exoplanet bonanza,” says Kepler co-leader Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The newly announced exoplanets reinforce the view that most solar systems around sunlike stars have smaller-size planets.

Most of those planets range in width from Earth-size (on the smaller side) to Neptune-size (on the larger). That’s quite a change from the Jupiter-size planets that were often spotted orbiting nearby stars during the early planet searches that started in 1995.’ (National Geographic).

‘The practice is impractical as well as immoral. It harms prisoners, costs too much, and leads to more crime.’ (Slate.com)

‘Musical preferences have become increasingly uniform across the country, but there are still some pretty strong regional preferences. This map breaks down those distinctive preferences along state lines.

The map is the work of Paul Lamere, who used musical data from 250,000 listeners through streaming service The Echo Nest, where he’s the Director of Developer Platform.

What it’s not, however, is a map of the most popular music in each state, which tends to crossover quite a bit between individual states. It’s the most distinctive music, the music that’s listened to more in that particular state than anywhere else in the rest of the country.’ (io9).

‘Johnathan was on death row when we fell in love. Nothing could have prepared me for witnessing his execution…’ (Salon.com).

‘Wolf eels are pretty ugly in general, but this one—this one is the one that the rest of the wolf eels make fun of in school.’ (Gizmodo).

‘Out-group homogeneity bias exists in almost all societies, and almost all subgroups of societies. No matter who a person is, or who they are friends with, turn to get them to look at some other group and they’ll say, “They’re all the same.” The other people in someone’s group of friends, co-workers, or acquaintances are wildly different individuals. All other groups are locked in a stultifying or even threatening homogeneity. At its most pernicious, out-group homogeneity bias affects how people look at other races or the people in other countries. Insiders are a group of individuals, each with their own hopes and dreams. The outsiders are a teeming mass, barely distinguishable from one another. In lighter situations, it can be nothing more than a human trait worth a bit of a chuckle. One study of sororities on a college campus found that each sorority thought they were more diverse than every other sorority.’ (io9)

‘A longshot push to get the professional association of US psychologists to consider banning its members from providing aid to military interrogations failed on Friday, but gathered enough support to make supporters optimistic about a follow-on effort in August.

A resolution brought by University of Dallas psychologist Scott Churchill to add the interrogations ban to the agenda of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) legislative body received the support of 53% of representatives to the group’s biannual convention.

That didn’t clear the two-thirds threshold required to add the proposed ban to the agenda for this weekend’s conference. But the simple majority showing prompted Nadine Kaslow, the APA president, to express her openness to adding consideration of the proposed ban to the body’s next meeting.’ (theguardian.com).

We Must Start Treating It Like One of the World’s Deadliest Diseases: ‘A report says loneliness is more deadly than obesity – the challenge now is to help lonely people connect.’ (Alternet).

‘Early Egyptian maps show south as up. In medieval European maps, east replaced it. Now north is always on top. Blame Byzantine monks and Majorcan Jews.’ (Al Jazeera America).

‘It was found in Baja California, in the water, scuttling about. It’s an isopod — a many legged, many jointed, bottom-crawler, related to prawns and crabs and it happily eats dead things. Scavengers aren’t that particular about what’s for dinner. When they find it, they eat it.

This particular isopod was big, almost a foot long, weighing over 2 pounds. In 2007, it was taken from Mexican waters and brought to the Toba Aquarium on the east coast of Japan, where it was displayed as “Giant Isopod No. 1.” At Toba, they don’t name their animals Freddy or Hiroto. They give them scientific-ish numbers. No. 1 was the first of eight captive isopods, but it was about to become the most famous animal at the aquarium.’ (Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

‘People born with Down syndrome have always been considered to be incurably developmentally delayed—until now. In the past few years a number of laboratories have uncovered critical drug targets within disabled chemical pathways in the brain that might be restored with medication. At least two clinical trials are currently studying the effects of such treatments on people with Down syndrome. Now geneticist Roger Reeves of Johns Hopkins University may have stumbled on another drug target—this one with the potential to correct the learning and memory deficits so central to the condition.’ (Salon).

We’re mad because people should be better: “Anger is really a sign of hope — and belief that the world can, and must, be better than it is…” — Alain de Botton (Salon).

‘If the bloodshed in Kiev turns into civil war, the conflict will have a ripple effect across the European Union…’ (Salon)

The skinny on the dairy paradox: ‘It’s enough to make you weep into your skinny latte. The “dairy fat paradox” is the suggestion that if you opt for low-fat versions of dairy products you are more likely to become obese than people who eat full-fat versions.

Two recent studies have added weight to this idea. A Swedish study of 1782 men in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care says that consumption of full-fat dairy products is correlated with a lower risk of developing central obesity – excessive weight gain around the abdomen. A separate and more recent meta-analysis of 16 relevant studies in the European Journal of Nutrition echoes the weight-gain link.

Jon White asks US nutritionist Walter Willett of Harvard School of Public Health for his views on the evidence…’ (New Scientist).

‘For the first time, we have telescopes strong enough to see the radioactivity at the heart of the supernova known as Cas A. What scientists have seen there helps unravel the mystery of how a star dies.’ (CNET).

‘…[I]n the small town of Weesp, in Holland—that bastion of social progressivism—at a dementia-focused living center called De Hogeweyk, aka Dementiavillage, the relationship between patients and their care is serving as a model for the rest of the world.’ (Gizmodo)

‘When the Universe came into being, it was a kind of hot soup of elementary particles—and now scientists believe it could have been rumbling with thunder caused by Higgs boson bubbles.

This video, created by researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland, shows a visualization of how the early Universe could have formed.’ (Gizmodo)

Related articles

• Higgs Boson Explained By Peter Higgs In 120 Seconds (VIDEO)
• Higgs boson, key to the universe, wins Nobel physics prize
• After the Large Hadron Collider, an Even Larger Hadron Collider?
• Why Higgs boson is like a tequila slammer

‘Although Professor Bax’s decoding is still only partial, it has generated a lot of excitement in the world of codebreaking and linguistics because it could prove a crucial breakthrough for an eventual full decipherment.

“My aim in reporting on my findings at this stage is to encourage other linguists to work with me to decode the whole script using the same approach, though it still won’t be easy. That way we can finally understand what the mysterious authors were trying to tell us,” he added.

“But already my research shows conclusively that the manuscript is not a hoax, as some have claimed, and is probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language.” ‘ (beds.ac.uk).

Related articles

• Another Possible Voynich Breakthrough
• The Unread: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript
• The Voynich Again, No I don’t have one…
• Voynich Manuscript Has Real Message After All, Say Scientists
• The Voynich Manuscript – World’s Most Mysterious Book
• Has the Voynich manuscript been decoded? Mysterious 15th century text may be written in a lost AZTEC language
• The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript
• 100-Year-Old Hoax May Be 600-Year-Old Code

‘…The whole planet is getting warmer, which means that temperature zones are shifting. Warmer areas are expanding, pushing cooler zones closer to the North and South Poles, so that the meadow, the forest, the tundra, the desert, the plains — wherever you live — your ecosystem is beginning to shift. Over the decades, the climate you prefer has started to migrate away from you, which raises an intriguing question: “If I’m standing in a landscape,” asked Stanford ecologist Scott Loarie a few years ago, “how far do I have to travel in order to change my temperature” – to get back to the climate that suits me? Loarie, Chris Field, and their colleagues at the Carnegie Institution for Science gathered all the data they could from climate change studies in order to measure “temperature velocity,” or, as Scott put it in a podcast at the time, “How fast is temperature change sweeping across the Earth’s surface?”

In 2009, they came up with an answer, published in the science journal, Nature. As a global average, they said, temperatures are changing at a rate of 0.42 kilometers — or roughly, a quarter mile a year, which means that if you are standing on a patch of earth, climate zones are moving at a rate (on average) of about 3.8 feet every day.’ (Krulwich Wonders… NPR).

Related articles

• Shifting climate zones portend massive ecosystem upheaval
• Fast-moving climate zones speed extinction
• Homeless Animals Can Blame Climate Change for Their Untimely Deaths
• Climate change threatens crunchy, tart apples.
• Shift in Earth’s climate zones accelerating with global warming
• Warmer temps push tropical birds up and off mountains
• Fast-Moving Climate Zones Speed Extinction
• Climate Change : As regional temperatures shift with climate change, many plants and animals will need to relocate to make sure they stay in the range of temperatures they’re used to.

‘Science tells us that taking most vitamins is worthless — but here’s a few that buck the trend…’ — Joseph Stomberg, Smithsonian.com (Salon).

‘…[T]here are some actual events that are actually scheduled to actually happen in the next 1,000 years. They are also, of course, subject to change without notice. So open up your calendars and mark these dates in the coming millennium…’ (The Protojournalist : NPR).

Related articles

• Top 5 Cultures Whose Calendars Would Break Your Concept Of Time

‘When we peer into the fog of the deep future what do we see – human extinction or a future among the stars?’ (Aeon)

‘Scientists used to scan the skies for messages from alien civilisations. Now they go looking for their ruins…’  – Paul Gilster (Aeon)

‘A major earthquake wouldnt just be disastrous in its own right — it could trigger an even deadlier chain reaction.’ (Salon.com).

‘If SETI is giving us no evidence of extraterrestrials, maybe it’s because we’re looking on too large a scale. What if, in other words, truly advanced intelligence, having long ago taken to non-biological form, finds ways to maximize technology on the level of the very small? Thus de Garis’ interest in femtotech, a technology at the level of 10-15 meters. The idea is to use the properties of quarks and gluons to compute at this scale, where in terms of sheer processing power the improvement in performance is a factor of a trillion trillion over what we can extrapolate for nanotech.’ (Gizmodo).

America’s double standard on politicizing the Olympics: ‘I hate my sports mixed with jingoism, but it’s the only way to get them these days in the United States. To be sure, this isn’t exclusively an American problem, but I’m an American viewer watching American television, so it’s my problem, whether I want it to be or not. The sanitization of American politics in sport, like the celebration of militarism, illuminates the profound connection between corporate sponsorship and plutocratic governance.’ (Salon.com).

‘What do Beethoven, David Bowie, Green Day, Mozart, *NSYNC, Pete Seeger, Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, The Supremes, Rihanna, and many others all have in common? The Andalusian Cadence! Also known as the Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord–sometimes written as i-bVII-bVI-V (or, in the key of A, the descending sequence A, G, F, E)–this sequence of four notes, this musical pattern, chord progression, or bass line shows up throughout the ages in all styles and genres, underlying music that ranges from sad to joyful, delicate to badass.

David Garland has assembled more than 50 recordings of music from over five centuries to vividly make the case that this four-note progression, the Andalusian Cadence, is the world’s most-used musical sequence.’ (WNYC).

Why Sochi’s “above and beyond” what we’ve seen before: ‘Dave Zirin, author of “Bad Sports,” tells Salon about graft, LGBT activism, Putin and why athletes will defy him…’ (Salon.com).

Pulitzer-Winning Poet With a Naturalist’s Precision Dies at 88: ‘Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose spare, deceptively simple lines explored some of the most complex aspects of human existence — birth and death, evanescence and renewal, and the events large and small conjoining them all — died on Thursday at her home in Warner, N.H. She was 88.Her death was announced by her daughter Judith Kumin, who said that her mother had been in declining health for the last year and a half.The author of essays, novels, short stories and children’s books as well as poetry, Ms. Kumin pronounced KYOO-min, like the spice was praised by critics for her keen ear for the aural character of verse — the clash and cadence of meter, the ebb and flow of rhyme — and her naturalist’s eye for minute observation.’ (NYTimes obituary)

‘It seems the Loch Ness Monster has left the building — that is, if she was ever in it.

For 18 months there have been no confirmed sightings of the supposed being, said to reside in the second largest body of water in Scotland. It’s the longest period of time without a Nessie sighting in nearly 90 years, the BBC reports.’ (Mashable)

‘If artificial intelligence is the way of the future, then we should probably prepare for the worst… Because who really knows what these little guys are capable of?’ (Mashable)

‘After dimming for the last few decades, the North Star is beginning to shine brightly again. And over the last two centuries, the brightening has become rather dramatic.

“It was unexpected to find,” Scott Engle of Villanova University in Pennsylvania told SPACE.com. Engle investigated the fluctuations of the star over the course of several years, combing through historical records and even turning the gaze of the famed Hubble Space Telescope onto the star.

Scientists have known since the early 20th century that the familiar star was part of a pulsating class known as Cepheid variables; its variations were suspected as early as the mid-1800s. But unlike most Cepheid variables, the pulses of Polaris are very small.

“If it had not been so popular as the North Star, we likely wouldn’t have known it was a Cepheid until modern times,” Engle said. ‘ (Mashable)

‘Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that exposure to short wavelength, or blue light, during the biological day directly and immediately improves alertness and performance. These findings are published in the February issue of Sleep.

“Our previous research has shown that blue light is able to improve alertness during the night, but our new data demonstrates that these effects also extend to daytime light exposure,” said Shadab Rahman, PhD, a researcher in BWH’s Division of Sleep Medicine and lead author of this study. “These findings demonstrate that prolonged blue light exposure during the day has an an alerting effect.” ‘ (EurekAlerts).

This is an update on a post here from last week. The world truly is fractal:

‘Contained within the borders of Canada are: the world’s largest island in a lake on an island; the world’s largest island in a lake on an island in a lake; and the world’s largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.’ (Boing Boing).

‘So ask your vet why they think the drugs your animal is being given will work. We’re going to have to confront our own psychological biases, here: research shows that people prefer confident advice, sometimes even when we know those giving it have been wrong before. And good answers to these questions will inevitably be hedged with caveats about the small number of studies that have been done, and their limitations. If all you get from your vet is a bland assurance that they’ve been doing this for years, and see great results, get them to talk you through the scientific evidence. If they can’t do so, that should be a warning sign: It might be time to look for another vet.’ (Medium).

‘It happens to nearly everyone: A song — let’s say Abba’s “Waterloo” — is stuck in your head and just won’t go away.

Now science has not one but three ways to dig that dreaded earworm out. And none of them are too surprising, as researchers surveyed 18,000 residents of Finland and England and reported their findings in the journal PLOS One.

Researchers at the University of London found that earworm victims say you can listen to the complete song or sing it; you can just not let it bother you, or you can try using another song to shove out the offending tune.’ (wfaa.com Dallas – Fort Worth).