Today's Cool News

Nobel Prize Awarded for Psychedelic Art

Those wacky Swedes thought they were giving out a dynomite Nobel Prize last week for Chemistry to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien for discovering green fluorescent protein, commonly called GFP, and developing the protein as a powerful tool for basic biological research.

But take one look at this image and any stoner worth his bong knows the real purpose had to be to create cool psychedelic artwork. 

Science news has a very cool slideshow depicting these trippy paintings masquerading as images of stuff inside your body lit up by the jellyfish protein.  Enjoy, and if anyone asks, it's all in the name of science.

How Hot is that Chili? Grab Your Nanotube and Find Out

I'll admit I'm a wimp when it comes to hot and spicy foods.  Give me something nice and bland anyway.

One reason I'm so squeamish when it comes to hot chili is that I can't yet afford a home supply of Carbon Nanotubes.

From the University of Oxford:

Oxford chemists have found a way of using carbon nanotubes to judge the heat of chilli sauces. The technology might soon be available commercially as a cheap, disposable sensor for use in the food industry.

Professor Richard Compton and his team at Oxford University have developed a sensitive technique to measure the levels of capsaicinoids, the substances that make chillies hot, in samples of chilli sauce. They report their findings in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal The Analyst.

(snip)

In Compton’s method, the capsaicinoids are adsorbed onto multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) electrodes. The team measures the current change as the capsaicinoids are oxidised by an electrochemical reaction, and this reading can be translated into Scoville units. The technique is called adsorptive stripping voltammetry (ASV), and is a relatively simple electrochemical method.

Yeah, sounds relatively simple to me...

Go Down to the Freeway and Breathe Deeply

Think you need a new perspective on life?  Try heading down to a garage or hang out by the freeway and breathe deeply.  Exhaust fumes will change the way you think, unless you change your mind about taking part in this experiment.

From the BBC:

An hour sniffing exhaust fumes may not just give you a headache - it could even alter the way the brain functions, Dutch researchers have suggested.

(snip)

A team at Zuyd University in the Netherlands persuaded 10 volunteers to spend an hour in a room filled either with clean air or exhaust from a diesel engine.

They were wired up to an electroencephalograph (EEG), a device that records the electrical signals of the brain. They were monitored during the period of exposure and for an hour after they left the room.

After about 30 minutes, the brains of those in the exhaust rooms displayed a stress response on the EEG, which is indicative of a change in the way information is being processed in the brain cortex.

This effect continued after they were no longer in the room.

(snip)

...a study of dogs in Mexico found those who lived in highly-polluted Mexico City had brain lesions similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients, while those who lived in much less-polluted rural areas showed a much lower rate of damage to the brain.

Of course, I can't quite remember why that might be important.

Was Spitzer Just Following the Rules of Evolution?

The New York media world is all agog over a New York Times piece that shows New York Governor Elliot Spitzer arranged for a prostitute to travel with him from DC to New York... and that the entire transaction was caught on an FBI Wiretap.

The story raises the whole issue of paying for sex (even when it's free, you're paying for it, buddy) and on the same day as the Spitzer news comes out, there's this scientific gem on the matter of sex for money.

From the Future of Things:

A recent study conducted in Indonesia shows that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females in the form of pre-sex rituals, and that the success of these rituals was reduced as the number of available females went up. Although the conclusions are not decisive, it is suggested that sex is a "currency" in the monkeys' biological market.

In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that males performed several services in order to encourage females to agree to sexual intercourse.

(snip)

After observing the monkeys for about 20 months, the scientists concluded that after the males performed their grooming ritual, sexual activity more than doubled: from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times an hour. The study also showed that the amount of time that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time. For instance, as the number of females increased, the males spent less time picking nits off the females.

(snip)

In the case of the voluntary sex life of long-tailed macaques, it means that the price that one group is willing to pay for a commodity that the other group has depends on the scarcity or abundance of that commodity on the market. Scientists assume female macaques use grooming, too, to try to maintain social relationships to benefit their offspring, or as a way to distract or appease males from becoming overly aggressive – a behavior that is quite common after a sexual encounter. In fact, when female macaques groomed males, their services decreased. 

So as you can see, Governor Spitzer, this is all just a matter of nit-picking.

A Fondness for Heresy aka We're All Doomed so Let's Party!

Thanks to Tom Buckner at alt.fan.rawilson for pointing me to this.

The thing that bothers me about the Global Warming orthodoxy is that whenever you look at the history of science, when you get to the point that "every reputable scientist in the world agrees that" x is true, x is almost certain to be disproved by the next generation of scientists. 

I'm also just fundamentally turned off by all of the "Holier than Thou" "I'm more Green than you" mentality, especially the blind fervor you find in the Bay Area. 

Now here's a guy, James Lovelock, who says returning to the days of the horse and buggy ain't gonna fix the problem. 

From the Guardian.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

(snip)

He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics.

(snip)

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas.
"
(snip)

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

(snip)

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

Sounds like good advice to me.

Why a Man Should Never Argue with a Woman

There are probably social and psychological reasons why no man in human history has ever won an argument with a woman.

However, this may well play into it, at least a bit.

From Scientific American:

Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now.

Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.

The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the way girls routinely ogle boys during test taking times...

-----------------------------------

The Future of Exit Polling

In the future we can forget exit polling.  Just pass beyond this plate and your brain will tell us who you voted for and why you don't accept consensus reality.

From the Guardian:

Scientists have developed a mind-reading technique that allows them to accurately predict images being viewed by people, by using scanners to study brain activity.

The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in surgical procedures to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs.

Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on - random guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.

The study raises the possibility in future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory.

Writing in the journal, Nature, the scientists led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time."

It will inevitably also raise fears that a suspect's brain could be interrogated against their will, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes".

Nightmarish indeed.  Boy we've had a bunch of cheery posts today on TCN, nicht wahr?

Massive Creepy Crabs

I've long been an advocate of space migration, the idea that a significant number of us need to get off this planet and explore some new worlds.

But every now and then we discover brand new (to us) worlds right here on Terra.

From the Daily Mail:

More than a mile below the icy surface of Antarctic waters scientists have discovered an amazing world of giant sea creatures, including spiders as large as dinner plates and jellyfish with tentacles that stretch more than half the length of a London bus.

They live in a dark and mysterious wilderness of thick sea grasses and coral gardens that are teeming with creatures never seen before – huge worms, giant prawns and massive, creepy crabs.

(snip)

In some places, (voyage leader Martin Riddle) said "every inch of the sea floor is covered in life".

Giantism, he said, was "very common in Antarctic waters", where his team had even found deep gouges in the sea floor, caused by icebergs scraping the coral" as they floated by.

(snip)

Marine scientists have already suspected that huge creatures live in the very deep waters of the Southern Ocean which reaches Antarctica.

Giant squid have been caught by New Zealand fishermen, but these are usually sick creatures which have risen up from the sea bed.

Could Biometrics Save America From the Scourge of Icelandic Shoppers?

You may already be carrying around the national identification card of the future... your body.  While that may sound scary, a national biometrics database will make sure your children aren't threatened by Icelandic shoppers who outstayed their welcome ten years ago.

We start with the national database from the Washington Post:

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

And we're not just talking any criminal.  Why, biometrics could keep us safe from shoppers from Iceland who threaten the very moral fiber of our nation.

From the International Herald-Tribune:

Iceland's government has asked the U.S. ambassador to explain the treatment of an Icelandic tourist who says she was held in shackles before being deported from the United States.

The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier.

Lillendahl, 33, had planned to shop and sightsee with friends, but endured instead what she has claimed was the most humiliating experience of her life.

She contended she was interrogated at JFK airport for two days, during which she was not allowed to call relatives. She said she was denied food and drink for part of the time, and was photographed and fingerprinted.

On Monday, Lillendahl claimed, her hands and feet were chained and she was moved to a prison in New Jersey, where she was kept in a cell, interrogated further and denied access to a phone.

She was deported Tuesday, she told reporters and wrote on her Internet blog.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir told U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst that the treatment of Lillendahl was unacceptable.

"In a case such as this, there can be no reason to use shackles" Gisladottir said. "If a government makes a mistake, I think it is reasonable for it to apologize, like anyone else."

Van Voorst has contacted the officials at JFK airport and asked them to provide a report on Lillendahl's case,

And now according to Lillendahl's blog, an apology and lawsuits may be on the way.

"According to news today here in Iceland the Foreign Ministry received a letter from the DHS, where they regret the treatment Erla got, admit it was out of proportion, and that they will review their processes in the light of this incident. We can also thank, Mrs. Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, FM of Iceland, and the U.S. Ambassador in Iceland, Mrs.Carol van Voorst, who is a great representative for her nation. Hopefully these three women have started something, that will improvethe situation for all of us...

It was also mentioned in the news, that several American laywers have contacted Erla encouraging her and offered their help to sue the US government..."

See, that's what happens when you start giving Guantanamo prisoners access to lawyers.  The next thing you know, the Icelandic shopping cabaal will think it has Constitutional rights too.  Sheesh.

Where's Ptolemy When We Need Him?

Are you as mad as I am that the people who seem to run our schools are COMPLETELY BIASED against the TRADITIONAL BELIEF that the Sun and all the planets revolve around the earth??  Ptolemy said it.  I Believe it.  That settles it.

Look, I'm a firm supporter of the "Right to Be Wrong" but someone shouldn't lose his or her job for standing up to the wrong crowd.  That's just what's happened in Texas where the chief science teacher in the state appears "biased" against superstition, er... I mean "Intelligent Design"

From the Austin American-Statesman:

The state's director of science curriculum has resigned after being accused of creating the appearance of bias against teaching intelligent design.

(snip)

Comer was put on 30 days paid administrative leave shortly after she forwarded an e-mail in late October announcing a presentation being given by Barbara Forrest, author of "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse," a book that says creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Forrest was also a key witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case concerning the introduction of intelligent design in a Pennsylvania school district. Comer sent the e-mail to several individuals and a few online communities, saying, "FYI."

Agency officials cited the e-mail in a memo recommending her termination. They said forwarding the e-mail not only violated a directive for her not to communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the agency regarding an upcoming science curriculum review, "it directly conflicts with her responsibilities as the Director of Science."

The memo adds, "Ms. Comer's e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral."

That's right.  She should be neutral on the big controversial science subjects of the day including whether Ptolemy was right after all, whether that Galileo guy was a heretic, whether lightening should be taught to be the result of charge imbalances between the clouds and the ground since you might offend followers of Zeus and Thor...

That's right neutrality is very important in eduction.