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Mystery Animal Contest: Who Is This Shy Climber?

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Guess the species (either common or Linnaean) by tweeting at us--we're @PopSci--and get your name listed right here! Plus eternal glory, obviously. Update: We have a winner!

So, here are the rules: To answer, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!

Update: Congratulations to Dylan D'Orazio, who correctly guessed that this is Cyclopes didactylus, the silky anteater, also known as the pygmy anteater. Many guessed that it's some kind of sloth, which is a reasonable guess; anteaters are in the Pilosa order, including sloths and tamanduas (which look like snort-nosed anteaters), and the silky anteater actually has some sloth-like behavioral quirks. It's arboreal, meaning it lives in trees, like the sloths and unlike the more famous giant anteater, for example, and uses its large, curved claws and partially prehensile tail to grasp trees and climb along, like it's doing in this GIF.

The silky anteater lives in forests in Central and South America, with a small population on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. (As a matter of fact, the above GIF is of a Trinidadian silky anteater.) It eats between 700 and 5,000 ants per day, despite being a generally slow-moving animal. It's also unusual; it's the only animal in its family, though it's not particularly rare. You can see more of this silky anteater in the BBC series Wild Caribbean. Hi silky anteater!




DNA Makes A Great Flame Retardant For Cotton Fabric

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Fiery Fashiondesignshard via Flickr
Fabric coated in DNA from fish sperm won't catch on fire. Who knew?

DNA, the genetic Lego castle that makes up all living organisms, can store data, nab bad guys and even appreciate poetry. It can also keep your clothes from catching fire, a group of Italian researchers discovered.

Flame retardants are used in everything from military uniforms to furniture upholstery to children's pajamas, though some have been found to contain toxic chemicals. DNA could be a green alternative, according to a study in Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Scientists dipped cotton fabric in a solution containing DNA taken from herring sperm. Once it dried, they tried to set it on fire. While the untreated cotton burned completely within 80 seconds, the DNA-treated fabric was slow to catch on fire and the flame went out within two seconds.

Wired has a good explanation of how the chemical structure of DNA stops flames:

When heated, its phosphate-containing backbone produces phosphoric acid, which chemically removes water from cotton fibers while leaving behind a flame-resistant, carbon-rich residue. The nitrogen-containing bases release ammonia - which dilutes flammable gases and inhibits combustion reactions - and can act as "blowing agents," which help turn the carbon-rich deposits into a slow-burning protective layer. Ultimately, these ingredients stop combustion by forming either a carbon-rich foam, or a protective, glassy carbon coating called char.


Watch it in action:


There are a few things standing in the way of DNA-coating as a viable flame retardant. It's expensive, for one. It also can't be washed -- the solution came off immediately when laundered -- which would prove cumbersome for most clothing applications. In the future though, we could all be happily and safely wearing sperm.

[Wired]



NYC Wants To Sterilize Its Subway Rats

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Subway RatWikimedia Commons
Because there are enough already, thanks.

The rats of NYC subways are resilient. The city is an especially well-suited home for the critters, which explains why the Big Apple has millions of them, even if some were displaced from the subway after Sandy. The latest plan to stem the tide? Sterilize them.

Traditional methods like trapping and poisoning are already being used, but there are a lot of rats down there, and this could potentially slow the population in a more humane way. A sweet-salty, sterilizing chemical called Contrapest will be placed in subway bait boxes. When a female rat ingests some, it'll target the ovarian follicles, permanently sterilizing it. If it's already pregnant, some of its female children will even become sterile. Along with those more traditional techniques, Metro Transit Authority officials are hoping this puts a dent in the rodent population.

Still, it sounds like it takes a lot of the compound, developed by a company called SenesTech, to effectively sterilize the rats: one of them needs to consume 10 percent of its body weight in five to 10 days to make it infertile. And there's a lot of discarded food around the subway to compete with.

[New York Times]



Wearable Computers Could Help Build A Better You

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Computer Guidance Paul Lachine
Wearable head-up displays make gamification a viable route to self-improvement.

In 1961, Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp built the world's first wearable computer. The cigarette-pack-size device tracked the speed of a roulette wheel and sent tones via radio to a gambler's earpiece to help predict where the ball would land. The goal of wearable computers hasn't changed much since. Like Shannon and Thorp's system, Google Glass and other head-up displays (HUDs)-from companies including Vuzix and Epson-are intended to heighten a person's awareness. But the latest discreet HUDs can do much more than augment our reality-they could also help us better ourselves.

One of the newest methods for spurring self-improvement is to turn every task into a game. So-called gamification apps keep score in real-life situations to promote certain behaviors-whether it's taking out the trash, going for a run, or complimenting someone. Users compete against other players and themselves-and it works. According to internal research, a person who uses the Fitbit health-and-fitness tracker, for instance, takes 43 percent more steps on average than a nonuser and loses an average of 13 pounds.

Gamification has problems; an app doesn't know when you're lying.
Yet the systems have problems. Users must be actively involved in the scoring process from start to finish-opt in, sometimes wear a device, and even manually input data into a smartphone app. Those tasks interrupt-even intrude upon-everyday life, turning the entire experience into a painstaking chore. What's more, an app doesn't know when you're lying.

Wearing a computer instead of carrying one could eliminate all those downsides. The Google Glass prototype projects information-photos, e-mails, navigation cues-onto a screen positioned in front of one eye. The system will most likely have its own cellular radio, so it could work independently of a smartphone. Motion sensors, a video camera, and a GPS radio will allow developers to code apps that monitor a person's behavior in real time. An HUD implementation of the Google Goggles image-recognition software, for example, could keep track of what a person eats, reads, and buys. New apps could establish an instant feedback loop- perhaps a reward for skipping the morning doughnut in favor of a banana.

More-advanced tracking may eventually allow HUDs to predict and prevent bad behavior instead of merely recording it. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have already filed eye-tracking patents, which could be used to monitor what a person is looking at and help the HUD respond with positive and negative cues accordingly. So if the HUD sees a person's pupils dilate when he's passing a dive bar on the way to the gym, it could flash a prompt to "keep on walking."



Photos From 11 Of The World's Coolest Nuclear-Monitoring Stations

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WINDLESS BIGHT, ANTARCTICA Infrasound station IS55 gets a checkup. Copyright CTBTO Preparatory Commission
How the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization keeps an ear to the ground

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization recorded some of the first data indicating both the recent Russian meteor hit and the North Korean nuclear test. How'd it know so fast? The organization maintains 337 seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide monitoring stations all over the world, to catch when someone sets off a nuclear explosion. Although built to monitor nuclear activity, the stations also gather data that can be used for tsunami warnings and for studies about volcanoes, climate change, whale migrations and other science, the organization says. What follows are photos of some of the stations' coolest locales.

PHOTO GALLERY:

Click here to enter the gallery



Japan Has Won The Race To Extract Gas From Offshore Methane Ice

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Methane Hydrate Wusel007 via Wikimedia Commons
This is the first successful production of natural gas from off-shore supplies of methane hydrate, a huge untapped energy resource.

Japanese officials report they've produced natural gas from underwater methane hydrate, a frozen mix of water and methane known as "burning ice." Previous experiments have successfully extracted gas from on-shore deposits, but this is the first time we've been able to do it with deep sea reserves.

Methane hydrates are made of gas molecules of methane that are trapped in a lattice of water ice. When the ice melts, because of change in temperature or pressure, the gas is released and can ignite to create that fiery ice effect.

The U.S., South Korea and China have also been working to harness the substance as fuel for years. It's one of the world's greatest untapped energy resources, found within the permafrost near the Earth's poles and under much of the sea floor.

Finding alternative fuel sources is especially vital for Japan, a country has to import huge amounts of energy, especially after the Fukushima disaster curtailed the Japanese nuclear program.

A team of Japanese drillers started extracting gas from methane hydrate deposits about 1,000 feet below the seabed off the central coast of Japan on Tuesday, according to The New York Times. They separated the ice and the methane by lowering the pressure in the reserve.

(If you can read Japanese, you can see the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's statement here.)

Trial extraction will continue for about two weeks to determine how much gas can be produced. The drilling technology will hopefully be commercially available in five years.

[BBC]



Trained Soviet Attack Dolphins With Head-Mounted Guns Are On The Loose

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Mine Clearance DolphinWikimedia Commons
Would suggest running, but it's already too late, probably.

Last year, the Ukrainian Navy decided to reinstitute a Soviet-era dolphin training program. Specifically, according to reports, the dolphins had pistols and knives strapped to their heads and were taught to use them. Because, you know, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

Anyway, some of the dolphins have apparently escaped from their trainers (because of course they were going to escape, Ukraine) and into the Black Sea, possibly on the prowl for mates.

But this is a contentious program and a contentious story. RIA Novosti reports that "Ukraine's Defense Ministry denied the reports, while refusing to confirm the navy makes use of dolphins, despite the frequent appearance in Ukrainian media of photographs of dolphins with military equipment strapped to them." The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has called the stories outright "fabrications" and there's some question if the dolphins were actually armed, even if the trained dolphins do exist and did escape.

As for training dolphins, that's not all that unusual. The Ukrainian dolphins can also sweep for mines, like dolphins employed by the U.S. Navy did until they were recently retired. Although it's not clear if they can handcuff enemy combatants like these guys could.

[The Atlantic]



The Science Press Is Going Crazy Over SpaceX's Most Recent Rocket Launch. Why?

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SpaceX GrasshopperSteve Jurvetson, via Wikimedia Commons
What a modest rocket flight tells us about the future of space tourism

On Thursday, March 7, SpaceX's Grasshopper rocket launched 263 feet into the air, hovered for 34 seconds, and then under its own power landed back where it took off. It was a record-breaking moment for the Grasshoper--in December, the rocket reached an altitude about half as high--but plenty of rockets have catapulted to even greater heights. So why was the sciencepressreally, reallyexcitedaboutthe whole thing?

Because the rocket actually landed in the same spot where it took off. This is called a vertical landing, it doesn't happen very often, and it bodes well for the future of space tourism:

Rocketry, since its inception, has been primarily concerned with breaking free from the constraints of Earth's gravity. It has been less concerned with the return trip. More often than not, rockets are designed to crash upon return. (Of course, scientists make calculations to ensure that they crash as safely as possible, ie. aiming for the 70 percent of Earth's surface not covered by land, deploying parachutes, deploying recovery ships to pick up the rocket, and so forth.)

That's not to suggest that Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL), as it's called, hasn't been highly sought-after. In fact, it's something people have wanted flying machines to do since pretty much the dawn of flying machines. If you can land where you take off, you can develop rocket-launching pads pretty much anywhere. And the more launch pads you have, the easier it is to explore space--and the more viable the business model for space tourism.

Vertical-landing rocketry was explored conceptually in the 1960s, realized in NASA's Apollo lunar landing module, and, inevitably, immortalized in video-game form.

The moon lander only had to navigate and then escape from the moon's gravity, though. Earth's gravity proves more difficult. In the 1990s, NASA worked on the DC-X, which was designed to take off from, and return to, Earth, but the project ultimately failed. The past decade has seen several new attempts, including NASA's Mighty Eagle lander prototype, Project Morpheus, GENIE rocket, and attracted private attempts with 2009's Lunar X Prize.

But SpaceX's Grasshopper is the only one that has repeatedly and successfully demonstrated accurate landings back on the launchpad from which it launched, with this fourth and latest test achieving a precise landing from twice as high as the previous attempt.




The U.S. Army's Ambitious Fight Against PTSD

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Mental CombatChris Koehler
With a decade of war winding down, post-traumatic stress disorder is an increasingly urgent problem. Will the Army's efforts work?

The roar of the chopper's engines made it hard to hear. First Sgt. James Kelley signaled with his hands and yelled: "Five minutes!" In the murky light of the Chinook's cargo bay, rows of helmeted figures sat surrounded by rifles and camouflage rucksacks. It was four in the morning. Bulldog Company from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, along with dozens of Afghan National Army soldiers, forward air controllers, military intelligence officers, and bomb-dog handlers, were air-assaulting into enemy territory. Under the light of the full moon, rows of mist-shrouded grapevines and mud compounds rushed below.

The mission, Operation Lion Strike, was to land in a Taliban-controlled area in one of the most violent parts of Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan. The soldiers would then push northward, into a cluster of villages Army command suspected of harboring insurgents and weapons caches. By landing before dawn, the soldiers hoped to surprise the insurgents, preventing them from setting up ambushes or laying improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. For added insurance, they had ordered F-15 jets to drop 500-pound guided bombs above the landing zone; the pressure wave would help trigger any IEDs the insurgents might have already hidden.

I had embedded with Bulldog Company to understand firsthand the conditions that forward-deployed infantry routinely experience during the course of combat-conditions that are causing a mental-health crisis in the military. Suicides among service members have outpaced combat deaths. In other words, the young men around me in the Chinook were more likely to die by their own hand than by the Taliban's.

For an uninitiated civilian, an assault into Taliban-held territory is an overwhelming experience. My heartbeat and adrenaline spiked as my nervous system's fear response kicked in. My sense of time shifted; events felt simultaneously rushed and glacial. Later, I noticed that my memory of the assault was filled with gaps.

Yet something different was unfolding in the minds and bodies of the soldiers of Bulldog Company. They had done this so many times during training that they were operating from muscle memory. The surge in stress sharpened their attention, heightened their performance.

Becoming good at war often involves becoming bad at peace.
The problem is, becoming good at war often involves becoming bad at peace. In every 20th-century conflict the U.S. has fought, more American soldiers have been psychiatric casualties than have been killed in combat. Since 2001, the Department of Veterans Affairs has diagnosed more than 200,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-nearly four times as many as were injured or killed. And while most soldiers readjust well to civilian life, a significant portion struggle. In addition to the spike in suicides, cases of spousal or child abuse and neglect, and referrals for drug and alcohol abuse, have increased among service members.

The Chinook banked hard to the right, slowed, and sank rapidly, its tail dipping downward. A ripple ran through our lines as the men started to shrug on their gear and wield their rifles. We stood up, grasping at each other for assistance in the narrow confines of the cargo bay, then shuffled toward the open bay door. The moonlit field of grass, flattened by the downwash of the rotor blades, came into view as the chopper dipped its back ramp against the turf.

"Let's go!" shouted Sgt. Kelley.

And then we were on the ground, jogging through the heat of the helicopter's exhaust. The soldiers fanned out and hit the dirt, and the chopper's engines screamed as it clawed its way into the night.

* * *

The trauma of war has been a subject of literature since Homer's Iliad, but it only entered medical discourse during World War I, when doctors coined the term "shell shock." They thought the new phenomenon of days- or weeks-long artillery bombardments were rattling the brains of soldiers, causing infantrymen to experience problems that ranged from nightmares to uncontrollable tremors. By the end of the war, however, doctors had come to understand that what they called shell shock was more than physical-it was also emotional.

During World War II, psychologists replaced shell shock with battle fatigue, which described the condition as overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion. After the Vietnam War, researchers better understood what the brain and body go through in combat. They knew that a complex mixture of psychological and physiological reactions trigger anxiety and intense flashbacks in many soldiers. And in 1980, PTSD-a term covering a variety of symptoms that occur after exposure to trauma, including hypervigilance, insomnia, flashbacks, and inappropriate emotional responses to everyday situations-entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Over the past decade, the two million American service members deployed in combat zones have provided military researchers with the largest body of data on PTSD since the Vietnam War. Now the Army, in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health, has implemented a massive $65-million epidemiological study known as STARRS, which collects blood samples as well as surveys from more than 100,000 current soldiers and new recruits. The aim is to identify risk factors for combat stress and suicide. The study will wrap up next year.

That, of course, will be too late for soldiers who have already been deployed. For them, the Army has rolled out a variety of programs designed to fight PTSD. One, a $125-million initiative called Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2), seeks not to treat PTSD but to prevent it-to create enduring soldiers for an age of enduring conflicts. It is an unprecedented, integrated training regimen designed to manage all aspects of the soldier's well-being: emotional, social, physical, and even spiritual. But will it work? For that matter, can anything prevent PTSD?

* * *

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The Freedom Restoration Center at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, is a sort of retreat for soldiers who have experienced psychological trauma or stress while deployed there. It has a staff of behavioral specialists, plus overstuffed sofas, DVD players, an Xbox, and a specially trained therapy dog, a cartoon-eyed golden Lab named Major Timmy.

When I visited one sunny winter day, four soldiers were attending a class on relaxation techniques. We sat in a small plywood building with the lights off and the curtains drawn. Just a few strips of sunlight seeped through into the interior gloom. Outside, armored trucks crunched by on gravel roads, and departing jets roared in the distance.

A woman's mellifluous voice filled the room. "Let yourself relax, and realize that an endless well of peace and tranquillity exists within you. . . ."

Around me, young men in combat fatigues slouched in their chairs, their eyes closed, their heads tilted back.

"Well, that was the deep-relaxation track," drawled a young corporal leading the session. He fanned out small MP3 players across the table. "You're welcome to take one for later. We also got some of the guided meditation tracks from yesterday."

He looked around the room. "So, uh, what else do you do to relax?" the corporal asked after a moment's silence.

"I like to take a nice, long, hot shower," offered Daniel Piotrowski, a bullet-headed sergeant, his pale skin sunburned and freckled. "Just kind of get away and block everything out."
There was another awkward pause. I asked Piotrowski if they had decent shower facilities at his base. He nodded slowly. "Well, we did, until they were destroyed by a 2,000-pound bomb."

His company's small combat outpost, named Dasht-e Towp, was located in the Tangi Valley in Wardak Province, a Taliban-controlled area the insurgents would mortar nearly every day. A highway ran alongside it. When Piotrowski's unit from the 10th Mountain Division moved in, the senior sergeant took one look at a row of prefabricated barracks that abutted the road and ordered everyone to move into buildings and shipping containers on the other side of the base. Soon after, a dump truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives veered off the highway and half-demolished the compound. "Just for reference," Piotrowski said, "the bomb at Oklahoma City was 4,000 pounds."

The blast buckled the walls of the building he lived in and blew him out of bed. His sergeant's foresight-earned the hard way, through several tours of duty-likely saved dozens of lives. Twenty-six people were wounded, but only the suicide bomber died. Piotrowski suffered a traumatic brain injury. He had been hit before, by a roadside bomb in Iraq, and the explosion brought back his old trauma. He started having problems sleeping. He couldn't concentrate on his work. He felt like he was losing his grip, and so his commander suggested he check into the restoration center for a few days.

CSF2 is designed to enable Piotrowski and others like him-soldiers who have accumulated layers of injury and trauma-to withstand multiple deployments overseas by the use of "positive psychology." Rather than focusing on distress and pathology, which has been the approach of psychologists going back to World War II, positive psychology seeks to encourage qualities like emotional awareness and self-control. It's modeled on the Penn Resiliency Program, which researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been using to teach resilience to nearby middle- and elementary-school students, with the goal of preventing depression and anxiety.

Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the field of positive psychology, directs the Penn Positive Psychology Center. Seligman has a long career in this sort of behavioral modification. He's famous for developing the theory of learned helplessness, which explains psychological breakdowns in captivity as a result of losing a sense of personal agency. The theory was adopted by the military's interrogation-resistance training programs and later used, controversially, under the Bush administration's program of torture against high-value terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks. ("My career has been devoted to finding out how to overcome learned helplessness," Seligman, who has condemned torture, said, "not how to produce it.")

CSF2 divides resilience into five areas of fitness: emotional, physical, social, family, and spiritual. By embracing this philosophy, the Army has ostensibly become concerned not only with the ability of its soldiers to shoot straight, march far, and obey orders, but also with their feelings, friendships, marital relations, and spiritual beliefs (or lack thereof).

Clinics like the Freedom Restoration Center are just one component of the Army's broader push to combat PTSD. As part of the CSF2 program, all new Army recruits now fill out a Global Assessment Tool, a questionnaire that will help evaluate their resilience and provide a baseline for tracking each soldier's progress. Throughout their career, soldiers participate in individual and group training sessions. Psychologists and behavioral specialists even accompany some units during combat tours.

When the relaxation session at the Freedom Restoration Center came to an end, the soldiers quietly filed out, returning to their bunks for some downtime. They would have a few days before returning to their companies. Part of their struggle will be with the stigma typically associated with psychological troubles in the military. Piotrowski shrugged when I asked him about it. "I'm the first one to come here," he said, "but hopefully now that I've come, some of the other guys will too."

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The hospital at Kandahar Airfield-the main military base in southern Afghanistan, about 10 miles from the village cluster of Pashmul and Bulldog Company's patrol-sits at the end of an airstrip, so that wounded soldiers who arrive on medevac flights can be treated immediately. Next door, an outpatient-care facility known as Role 2 includes the 883rd Medical Company, a combat-stress detachment consisting of psychiatrists and behavioral-health specialists.

Lt. Col. Richard Toye, commander of the 883rd, bowed his head with a little smile as the roar of a fighter jet taking off momentarily filled the room, rattling the thin plywood walls. "As you can see, it's quite relaxing here," he joked.

In the U.S., Toye works as a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital. Here in Afghanistan, where he is deployed as a member of the Army Reserve, he helps monitor and care for the mental well-being of service members, any one of whom could be exposed to combat trauma through IEDs or gunfire. "Every part of the theater is the front line," he said. His team's job is to keep as many soldiers as possible functioning in their assigned units-a departure from civilian psychology, where the focus is individual, rather than group, welfare. "Our mission is to fix them and send them back."

Toye's staff engage in a variety of preventive and therapeutic techniques, most of which he considers to be commonly accepted practices. Still, he has his doubts about some components of the Army's anti-PTSD effort. He is highly skeptical of CSF2, for example. "If we train you to be spiritual and to have a social network and to be physically fit and to have lots of hobbies, well, just because those are the characteristics of people who are stress-resilient, it doesn't mean that I can take those demands and put them on your head and make you stress-resilient," Toye said. "It is pseudoscience. And we put a lot of money into it."

Psychologists are also divided about the significance of the Penn Resiliency Program's results. Some children who participated showed increased resilience against depression and anxiety. Yet every major therapeutic approach-so long as both the therapist and patient have faith in its efficacy-tends to show some positive results, a kind of placebo effect.

And even if positive psychology works for children in the classroom, critics say, that doesn't mean it will work for soldiers in combat. "The program is modestly effective with certain
populations-for example, kids with mild depression and anxiety," says Roy Eidelson, former president of the nonprofit Psychologists for Social Responsibility. "The research itself is not nearly that persuasive in terms of how likely the program is going to be able to translate to combat situations."

* * *

A war-related surge in government funding has stimulated a search for other means of treating and preventing PTSD, through the use of drugs, genetic screening, and new technologies. One study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that patients with PTSD had fewer of a certain type of receptor for the neurotransmitter serotonin; another study found that, after a shooting on their college campus, women with a serotonin-
transporter gene variant linked to increased anxiety were more likely to develop PTSD. Presumably, the Army could use this knowledge to predict which soldiers will be better suited to combat.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel have hypothesized that injecting patients with hydrocortisone immediately after a traumatic event could, by interrupting stress pathways, help stop symptoms of PTSD from later emerging. And in 2011, the Pentagon awarded $11 million to study whether the drug D-Cycloserine could help reduce fear associated with traumatic memories.

Research of this sort has long bothered some experts. In the 1980s, the military scholar Richard Gabriel advised against the development of a purely pharmacological solution to the problems of combat stress. His argument: A miracle drug that eliminates the trauma of killing would result in armies of sociopaths.

Soldiers throughout history have proved naturally averse to killing their enemies. During World War II, an Army researcher named Col. S.L.A. Marshall interviewed a large set of infantrymen immediately after intense combat and found that 80 to 85 percent, when faced with an enemy target, didn't fire their rifles. While his methodology has been criticized, other researchers have come up with similar findings at battlefields such as Gettysburg, where 90 percent of 27,574 abandoned muskets recovered after the battle were still loaded.

The Army responded by introducing training tactics that more realistically simulated killing-for example, they switched from bull's-eyes to man-shaped-silhouette targets. Today, as soon as they're inducted into the Army, soldiers are placed in aggressive and stressful conditions. Their egos are broken down and rebuilt within the context of group unity and loyalty. The verbal abuse of the drill instructor, the firing drills, the hand-to-hand combat-all are intended to get them accustomed to violence. The shift in training has vastly improved the willingness of U.S. soldiers to fire their weapons in battle, from 55 percent in the Korean War to approximately 90 percent in Vietnam.

Throughout history, soldiers have proved averse to killing their enemies.
Soldiers are expected to spend months or years fighting and killing, then return to the U.S. as stable, well-adjusted citizens, spouses, and parents. The challenge, then, is achieving balance between the training that will enable soldiers to survive battle and the skills that will help them reacclimate to civilian life. Advocates of the CSF2 program point out that some people who undergo trauma experience what they call "post-traumatic growth." So instead of allowing the experience of combat to lead them down a self-destructive path, soldiers could use the trauma as a motivating event, a reason to grapple with family or personal issues they may have had before ever going to war. If it works, CSF2 should, ideally, enable soldiers to leave the battlefield in better shape than when they went in.

* * *

As the sun rose over Kandahar Province, the soldiers of Bulldog Company and their Afghan allies were taking up positions in the muddy fields bordering Pashmul. We shivered as the mist dissipated, having waded through armpit-deep water in frigid canals to avoid crossing footbridges, which were more likely to contain IEDs.

The soldiers began to sweep through the villages, searching for insurgents and weapons caches. It was agonizing work, at once deliberate and improvised. They knew that ingeniously rigged booby traps-a buried piece of tire rubber that, when stepped on, pressed two wires together, or a trip line strung up in the trees to catch a backpack-radio antenna-could lurk around every corner. Bulldog Company had seen their friends killed by them.

The men went in hard but warily, weapons at the ready. They picked through haystacks, rifled through bedrooms. They detained several villagers when they found an AK-47 and rocket-propelled grenades buried in a yard. A knot of wide-eyed children gathered to watch as they bound and interrogated the men.

It was aggressive work, but work that the soldiers were trained to do. And the soldiers of Bulldog Company don't mind admitting that sometimes, war can be very exciting. "It's fun,
as long as you're not dead," said First Lt. Nick Williams, a platoon leader who had led his team through hellish engagements in Pashmul.

The next challenge that tens of thousands of soldiers like the members of Bulldog Company will face-readjusting to their lives back home-could be much less exciting than combat. But for some, it could be just as difficult.

Matthieu Aikins is a writer living in Kabul, Afghanistan. This article originally appeared in the March 2013 issue of the magazine.



NASA Wants More Info About The Satellite Communication System Of The Future

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EnvisatESA
What that looks like is open to debate.

Communicating in space is still pretty rough, and our current information-transferring system is aging quick. There must be a better system, and NASA is open to suggestions.

The space agency has posted a Request for Information, or RFI, on creating "Next Generation Spaced-Based Relay Communication And Navigation Architecture." If that sounds a little vague, it should. This is what the current system is responsible for:


The Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program provides user missions with communication services that may include transmitting data and/or commands to and from user mission platforms (such as crewed and/or uncrewed space vehicles); deriving information from transmitted signals for tracking, position determination, and timing; and measuring the Radio Frequency (RF) emission or reflection from celestial bodies.

Basically, it connects low-earth-orbiting satellites, the International Space Station, and Earth. But these satellites have already existed for longer than they were intended to, and by the early 2020s, they'll need to be replaced with a new infrastructure. That could look like ... anything, pretty much. Either ground- or spaced-based systems could be integrated, as long as they communicate effectively. (And as long as they're cheap, flexible, and backward-compatible with the current system. The list of necessities is pretty extensive.)

If you've got an idea, send it NASA's way!


NOTE: This is not a request for proposal, quotation, or invitation for bid notice and is intended for information and planning purposes only. NASA does not intend to award a contract on the basis of this RFI. However, NASA may consider issuing formal solicitations at a later date.

So, you know, just keep this in the back of your head for now.

[NASA]



The Science Of Soda Sizes

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Some fun reading about how, psychologically, New York's proposed soda ban was supposed to work

As we either celebrate or mourn the New York Supreme Court's striking down of the soda size limit in New York City, let's take a moment to look at the psychology of portion sizes, which is truly weird.

An overwhelming number of studies shows that people seem to base how much they eat on the amount of food or drink they're given, not how full they actually are. And portion sizes, of course, have increased dramatically over the past few decades.

In 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a document about research into portion sizes. Experiments with mac and cheese, sandwiches, pasta entrees, potato chip bags, bags of popcorn and other food all showed that people ate more when given more.

Often, people reported feeling just as full whether they ate smaller or larger portions. In the potato chip study, people didn't adjust their intake at dinner after eating a larger bag of chips.

The New Yorker covered more studies into the psychology of choice last August. (I recall anti-ban petitioners wandering the sticky-hot New York City parks around that time, asking passersby their opinions on the ban. Shake Shack patrons seemed to be opposed.)

People tend to go for the default option, the New Yorker reported. People living in areas where the default is to be enrolled as an organ donor are mostly organ donors. People living in areas where they have to actively check that "Be an organ donor" box are mostly not organ donors. People automatically enrolled in a retirement plan tend to stay in that plan, while people who must choose a plan move around more.

People also tend to take more when they know a bigger option exists, the New Yorker reported. It's as if knowing a super size exists, even if you don't choose it, makes that large frappe seem reasonable.

There's still an open question on whether, scientifically, a soda size limit would work to reduce obesity rates and the financial and health costs of obesity.

Whether Americans sustain their responses to increased portion sizes over weeks and months and years hasn't been studied, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pointed out.

And how much sugary drinks contribute to obesity by themselves is uncertain. Slate's Dan Engber--also a contributor to this publication--analyzed the science of linking sweet drinks to weight gain and found that the studies are unsure. Then again, the most unsure studies were supported by grants from the beverage industry.



A Subterranean Performance Inaugurates The Largest Earth Telescope Ever

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Tele-Commute Chilean singer Constanza Biagini, wearing a hat designed to look like the ALMA telescope dishes, belts out an unscripted vocal performance in a Santiago subway station. Rebecca Boyle
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is officially introduced today in Chile, and PopSci is high in the Andes with the details.

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Wearing a rainbow skirt, silver face paint and a pair of metallic radio dishes on her head, Constanza Biagini was an exhibit unto herself. She stood in a dim back room of a crowded Chilean subway station, a living interpretation of the country's newest point of astronomical pride. And then she started singing.

Her performance served as a formal introduction to ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array, the largest telescope ever built on Earth. The most powerful observatory in short-wavelength radio astronomy, ALMA is a feat of engineering that will unveil cosmic histories, like the birth of stars and planets, that have until now been invisible to us. It's also an enormous source of pride in Chile, where people like to say they have the best skies for astronomy.

Morning commuters passing through Estacion Baquedano heard a soaring, operatic vocal performance that trilled like radio waves, or at least otherworldly sounds that you might associate with radio astronomy. Remember the opera scene in the movie "The Fifth Element?" That's what this was. Biagini, 26, said she tried to emulate the sounds of a theremin.

ALMA is an array of 66 radio dishes situated in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, which provides spectacular views for both human eyes and finely tuned radio receivers. Though it is hosted by Chile, it is very much an international collaboration--the U.S. and Europe donated 25 dishes each, and the remaining 16 were built by Japan. It is formally inaugurated today, and I am here with dignitaries from all over the globe who are celebrating ALMA's potential to transform astronomy. Stay tuned for much more.



NSFW: A Survey Of Global Porn Searches [Infographic]

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PornMD's Survey of Global Porn SearchesPornMD
What kind of porn are New Yorkers searching for? How about Nigerians? Palestinians? Portuguese?

PornMD, which, despite its distinguished-sounding name is actually a porn search engine in PornHub's popular network of pornography sites, just published a genuinely fascinating interactive infographic about the search habits of porn users around the world. You can see the top ten searches in an array of countries and all 50 states.

Some are expected--teen, Asian, MILF--and some are more a result of the fact that PornHub is an English-language site, so a speaker of another language might naturally search for pornography in their own tongue, so to speak. (Interestingly, while 49 of the states have the same standard 10 or 15 searches, Hawaii's searches are more similar to those of foreign nations than its fellow states: the most popular searches are for "Hawaiian" porn in addition to Asian and Japanese, cultures heavily represented on the islands.)

And then there's the...weirder...stuff. Why does Iran search so enthusiastically for gay hotel businessman porn? Especially given Ahmadinejad's statement that there are no gay people in his country? Why do Ukrainians search for "gay raincoat" porn above all else? What even is that? Does the entire nation of Finland have an Oedipal complex?

See the infographic here. There's no actual photographic or video nudity on the page, but it's NSFW given some of the words that appear.

[via BuzzFeed]



9 Reasons To Avoid Sugar As If Your Life Depended On It

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Sugar rushDreamstime
Because, well, it does!

The harmful effects of sugar go way beyond empty calories.

Added sugar is so unhealthy that it is probably the single worst ingredient in the modern diet.

Here are the top 9 reasons to avoid sugar as if your life depended on it (it does).

1. Added Sugar Supplies a Large Amount of Fructose

The reason added sugar (and its evil twin… High Fructose Corn Syrup) is bad for you, is that it supplies a very large amount of fructose.

Sugar (and HFCS) are half glucose, half fructose. Glucose is essential and can be metabolized by pretty much every cell in the body. If we don't get it from the diet, our bodies make it from proteins and fat.

Fructose, however, is not essential to our functioning in any way.

The only organ that can metabolize fructose is the liver, because only the liver has a transporter for it (1).

When large amounts of fructose enter the liver and it is already full of glycogen, most of the fructose gets turned into fat (2).

This process is probably one of the leading causes of the epidemics of many chronic, Western diseases.

I'd like to point out that this does NOT apply to fruit, which are a real food with vitamins, minerals, fiber, lots of water and are very difficult to overeat on.

Bottom Line: The only organ that can metabolize fructose is the liver. When we eat a lot of fructose, many things in the body start to go wrong.


2. Sugar Doesn't Contain Any Vitamins or Minerals (Empty Calories)

Sugar IS empty calories. No doubt about that.

Most high-sugar foods like pastries, sodas and candy bars contain very little essential nutrients.

People who eat them instead of other more nutritious foods will probably become deficient in many important nutrients.

Bottom Line: Most products with added sugars in them contain very little nutrients and can therefore be classified as "empty" calories.

3. Sugar Causes Deposition of Fat in The Liver

When we eat fructose, it goes to the liver.

If liver glycogen is low, such as after a run, the fructose will be used to replenish it (3).

However, most people aren't consuming fructose after a long workout and their livers are already full of glycogen.

When this happens, the liver turns the fructose into fat (2).

Some of the fat gets shipped out, but part of it remains in the liver. The fat can build up over time and ultimately lead to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (4, 5, 6).

Bottom Line: Eating a lot of added sugar (fructose) can cause deposition of fat in the liver and lead to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

4. Sugar Harms Your Cholesterol and Triglycerides

Most of the fat generated in the liver gets shipped out as Very Low Density Lipoprotein (VLDL) particles.

These particles are rich in triglycerides and cholesterol.

In a controlled study, people were assigned to drink 25% of calories as either a glucose-sweetened drink or a fructose-sweetened drink for 10 weeks (7).

The fructose group had:

Increases in blood triglycerides.

Increases in small, dense LDL and oxidized LDL (very, very bad).
Higher fasting glucose and insulin.

Decreased insulin sensitivity.

Increased fat in the abdominal cavity (visceral fat).

Basically, 25% of calories as fructose significantly harmed blood lipids and caused features characteristic of the metabolic syndrome, which is a stepping stone towards obesity, heart disease, diabetes and a (short) lifetime of poor health.

Bottom Line: Consuming a large part of calories as fructose can lead to serious adverse effects on blood markers in as little as 10 weeks.

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5. Sugar Causes Insulin Resistance

The main function of insulin is to drive glucose from the bloodstream into cells.

But when we eat a Western diet, the cells tend to become resistant to the effects of insulin.

When this happens, the pancreas start secreting even more insulin to remove the glucose from the bloodstream, because elevated blood glucose is toxic.

This is how insulin resistance leads to elevated insulin levels in the blood.

But insulin also has another important function… it tells the fat cells to pick up fat from the bloodstream and to hold on to the fat that they already carry.

This is how insulin causes obesity.

When the body becomes even more resistant to insulin, the beta cells in the pancreas eventually become damaged and lose the ability to produce sufficient insulin. This is how you get type II diabetes, which now afflicts about 300 million people worldwide.

Excess fructose is a known cause of insulin resistance and elevated insulin in the blood (8, 9, 10).

Bottom Line: Excess fructose consumption can lead to insulin resistance, a stepping stone towards obesity and diabetes.

6. Sugar Raises Your Risk of Western Diseases

Excess sugar consumption has been associated with many Western diseases.

If anything, sugar is the single largest contributing factor to the poor health of affluent nations.

Every time sugar (and refined flour and vegetable oils) enter a population's diet, these people become sick.

Sugar has been associated with:

Obesity. Sugar causes weight gain via various mechanisms, including elevated insulin and leptin resistance (11, 12).

Diabetes. Sugar is probably a leading cause of diabetes (13, 14, 15).

Heart disease. Sugar raises the bad cholesterol, triglycerides and causes various other issues that can ultimately lead to heart disease (16, 17).

Bottom Line: Excess sugar consumption has been associated with many serious diseases, including obesity, type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

7. Sugar Doesn't Cause Proper Satiety

n area in the brain called the Hypothalamus is supposed to regulate our food intake.

In a study published in 2013, two groups drank either a glucose-sweetened drink or a fructose-sweetened drink (18).

The glucose drinkers had decreased blood flow in the hypothalamus and felt satiated, while the fructose drinkers had increased blood flow in this area of the brain.

The fructose drinkers felt less satisfied and were still hungry.

Another study revealed that fructose didn't reduce levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin like glucose. The more ghrelin, the hungrier you are (19).

Bottom Line: Studies comparing fructose and glucose show that fructose does not induce satiety like glucose, which will contribute to a higher calorie intake.

8. Sugar is Addictive

When we eat sugar, dopamine is released in the brain, giving us a feeling of pleasure.

This is actually how drugs of abuse like cocaine function (20).

Our brain is hardwired to seek out activities that release dopamine. Activities that release an enormous amount of it are especially desirable.

In certain individuals with a certain predisposition to addiction, this causes reward-seeking behavior typical of addiction to abusive drugs.

Studies in rats demonstrate that they can in fact become physically addicted to sugar (21).

This is harder to prove in humans, but many people consume sugar and other junk foods in a pattern that is typical for addictive, abusive compounds.

Bottom Line: Sugar, due to its powerful effects on the reward system in the brain, can lead to classic signs of addiction.

9. Sugar Causes Resistance to a Hormone Called Leptin

Leptin is a hormone that is secreted by our fat cells. The more fat we have, the more leptin is secreted.

This is supposed to function as a signal to tell the brain that we're full and need to stop eating. It is also supposed to raise our energy expenditure.

Obese individuals actually have high levels of leptin, but the problem is that the leptin isn't working.

This is called leptin resistance and is a major reason why people eat more calories than they burn and become obese.

Fructose is a known cause of leptin resistance, both because insulin blocks leptin signalling in the brain and because fructose raises blood triglycerides which also blocks the effects of leptin (22, 23, 24).

This makes our brain think that the fat cells are empty and that it needs to keep eating.

Willpower is very weak compared to the leptin-driven starvation signal.

This is the reason people can't just "eat less, move more" and live happily ever after.

To reverse leptin resistance and make the brain WANT to eat less, sugar has to go.

This article was republished with permission from Authority Nutrition.



Their Big Eyes May Have Caused Neanderthals' Demise

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Prehistoric Face-Off A comparison of skull features of an anatomically modern human and a Neanderthal. Wikipedia
The species may have gone extinct because their eyes demanded too many neural resources.

Anyone stuck with glasses knows the envy of those with killer eyesight. But visual acuity apparently came at a price, at least for Neanderthals. According to a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B this week, Neanderthals' visual acuity in the low-light conditions of northern Europe -- much higher than that of Homo sapiens -- came at the cost of other cognitive skills, such as extended social networks and innovation maintenance.

Researchers at Oxford University compared the sizes of the orbital sockets (the holes in the skull where eyeballs go) to the size of the visual cortex (the part of the brain tasked with interpreting visual information) of five diurnal primate species: Humans, Rhesus macaques, marmosets, squirrel monkeys and brown-mantled tamarins. The results were clear: the size (volume) the visual cortex in each of these species is proportional to the size of the orbital sockets (and thus, the scientists inferred, the eyeballs themselves). The scientists then measured the orbital sockets of a number of Neanderthal skulls and of modern humans alive at the same time as the Neanderthals, and deduced what the volume of the visual cortex in those individuals would have been.

The researchers found that Neanderthals that lived 25-75K years ago had a much higher proportion of their brains dedicated to visual processing, even when compared with anatomically modern humans living during the same time period. This specialization of their brains, the scientists propose, mean that less neural tissue was left over for higher-order reasoning, problem-solving and creating elaborate social networks. This would limit the Neanderthals' abilities to, for example, trade for resources not endemic to their local habitat, or in times of local scarcity. Additionally, the scientists claim, Neanderthals' ability to develop or learn new technologies could have suffered due to their brains' specialization on visual acuity.

The researchers sum up their findings thusly:

Whereas [anatomically modern humans] appear to have concentrated neural investment in social adaptations to solve ecological problems, Neanderthals seem to have adopted an alternative strategy that involved enhanced vision coupled with retention of the physical robusticity of H. heidelbergensis, but not superior social cognition. […] While the physical response to high latitude conditions adopted by Neanderthals may have been very effective at first, the social response developed by AMHs seems to have eventually won out in the face of the climatic instability that characterized high-latitude Eurasia at this time.




15 Incredible Images Of Futuristic Skyscrapers

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Light Park Floating Skyscraper Coming in third place, this design for Beijing imagines a skyscraper that brings parks and other green spaces to heavily developed areas. A giant balloon would suspend it in mid-air. We have some thoughts about trees on buildings, but it's still pretty amazing. (The following images all received honorable mentions in the competition.) Ting Xu, Yiming Chen
Architects design buildings for rebuilding after the apocalypse, terraforming Mars, and more.


Click to enter the gallery

eVolo Magazine, an architecture and design journal with a futuristic bent, has announced the winners of its 2013 Skyscraper Competition, where architects imagine what the skyscrapers of tomorrow will look like. Hundreds of architects entered and offered up concepts for buildings, and they are some of the most science-fictional ideas we've seen in a while. Just a quick sample of some honorable mentions: a skyscraper that floats on a giant balloon, a shield that harnesses heat from volcanoes, and a plan for building cities inside meteorite crash sites.

Admittedly, this contest is more of a thought experiment; it's not very likely any of these are ever going to be built. (Hopefully the one for rebuilding after the apocalypse isn't necessary, anyway.) But still, like the best sci-fi, it gives a glimpse of the future based on technology we're near now.

So until you're reading this from your wood skyscraper, enjoy.

[eVolo]



ALMA, Earth's Largest Telescope, Is Officially Open For Business

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The next 30 years of observations will revolutionize astronomy.

NEAR SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, CHILE -- A massive new telescope that will unveil the faintest, most distant objects in our universe is officially inaugurated today, with great fanfare and anticipation from the world's astronomical community. Scientists gathered in the desolate Chilean Andes this week say the new Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array could revolutionize cosmology. It it is the largest, most complex and most ambitious telescope project in history.

ALMA, whose acronym means "soul" in Spanish, will uncover some of the most mysterious and yet most common phenomena in the cosmos. From its perch on the 16,400-foot Chajnantor Plateau, it will see the birth pangs of stars, the collision of cosmic crumbs that turn into planets, and possibly even the formation of moons around faraway worlds.

"This is much more than an astronomers' observatory. ALMA will allow us to get deeper into this universe, but also to get deeper into our own nature, and our own lives," said the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera. "The native Chilean people that lived here since 10,000 years ago knew this from the beginning. In their native language, Chajnantor means 'point of observation.' ... We know that Chile is a very small country, but with your help, in astronomy, we want to become a real giant."

Pinera led a delegation of luminaries who drove on winding unpaved roads, past grazing llamas and looming cactus, before traipsing through the soft gray dirt at ALMA's Operations Support Facility.

A week prior to the ceremony, a shaman and other indigenous Andeans traveled to the array and blessed the telescope's antennas. Even the astronauts orbiting Earth on the International Space Station joined in the celebration with a surprise message Wednesday. Along with future observatories, including the James Webb Space Telescope, ALMA "will enable the exploration of the universe with unprecedented power," said Chris Hadfield, who recently turned over the commander's seat. "We congratulate the scientific communities of North America, and Europe and east Asia. ..."Enjoy your new discoveries."

The ceremonies Wednesday capped 30 years of planning and a decade of construction. The U.S. spent $500 million on the ALMA project, making it the largest investment ever by the National Science Foundation in any facility in the world, according to Subra Suresh, the outgoing director of NSF. Along with its potential for groundbreaking new science, the technology behind ALMA will translate to countless new innovations we might not even imagine now, he said--just as the Apollo moon program set off new products that had nothing to do with the moon.

"We put man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase, but wheels on a suitcase is also an important innovation," he said. "ALMA will not only lead to innovations [in astronomy], it will lead to many, many seemingly small innovations that will improve humanity."

The technology that makes ALMA possible only came into existence in the past few years, astronomers said. Throughout its expected 30-year lifetime, it can also be upgraded with even more powerful receivers that could probe even deeper.

"There's no way this could have happened any sooner, because the technology is state-of-the-art," said Alison Peck, former head of ALMA commissioning and now an associate scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, an ALMA partner.

What is ALMA?

Half of all light in the universe is in millimeter-wavelength light between the far infrared and radio waves. ALMA can detect this light, which is emitted by cool objects and distant objects. It's possible thanks to the telescope's location at 16,400 feet in the driest desert on Earth, and because of the incredible precision of its 66 antennas.

All telescopes are limited in their angular resolution by the ratio of their aperture to the wavelength they observe, explained Michael Thornburn, head of the ALMA department of engineering. ALMA is an aperture synthesis telescope.

"We cannot make a single aperture 15 kilometers across, so we do it in pieces," he said. "The signals from individual dishes are combined to build up the image from a single large aperture."

Radio signals from distant cosmic sources arrive at each dish at ever-so-slightly different times, and these are combined with the signals from every other antenna. This technique, interferometry, allows ALMA to operate like a single huge dish with an adaptable radius.

In a carefully choreographed ballet, each dish moves in unison with the others to change the telescope's observing area. Along with moving in place, giant transporter trucks, specially designed for the dishes, can pick them up and cart them across the Chajnantor Plateau to one of 192 concrete pads. At their greatest distance apart--16 kilometers--ALMA's angular resolution will be equivalent to the Hubble Space Telescope, Peck said.

ALMA is observing sources that are 10 times weaker than those observed with other arrays, explained Pierre Cox, ALMA's incoming director. This is key to ALMA's capability for observing phenomena like star formation, he said.

"Future observations should allow us to detect dark matter substructure and shed light on its nature," he added.

There's much more to learn about how ALMA works, and why astronomers are so excited about it--stay tuned for more dispatches from the Atacama.



Minority Scientists Are Less Likely To Find Jobs

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Breakdown Of Working U.S. Scientists And Engineers By Race And Sex, 2010NSF
And more disturbing stats from a biennial report on women and minorities in science and engineering. Though it's not all bad!

You probably already know that women and certain minorities are underrepresented in science and engineering in the U.S. But a recent report from the the National Science Foundation shows just how pronounced that gap is.

The report comes out every two years, and it tracks women, minorities, and people with disabilities in science and engineering. The latest report uses figures from 2010, the most recent year for which data was available. The highlights include trends that are both expected and unexpected:

Unemployment

Minority scientists and engineers are more likely to be unemployed. In 2010, unemployment rates were highest for Asian women and underrepresented minority men and women scientists, with each around 7 percent. (That was still quite a bit under the average national unemployment rate that year, which was 9.6 percent.) The unemployment rate for white men in science and engineering was 3.6 percent.

By the way, Asians aren't considered an underrepresented race in math and science. In 2010, 18 percent of U.S. scientists and engineers were Asian, while Asians represented only 4.7 percent of the U.S. population. The National Science Foundation counts black, Hispanic and American Indian people as underrepresented minorities in science.

Among the roughly 4 percent of white male engineers and scientists who say they're unemployed, 71 percent say they're unemployed because they're retired. That's much more than the next group: Unemployed, underrepresented minority male scientists, 52 percent of whom say they're unemployed because they're retired.

The reasons for unemployment vary between different races and sexes of scientists.

Women were four to six times more likely to be unemployed because of family responsibilities than men, and Asian men and underrepresented minority men and women were the most likely to say they're unemployed because of a layoff or because there aren't jobs available.

Current and future scientists

The majority of working scientists and engineers (51 percent) are white men, with the next-largest groups being white women (18 percent) and Asian men (13 percent). One promising detail: these figures probably won't stay that way forever. Women and underrepresented minorities are earning greater and greater shares of math and science degrees every year, it's just that the job market, which includes scientists who might have trained any time in the last 30 years, doesn't yet reflect that diversity.

There is still a significant gap in certain fields, though.

In the social sciences and biology, women earned half or more of the degrees granted at all levels. And they earned between 70 to 80 percent of the degrees in psychology. They still earned fewer than half of the degrees given in math and the physical sciences, however, and fewer than 30 percent of the degrees given in engineering and the computer sciences.

The numbers of underrepresented minorities earning bachelor's and master's degrees in math and science have increased slowly but steadily since 1991. The share of doctorates going to underrepresented minorities has leveled out and stayed below 8 percent since about 2004.

Historically black colleges

Historically black colleges and universities are an important early training ground for black PhDs. Thirty percent of black doctorates in math, science or engineering got their bachelor's at a historically black institution. A couple of the better-known places include Howard University in Washington, DC, and Morehouse College in Georgia, but there are more than 100 historically black colleges in the U.S..

The ivory tower

For full-time academic scientists of all stripes, median salaries are pretty similar. They start at about $50,000 for freshly minted doctorates and hit about $80,000 after more than a dozen years of experience.

Women have made big gains in academia. The share of female math and science full-time professors in 2010 is more than double the share in 1993. But the overall number is still small: Women make up only 22 percent of math and science full-time professors.

Underrepresented minorities have made smaller gains than women in ivory towers across the U.S. In 1993, 3.8 percent of full-time math and science professors were black or Hispanic. In 2010, 5.9 percent were.

Women and underrepresented minorities are less likely to receive federal grants to do research, too, a phenomenon the National Institutes of Health have begun to track.



This Clock Tracks The End Of The World

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The clock monitors how close we are to doomsday, as decided by the heads of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Maybe you're familiar with the Doomsday Clock. It's an analogy started by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to track how we close we are to the apocalypse by way of nuclear war or other global disaster. Midnight means the end of the world. Artist Tom Schofield went ahead and turned that analogy into reality with this clock, which automatically checks the Bulletin's site for updates on the human race's demise. Cheery!

As of 2012, the clock's been set to 11:55 p.m. (Gulp.) That's not the closest to midnight ever--it was set to 11:58 back in 1953--but it's still too close for comfort. That's where Schofield's clock, the Neurotic Armageddon Indicator, is sitting right now. It uses a computer program to regularly check the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' website for any time changes, then adjusts accordingly.

Hard to say when that change is coming, though: the hands have been altered just 20 times since the clock started in 1947, and often they aren't change for several years. So Schofield's clock will neurotically check the Bulletin's site until the real clock budges. Unless it's midnight, in which case it's going to be tough to find updates.

[Creative Applications Network]



Wait, Is There Life In Lake Vostok? Researcher Still Says Yes

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Lake Vostok Drilling SiteWikimedia Commons
The bacterium found last week was an undiscovered lifeform. No, it was a contaminant. No! Yes!

We never suspected this particular saga to go smoothly, and so the latest tit-for-tat over Lake Vostok and its possible Brand New Lifeforms is depressingly familiar.

A quick primer: Lake Vostok is a large subglacial lake in the Antarctic. Scientists think that the water in the lake has been cut off from the outside world for up to 25 million years; that isolation could mean that Lake Vostok harbors forms of life now totally unknown to the modern age, trapped in a dark, frozen time-machine. Russian scientists have been drilling toward Lake Vostok for over a decade. After years of waiting to drill the last few meters into the lake (contamination of the unknown ecosystem was a big fear), the Russians finally reached Lake Vostok in February 2012. About a week ago, Sergey Bulat of the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics announced that the Vostok team had found "an unclassified and unidentified" form of bacterial life -- one that was only 86% similar to other bacterial taxa -- in the samples taken from the lake.

Skeptics were quick to question the results, citing contamination as a more-likely source of the bacteria. As one microbiologist said to Nature, running across "uncultured and unsequenced" bacteria in the wild is totally typical--some 90% of all bacterial species on Earth fall into that category. Just because this putative Vostokian variety doesn't match known bacteria taxa is no indication that it's actually new to science. Others were critical of the Russians' methodology and general contamination of the sample, which was reportedly about 50% kerosene. The sample also had only 167 cells per milliliter of fluid, a very meagre haul. As another researcher (granted, one involved with a rival drilling group) sarcastically quipped to Nature, "They really need to stop playing around with frozen lake water bathed in kerosene and get a clean bulk water sample."

Kerosene. Wherever the hell the bacteria came from, they were able to survive at subfreezing temperatures bathed in kerosene--that kind of blows my mind. (The Russians used kerosene in the borehole to prevent it freezing over during drilling.) Whatever the hell that lifeform turns out to be, I have to give it props for surviving in that environment.

Of equal interest will be any results that come from a U.S.-led expedition to Lake Whillans, another Antarctic subglacial lake. Instead of kerosene, this group used a hot-water jet to make a borehole to the lake. In February, those scientists announced that they, too, had found life in lake water and sediment. But they stopped well-short of claiming "new forms of life."

Only time and full genomic analysis will answer many of the questions lingering around the bacterial hauls from both lakes. And even then, as scientists have found to their chagrin, that might just be the beginning of the drama.



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