Turning your daily commute into a joyride Mark Nerys "I can't reach my coffee holder." Martin Aircraft in New Zealand built the prototype that’s closest to allowing you to jet to work. A fan-propelled, rotary-engine-powered jetpack with 200 horsepower, the Martin Jetpack (not pictured) keeps steady altitude even if riders’ hands leave the controls for a…
Life on Mars? There could be, if NASA's Langley Research Center proposal for donut-shaped ice houses on the red planet goes ahead.
On December 29, NASA published details about a proposed solution for housing astronauts on Mars. With technology improving, missions to the red planet -- where astronauts might spend months at a time -- might not be far off, but Mars' hostile conditions mean that some form of protective housing will be required.
The Mars Ice Home consists of an inflatable inner tube lined with a shell of ice to protect against radiation and Mars' extreme weather conditions. It would be lightweight, double as a storage tank, and would use materials extracted from Mars itself.
However, the concept is not entirely problem-free: it is estimated that it would take over a year to fill the dome with Martian water.
Other ideas for how to provide habitation for astronauts at present include making concrete on the planet.
"I want to be with Carrie."
Hours before the stroke that ultimately killed Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds, the actress and dancer turned to her son Todd and said that she missed her daughter Carrie Fisher -- who died Dec. 26 following a heart attack -- and wanted to be with her. They were among her last words.
AlterNet reported on Thursday that "broken heart syndrome" is a real lethal disorder identified by neuropsychologists that has a history stretching back thousands of years.
"There's been a beautiful history that you can die from misery or loneliness or literally from a broken heart," said stress psychophysiology specialist Prof. Brian Hughes to AlterNet's Alexandra Rosenmann.
, "broken heart syndrome" is what is known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. It is a temporary heart condition brought on by intense or prolonged stress. And in some cases, it can be fatal.
“Women are more likely than men to experience the sudden, intense chest pain -- the reaction to a surge of stress hormones -- that can be caused by an emotionally stressful event," says the AHA. "It could be the death of a loved one or even a divorce, breakup or physical separation, betrayal or romantic rejection,”
"The ancient Greeks and Romans felt that many emotions were reflected in the body and the people with different characteristics and different personality types have different body shapes and body functions," said Hughes, who is the president of the international Stress and Anxiety Research Society (STAR).
"Nowadays we often feel that these notions are myths and superstitions, or in the case of fiction, artistic license," he continued. "However there's actually a very consistent line of research linking emotional function to the brain and to physical health and disease in the body and one of the most compelling examples this relates to cardiovascular function and especially to the notion of cardiovascular stress reactivity."
The University Hospital of Zurich has conducted a long-term study of "broken heart syndrome," following 1,000 patients who have been diagnosed with the condition.
Their research specifically examines the link between brain activity and heart function. Many of the patients affected by the syndrome, they say, are women over the age of 50.
"We know from experiments on animals that long-term stress can be fatal. Under fire from too much adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, a whole range of organs start to fail after certain time and the animal dies," said University Hospital's Lutz Jäncke.
Watch video about this story, embedded below:
Watch a video about the University Hospital of Zurich's study of broken heart syndrome, embedded below:
If you were forced to spend the holidays with family members who have conflicting political beliefs you might have been exposed to conspiracy theories or Donald Trump quotes used to justify beliefs. If it made you feel uncomfortable or anxious it has nothing to do with your political beliefs.
According to a study in the Nature Journal Scientific, neuroscientists at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC did MRI scans that show when people are forced to consider conflicting beliefs it causes certain sectors in their brain to light up, Mashable noted.
The researchers compared whether and how often people change their minds on non-political and political issues when given evidence showing a counter argument. People were more flexible when asked to consider the strength of their beliefs on non-political issues. The example they gave was if people held a strong belief that "Albert Einstein was the greatest physicist of the 20th century."
But when they were faced with political issues such as, "The United States should reduce funding for the military," the subjects refused to move on their opinions.
"Political beliefs are like religious beliefs, in the respect that both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong," Prof. Jonas Kaplan, the lead author, said in the news release.
"To consider an alternative view, you would have to consider an alternative version of yourself," Kaplan said.
He said that he was surprised that people would doubt Einstein was a great physicist but people manage to retain flexibility in their beliefs about him.
[caption id="attachment_954707" align="aligncenter" width="534"] A view of the amygdalae - the two almond-shaped areas hugging the center of the brain near the front - that tend to become active when someone is digging in their heels about a political belief. (Photo/Courtesy of Brain and Creativity Institute at USC)[/caption]
“The amygdala, in particular, is known to be especially involved in perceiving threat and anxiety,” Kaplan added. “The insular cortex processes feelings from the body, and it is important for detecting the emotional salience of stimuli. That is consistent with the idea that when we feel threatened, anxious or emotional, then we are less likely to change our minds.”
The Default Mode Network in the brain is the part of the brain important for high-level thinking about significant personal beliefs and values. When study participants were challenged on their beliefs this part of the brain surged.
“These areas of the brain have been linked to thinking about who we are, and with the kind of rumination or deep thinking that takes us away from the here and now,” Kaplan said.
The study's co-author, Sarah Gimble, said that the study helps in understanding when and why people are likely to change their minds.
“Knowing how and which statements may persuade people to change their political beliefs could be key for society’s progress,” she said.
But the results can also be used outside of politics, like how to respond to fake news stories as an example.
“We should acknowledge that emotion plays a role in cognition and in how we decide what is true and what is not true,” Kaplan said. “We should not expect to be dispassionate computers. We are biological organisms.”
The study confirms previous research done by Dartmouth researchers that people persist in opinions despite strong evidence to the contrary. Climate deniers are an excellent example. While the vast majority of scientists agree that human impact is influencing the climate, many in Congress refuse to believe it is real. When supplied with evidence, deniers dig in their heels.
Christopher Graves, the global chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations wrote in the Harvard Business Review that the same applies to parents who believe vaccines cause autism. Regardless of the overwhelming medical evidence that there’s no link, they maintain in their beliefs.
"Arguing the facts doesn’t help — in fact, it makes the situation worse,” Graves wrote. The reason, he explained, is that people only like to accept arguments that confirm their beliefs and discount any facts that challenge them.
Thanks to Kaplan and Gimble we understand the neurological reason.
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Because bats are highly social animals, they must rely heavily on vocalizations for social communication. But that can create a veritable cacophony of gibberish to the human observer. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what they're saying, as well as to whom and why? That's exactly what Tel Aviv University (TAU) researchers…
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register This galaxy, known as IRAS 16399-0937, may look serene, but appearances can be deceiving. The galaxy, located over 370 million light-years from Earth, is actually a rare megamaser, which are astrophysical objects that emit intense radio waves and are found near the center of some galaxies. Megamasers are intensely bright, around 100…
Think fake news is a recent plague, borne of the presidential election? It’s not.
“The notion of ‘fake news’ is hardly new to climate scientists like myself,” Penn State climatologist Michael Mann told Grist. “We’ve known about it (and written about it) for years.”
Thanks to researchers like Mann — the originator of the famed “hockey stick” chart and a frequent target of fake news himself — the science behind climate change is settled. And yet there remains a vocal contingent of ideologues who refuse to accept the connection between carbon emissions and a warming planet. For example, Donald Trump and a good portion of his proposed cabinet. For years, right-wing news organizations like Breitbart, Infowars, the Daily Caller, and Climate Depot have fed their denial, publishing stories that misinterpret, misrepresent, or distort scientific findings — or just outright lie.
This kind of fake news has set progress back years, if not decades, Mann said. It’s a “crime against the planet,” he told Grist, and a “crime against humanity.”
There are many flavors of fake news. Some of these stories push the idea that, yes, the climate is changing, but it’s just a natural effect of changes in the sun’s activity and humans have nothing to do with it. This theory has been a favorite of deniers for three decades, and even though it’s been widely discredited, Breitbart reported it in again in 2014, under the headline, “Solar Activity Could Cause Global Warming, New Paper Says.” Of course, this runs contrary to actual science, but Breitbart never lets that stop them.
Other fake stories claim that carbon dioxide is good because it increases plant growth, as the ever-optimistic Breitbart declared again last year. But while it’s true that CO2 can be beneficial for plants, it doesn’t outweigh the fact that increasing concentrations in the atmosphere are toasting our home planet. Good for plants does not equal good for people.
Bogus climate stories also allege that a so-called “pause” in global warmingundermines established climate science. Although climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that temperatures are rising and climate change is real, there has been debate over whether the rate of temperature increase slowed in the early 2000s — which climate deniers refer to as the “pause” or “hiatus.” Fake media outlets have seized on this debate and tried to spin it as proof that climate change isn’t real: Breitbart even claimed that Mann jumped on the pause bandwagon, deserted his scientific colleagues, and decided that there’s been no global warming since 1998. This was likely news to Mann himself.
There’s also the classic seasonal variety of stories alleging that cold, snowy weather disproves climate change. This reached a fever pitch in 2015, when Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe threw a snowball on the Senate floor. What Inhofe and his fellow deniers don’t get is that weather is not climate. Climate change is about long-term warming trends, not individual weather events, and so snow and climate change just aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, a warming climate could actually lead to an increase in snowfall in some places as melting sea ice in the Arctic alters jet streams.
And, of course, some deniers claim that this whole thing is a vast conspiracy perpetrated by scientists hungry for government research money. (They have never, apparently, seen what climate scientists drive.) Others — like our president-elect — say it’s a hoax created by China to crush U.S. manufacturing. Still other deniers insist that it’s a scheme cooked up by Al Gore to make himself rich — but, not to worry, they also tell us that Al Gore was sued by 30,000 scientists for his global warming fraud.
Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are hard to combat. Research shows that when presented with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, instead of reconsidering those beliefs, we humans tend to double-down on our preconceived notions. So if you already believe climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American public or that the Earth hasn’t warmed in 17 years or that this is all a big Communist plot, it’s unlikely that evidence to the contrary will dissuade you.
Some deniers — perhaps those who really believe Al Gore was sued by 30,000 scientists — think climate science is a lie because of the misinformation they absorb every day on TV and through social media. But other deniers have a more base motivation: money. The most high-profile deniers — people like Inhofe and Climate Depot’s Marc Morano — are backed by the fossil fuel industry. Exxon alone spent over $30 million to fund climate-denying organizations between 1998 and 2014, and an investigation by Carbon Brief found that nine of the 10 most prolific authors of papers skeptical of climate change have ties to Exxon. The industrialist Koch brothers, too, have spent a fortune on climate denial, donating nearly $50 million between 1997 and 2008 to groups that work to undermine climate science.
The money, it seems, was well-spent. Right-wing media outlets spread those groups’ misleading messages far and wide. So while the rest of the world has long since accepted the reality of climate change and humanity’s role in causing it, in the U.S., not only are we still debating its existence, but a climate change denier is about to occupy the White House.
Soon, however, there may be a cost to spreading misinformation about climate scientists, if not about climate change itself. The D.C. Court of Appeals recently ruled that Mann can proceed with a defamation suit against two bloggers who called his work fraudulent — and worse.
“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a 2012 post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.” The National Review’s Mark Steyn then quoted these comments in a post of his own, writing that Simberg “has a point” and calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”
For this, the court has ruled that Mann can sue both bloggers as well as their institutions — but you wouldn’t know that from the headlines in the climate-denying press. Climate Depot reported, “Court dismisses Michael Mann defamation lawsuit against National Review.” This is a clear manipulation of the truth: While the court did dismiss Mann’s claims against one National Review editor, its ruling clearly says that Mann can proceed with his suit against Steyn and National Review itself. But if we learned anything from the election of 2016, it’s that truth no longer carries much weight.
In the court’s ruling, Judge Vanessa Ruiz wrote, “Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming.” It’s not a new tactic, but tarnishing reputations and publishing lies has proved to be an effective one. As for how destructive, we’re soon to find out.
Vera Rubin, a U.S. astronomer who pioneered work on invisible dark matter in the universe and who some colleagues felt was overlooked for a Nobel Prize, has died at 88, her son said on Monday.
Rubin died on Sunday at an assisted living facility in Princeton, New Jersey, and had suffered from dementia for several years, Allan Rubin, a geosciences professor at Princeton University, said in an email.
Rubin, a Philadelphia native, used galaxies' rotations to discover the first direct evidence of dark matter in the 1970s while working at the Carnegie Institution in Washington.
Working with spectrograph designer Kent Ford, Rubin found that material at galaxies' edges rotated at the same rate as material in the center. The discovery contradicted a law of physics that said the greater mass in the center, such as dust, stars and gas, meant it should move faster than the edge, where there was less mass.
The explanation was a halo of dark matter around the galaxies that spread mass throughout the galaxies. Dark matter has not been directly observed but has been inferred through work by Rubin and other astronomers and physicists.
Scientists have discovered that a small part of dark matter is made of neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that do not really interact with regular matter.
Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington, told Astronomy Magazine in June that Rubin deserved the Nobel Prize since the discovery of dark matter had revolutionized astronomy and the concept of the universe.
The will of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prizes, "describes the physics prize as recognizing ‘the most important discovery’ within the field of physics. If dark matter doesn’t fit that description, I don’t know what does,” Levesque said.
Rubin graduated from Vassar College in 1948 with a degree in astronomy. She earned a master's degree from Cornell University and a doctorate from Georgetown University in Washington.
She was the second female astronomer to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1993.
Rubin was on the Georgetown faculty before working at the Carnegie Institution.
(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Ian Simpson in Washington; editing by Diane Craft)
Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's administration has removed the word "climate" from a Department of Natural Resources website dedicated to climate change.
Throughout his time as governor of Wisconsin, Walker has taken a series of actions to "reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees," according to the Scientific American.
Political writer James Rowen reported on Monday that the Walker administration had advanced their war on science by scrubbing information about climate change from a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources website that was dedicated to explaining how the agency would deal with a warming planet.
The DNR page titled "climatechange.html" originally acknowledged that "[h]uman activities that increase heat–trapping ('green house') gases are the main cause [of global warming.] Earth´s average temperature has increased 1.4 °F since 1850 and the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 1998."
In all, 13 mentions of "climate" where stripped from the page along with all references to global warming. The word "climate" now appears only in the title of a footnote link at the bottom of the page.
"In short, the guts of this page are now gone, or sanitized," Rowan observed. "This is Orwellian and propagandistic."
Read the full accounting of what was deleted from DNR's climate change website below via Urban Milwaukee.
[caption id="attachment_953767" align="alignnone" width="715"] Wisconsin DNR scrubs climate change from website (James Rowen/Urban Milwaukee)[/caption]
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register NASA's Cassini mission is busy gathering as much data as it can during the last year of its stay around Saturn, but it's safe to say that scientists back here on Earth as just as busy. That's because something quite mysterious is going on with Saturn's moon Titan: clouds that are visible…
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Astronomy is often considered a gateway into science, but University of California, Riverside scientists have found that astrophotography can also serve as the perfect inspiration for non-STEM (Science, Technology. Engineering, Mathematics) students. The UC Riverside scientists created astrophotography classes designed to teach science in a visual and hands-on manner to students majoring…
The world's oldest mummies have just had an unusual check-up.
More than 7,000 years after they were embalmed by the Chinchorro people, an ancient civilization in modern-day Chile and Peru, 15 mummies were taken to a Santiago clinic last week to undergo DNA analysis and computerized tomography scans.
The Chinchorro were a hunting and fishing people who lived from 10,000 to 3,400 BC on the Pacific coast of South America, at the edge of the Atacama desert.
They were among the first people in the world to mummify their dead. Their mummies date back some 7,400 years -- at least 2,000 years older than Egypt's.
Now, researchers are hoping to use modern medical technology to reconstruct what they looked like in life, decode their genes and better understand the mysteries of this ancient civilization.
The 15 Chinchorro mummies, mostly children and unborn babies, were put through a CT scanner at the Los Condes clinic in the Chilean capital.
"We collected thousands of images with a precision of less than one millimeter," said chief radiologist Marcelo Galvez.
"The next phase is to try to dissect these bodies virtually, without touching them, which will help us preserve them for another 500,000 years."
Using high-tech computer processing, researchers are busy reconstructing the mummies' muscles and facial features.
"We want to see what they physically looked like, to reconstruct them and bring to life someone who died thousands of years ago," said Galvez.
Researchers are also hoping to learn more about how the Chinchorro mummified their dead.
The Chinchorro, who apparently had a complex understanding of human anatomy, would carefully remove the skin and muscles of the deceased.
Using wood, plants and clay, they reconstructed the body around the remaining skeleton, then sewed the original skin back on, adding a mouth, eyes and hair.
A mask was then placed over the face.
The result looks like something in between a statue and a person -- eerily lifelike even after thousands of years.
- All in the family -
Mummification was an intimate process for the Chinchorro, said Veronica Silva, the head of the anthropology department at Chile's National Museum of Natural History.
"The family itself would make the mummy," she told AFP.
The earliest mummies were unborn fetuses and newborns, she said.
The mummies were all made using the same basic process, but each one shows unique "technological and artistic innovations," she said.
It was a process that evolved over time. The newest mummies are the most elaborate.
Some 180 Chinchorro mummies have been discovered since 1903.
All were found outdoors, placed near the beach. The Chinchorro apparently did not build pyramids or any other structures to house them.
In fact, the Chinchorro civilization left no trace besides its mummies.
"We are effectively talking about the oldest artificially mummified bodies in the world," said Silva.
"The Chinchorro mummies date to 7,400 years ago. That is to say, this system... existed 2,000 years before the first mummifications even began in Egypt."
Surprises have already begun to emerge from the CT scanner.
The smallest mummy, it turns out, was not a mummy at all.
"There was no bone structure inside. It was just a figurine, possibly a representation of an individual who could not be mummified," said Silva.
Researchers also took skin and hair samples from the mummies to analyze their DNA, in hopes of identifying genetic links with the modern-day population.
"We want to better understand their way of life -- from their diet to whether we Chileans still carry their genes," said Silva.
Searching for the origins of life in the deep sea. Illustration by Kendrick Kidd Chris German Age: 53 Affiliations: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Specialty: Geochemistry, finding life in extreme habitats You might not expect an oceanographer to be high on NASA’s speed dial, but when the space agency needed…
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