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Is EA The Worst Company In America?

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SimCityEA
The Consumerist says yes. We say otherwise.

Gaming company Electronic Arts (nee EA) is unhappy right now. The launch of the much-anticipated SimCity got botched, after server demand overloaded EA's systems, making the game completely unplayable. The company's stock has been slowly plummeting for a while now, and gamers are using that as evidence that EA is employing penny-pinching tactics like digital rights management (software add-ons that prevent sharing and copying) to squeeze more money from customers. (EA's CEO was canned recently, presumably because of the company's lousy finances.)

Now, for the second year in a row, The Consumerist has named EA the worst company in America, based on the results of an online poll. It's the only company in the history of the competition to receive that dubious honor. The Consumerist cited a few facts: EA makes expensive games that are occasionally broken (like SimCity), then doesn't support the games with updates once they've been bought (or they charge for those updates). Pretty bad, right?

Says The Consumerist:

When we live in an era marked by massive oil spills, faulty foreclosures by bad banks, and rampant consolidation in the airline and telecom industry, what does it say about EA's business practices that so many people have - for the second year in a row - come out to hand it the title of Worst Company In America?

Still doesn't make EA the worst company in America. All it does it tell us is 1.) gamers reaaaaaaaaally care about gaming and 2.) gamers spend too much time on the internet. If you wanted to draw a Venn diagram, there'd be plenty of overlap between people who read The Consumerist and people who hate EA: Young, tech-savvy gamers whose hobby is being "threatened" by a gaming corporation.

But, realistically, there is no comparison between a company that annoys customers and one that actively harms customers. Imagine, if you will, two people. The first: a dedicated EA fan who can't play SimCity, and who is (rightfully!) upset by that fact. The second: someone whose home was unfairly foreclosed on after allegedly being sold defective mortgages by Bank of America. Bank of America lost in the final round. Whoever voted for EA, please explain to the foreclosed-upon person (and me) why EA is deserving of that title.

So it's a little silly to put too much stock in the poll, but there is a lesson here. EA isn't the worst company in America, but even among non-gamers, it's starting to be portrayed that way, because gamers are an audience that knows how to kick back. The dust-up over SimCity, I'd wager, was covered more widely because EA was behind it, and because gamers had been disappointed by the company one too many times. Gamers are willing to shell out plenty of cash for games, EA, but they're not a demographic you want to mess with.

    



Why Are Monkey Butts So Colorful?

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MandrillWikimedia Commons
Plus, the best colored monkey butts on the internet!


Click to launch the gallery.

If you're anything like me, you may have wondered why some monkeys have bright blue skin. Even if you don't pay careful attention to monkey butts, you may still have wondered what makes some people's eyes blue.

To answer these questions, it is important to first understand how light interacts with living stuff, which we call biological tissue. Light is a collection of little packets of energy, called photons, that whiz through the air. Photons come in all different colors, and when these colors are all together, we see white light (like sunlight or light from a light bulb). But photons of different colors act differently when they enter biological tissue.

You can think of a photon as a drunk person walking through a forest. The drunk person enters the forest and walks into a tree, D'oh!, changes direction (scatters) and walks another short distance and into another tree, D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! …. and before you know it the drunk person exits the forest in a random place going a random direction.

When photons enter the skin, it is just like the drunk person walking in the forest. Photons bounce off collagen fibers (instead of trees) and emerge from the skin at a random place. In optics, we call this diffuse reflection. A visual representation of diffuse reflection is when a LASER beam hits the surface of milk, giving off a "glow ball" around the LASER spot. (You can also catch my personal demonstration HERE).

Before it gets detected by your eye, a single photon that penetrates a biological tissue (like skin) will randomly scatter within the tissue many times. But it is important to consider that skin is more complex than the forest analogy. Skin is composed of many layers and contains pigments such as melanin, and this affects how photons scatter. This added complexity is the secret to the blue monkey butt.

To understand how photons move through a complex tissue like skin, lets compare a red photon with a blue photon as it hits two tissue layers. Tissue "A" is on top, and Tissue "B" is underneath. If layers A and B were both white (like milk), they would reflect red and blue photons equally and you would see both colors.

But in real skin, the top layer (Tissue A) has only a little melanin, while the next layer of skin (Tissue B) can contain a lot of melanin, which is important because melanin absorbs light, "killing" any photons that encounter it!

In the picture above, both the red and blue photons bounce (scatter) 4 times while they are penetrating the skin. But because the red photons travel a longer distance in between scattering events, they manage to penetrate both layers of skin. The melanin in Tissue B absorbs the red photon so it can't leave the skin and reach your eye.

In contrast, the blue photons take very short steps in between their scattering events, and they don't penetrate very deep. They do not make it past Tissue A before they emerge and hit your eye.

A baboon's butt tissue is arranged somewhat like the illustration above so that blue photons are reflected and all of the other photons (like the red ones) are absorbed. Only the blue light makes it out and gets into our eyes. This is why we see we see blue monkey butts!

So now you will never look at a monkey's butt the same way: you will know what makes it blue! You will even be able to hold your own if this topic ever comes up on a first date…

More about photons: Another demonstration of optical diffusion can be found HERE. If you want to go way off the mathematical deep end of diffusion theory, equation 15 of THIS PAPER is a great way to start. Alternately, if you are sick and tired of diffuse light and just want to see me rock out using ballistic laser light, check out this RAP MUSIC VIDEO.

Or if you'd prefer to invoke the Goldilocks Postulate, and want to try something that is just right in the middle: head over to this online biophotonics course.

P.S. Stay tuned for next time's discussion about imaging cats through a layers of milk, another wonder of light diffusion.

This article was republished with permission from its author. See the original post over at Rockefeller.edu.

    


Holy Crap, Saturn's Rings Are Raining Water

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Saturn's Ring Rain This artist's concept illustrates how charged water particles flow into the Saturnian atmosphere from the planet's rings, causing a reduction in atmospheric brightness. Wow! NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/University of Leicester
Astronomers discover rainwater falling all over the planet!

Exciting news from space: Astronomers have discovered that charged water particles fall from Saturn's rings over large areas of the planet, and the rainwater has a major impact on Saturn's atmosphere.

Previously, scientists thought water particles only fell to the planet in two or three narrow bands. But after analyzing data from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers at the University of Leicester found that the ring-rain is actually widespread and influences the composition and temperature of large parts of Saturn's upper atmosphere.

"Saturn is the first planet to show significant interaction between its atmosphere and ring system," James O'Donoghue, the paper's lead author, says. "The main effect of ring-rain is that it acts to ‘quench' the ionosphere of Saturn, severely reducing the electron densities in regions in which it falls."

The discovery that ring-rain decreases electron densities solves a long-standing mystery: For decades, astronomers have wondered why they observed unusually low electron densities at some places on Saturn.

According to the researchers, Saturn's magnetic field draws charged water particles in the rings toward the planet, causing the rain effect. This isn't the first time astronomers have detected odd weather activity on our solar system's second largest planet. In 2011, scientists observed that Saturn's moon Enceladus was spewing huge jets of water onto its host planet.

The study appears in this week's issue of Nature.

    


From DARPA, A Navigational Device That Fits On A Penny And Works When GPS Doesn't

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TIMUDARPA
DARPA's new on-the-go navigation chip can measure orientation, acceleration, and time.

GPS is great, but it isn't always reliable. The signal can be interrupted by, say, a tunnel, or something else smothering the relay between here and space. So DARPA wants to navigate GPS blackout areas with a chip that does everything you need when GPS stops working, and to make that tech smaller than a penny.

The chip is called a timing and inertial measurement unit (TIMU), and it's actually a pretty simple little tool. Stuffed inside the 10 cubic millimeters are three gyroscopes, three accelerometers, and a master clock, all engineered by DARPA to take up as little space as possible. Those devices can measure orientation, acceleration, and time, which, if you already have a starting point, is all that's needed to calculate where something is. The chip's possible because of a unique structure: six layers of silica, each about as thick as a hair, stacked together.

DAPRA is developing the technology to help U.S. troops avoid navigational mishaps on military missions. It is meant to kick into gear when GPS is temporarily down or unavailable--it is not designed to replace GPS. So don't expect it to condescendingly recite driving directions to you any time soon.

[DARPA]

    


Brain Scans Offer Precise Measurement Of Human Pain

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Pain In The Brain Regions in the brain researchers found are activated when someone is experiencing pain from heat. The yellow regions are active when someone is in a lot of pain, while the blue regions are active during lower levels of pain. Tor Wager
A new study is a first step toward a objective way to measure physical pain.

Pain may be personal, but when it comes to a painful burn, people's brains seem to react the same way.

A team of researchers administered painful doses of heat to human subjects' forearms, in a range of temperatures from 111.7°F (44.3°C) to 120.7°F (49.3°C). Then, using brain scans, the team accurately evaluated the amount of pain the people felt, distinguishing between painful temperatures just one degree Celsius apart. Further research along these lines could lead to an objective measure of physical pain, though that's still a long ways away.

The immediate next step is to see if other types of pain, say from too much pressure, also create measurable, uniform responses the way heat does. And figuring out chronic pain, which is often associated with disease, will be another beast to tackle.

This study was one of a fewrecent studies that have tried to quantify people's pain by examining functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scans, Tor Wager, the study's lead scientist and a researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder, tells Popular Science. And, he says, it's the first to achieve this level of accuracy.

Right now, if a doctor wants to measure or record someone's pain, she'll generally just ask her patient about it, or ask her patient to rate his pain from 1 to 10. That will always be a very important part of diagnosis, Wager says, but having a less subjective measure could nevertheless help. Some people, such as very young, very old or certain disabled people, can't communicate well. Others may underreport their pain-or are less likely to be believed.

"Providing objective measures can help people from being undertreated," Wager says. He pointed to previous research that showed women and minorities receive less pain medication for reporting the same levels of pain than white men do, perhaps because doctors consciously or subconsciously do not believe their pain reports.

For this study, Wager and researchers from several U.S. universities analyzed brain scans from 114 people in a series of experiments. They compared the "heat pain" scans to scans of people anticipating, but not yet experiencing pain; people remembering pain; and people experiencing social pain, triggered by looking at a picture of a recent ex. (Previous studies have shown social pain involves many of the same regions in the brain as physical pain. "There's nothing that looks more like physical pain than social pain," Wager says.) Lastly, the researchers checked what happened when they gave people a pain reliever similar to morphine.

By feeding all of these scans into a computer program, Wager and his team discovered a pattern in the brain scans, common to the participants, that showed up only for painful heat. Using this pain signature, they were then able to evaluate people's pain in response to particular levels of heat with 90 to 100 percent accuracy, Wager says.

Wager has plenty of new studies ongoing or planned. He's looking for brain scan signatures that might correlate with pain from pressure, shocks, cold and a variety of other unpleasant stuff. He wants to see how mental attitudes, distraction and other interventions affect pain brain scans. And he'll look for patterns correlating to emotions such as sadness, pleasure and anger.

He and his colleagues published their heat pain work today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    


What Were Offices Like Before Computers And The Internet?

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The 32B Secretary Treasurer's office in 1937Wikimedia Commons
Old-timer Reddit users explain what work was like before the information age.

Sometimes while browsing Reddit (the land of aww-inspiring animal photos, sarcastic image macros, and the occasional "Ask Me Anything" with a current U.S. president) we find a discussion thread that perfectly illustrates the amazing ways in which science and technology have morphed our world. Case in point: Yesterday, Reddit user FLHCv2 asked the more than 3 million subscribers of the subreddit AskReddit: "Older Redditors, what were offices like before computers and the internet became mainstream?"

Here are some of our favorite answers. From user inbetweenthemargins:

Loud and smokey. If you've ever banged around on an old typewriter, even the electric kind, try to remember that sound and multiply it by 20 or 30 going full tilt. Now, go into a closet, close the door, and smoke a carton of cigarettes. That's what it was like.

Ouch. Not quite as glam as Mad Men. User rytis makes it sound a little more quaint:

People smoked at their desks, and you could look out over a sea of cubicles and know who was in by the smoke curling up over their cubicle walls. Research was done in libraries. We even had our own office library, which was filled with phone books, encyclopedias, manuals, research books, trade magazines, and newspapers.

User YourNewPope on what it was like to be one of the first techies:

I did programming pre-widespread-Internet. We used to have to look up things in books. Software was delivered in trucks.

From another early programmer, user aRoseBy:

In the late 1970s ... I was working as a COBOL programmer in a big insurance company, writing billing and accounting programs. I would write lines of code on coding sheets: these were pages of graph paper, twice as wide as long. I would write a program and drop the coding sheets in the inbox in the keypunch room. The keypunch girls (yes, all young women) would copy the program, one line at a time, to a stack of IBM cards. The cards were bound up in a rubber band, labelled, and put in a tray to be brought in the computer room. The computer ran 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.

User bluedunkie, on working in sales:

[P}eople usually held appointments more seriously, as there were no methods to cancel or contact salesmen, i.e., today you may get a text like "hey my day just got crazy, can we change to next week...?" Pre-smartphones, cellphones, texting etc, there was no way for the customer to contact you. I also had to make sure I had my 10 pence coins for making phone calls, which I carried in a sock. We lived in phone boxes.

Remember when there was no direct deposit? Suego26 does:

I used to do payroll for a linen cleaning company of about 150 employees. I would have to lay the check on a board with carbon copy paper and write the hours worked, the pay, the tax deductions and the amount of the check on the top ledger. After that was done I would go to a machine and punch in the amount of the check, insert it and press down to imprint the amount and the signature. It was time consuming, cumbersome, and the likelihood of human error was high.

And when the computers finally arrived? User jeannaimard describes the terror:

[B]ack then, computers were seen as a miraculous thing no one could ever undertand, and when you would have to train someone to work on a computer (or a terminal), they would be nearly fainting when told, then they were mortally afraid of touching the keyboard. It did not matter if the person was old or young, they were equally scared.

And the top comment of the thread, voted up by more than 700 users, from unclearbeer:

You could truly leave work. Work was work, and life was life.

To the future!

    


How It Works: The Earthquake Machine

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Earthquake Simulation MachineGraham Murdoch

The fundamentals of earthquake mechanics are simple: Pieces of rock slip past one another along a fault to release pent-up energy. Some of that energy ripples outward, causing seismic waves that shake the earth. But how long it takes and exactly how the energy dissipates has remained elusive. To discern these processes, researchers recently built a machine at the University of Oklahoma to mimic what happens inside the earth's crust. Two slabs of rock, ground against each other by a 500-pound flywheel, simulate fault stresses to provide data on the energetics of a tremor. "Most of the energy seems to go into heating, and some goes into grinding up material," says David Lockner, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. "What we're all familiar with-the energy that is radiated as ground shaking-ends up being 10 percent or less." Lockner says that understanding how an earthquake's energy evolves over time will help engineers design better earthquake-resistant structures.

BUILD ENERGY

The heart of the apparatus is a flywheel, a device that stores energy mechanically by spinning at high speeds. It's driven by a 100hp motor that can reach 3,300 rpm within 1/10 of a second. The flywheel connects to a central shaft.

An additional shaft connects the clutch to a four-inch-diameter cylindrical block of granite or dolomite, which spins in sync with the flywheel. Researchers use the granite and dolomite as proxies for rocks in the Earth's crust.

Sensors next to and within the rock monitor how the material deforms, grinds, and heats up during the simulation [see inset, above]. For example, infrared sensors and thermocouples measure rock temperature, while other sensors measure how fast the rock spins.

MODEL THE FAULT

To model earthquakes of varying magnitude, researchers start by spinning the flywheel at a given speed; a faster flywheel means a bigger quake. The researchers then disengage it from the motor, letting the flywheel spin on its own stored power.

Immediately afterward, the clutch engages, and the attached block of granite starts to spin. It grinds into a stationary block of rock positioned above. Where both rocks meet is the experimental fault.

At the experimental fault, the spinning rock transfers some of its kinetic energy to the stationary one, and they begin to grind and slip past each other-an earthquake in miniature.

STATS

Height of the Machine in Feet: 5.9
Weight of the Flywheel in Pounds: 500
Seconds the Clutch Needs to Engage: 0.03
Magnitude of the Largest Earthquake Yet Simulated: 8.0

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 How It Works section here, and see all of our April issue here.

    


Is Everyone Really Staring At You?

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I SEE THROUGH YOUR SOULWikimedia Commons
*Checks zipper repeatedly.*

Do you ever walk down the street, convinced everyone you pass is staring you right in the face? First of all, it's possible they are, so duck into an alley and use your phone's front-facing camera to see if you have any weird dirt on your face or something. If there's nothing there, keep walking.

A recent study from the University of Sydney, published this month in Current Biology, found that humans are hard-wired to think that strangers are staring at them. The way we can tell if people are staring at is us obvious; we look at the eyes and trace the gaze. But what's interesting here is that when that kind of analysis is impossible--if the stranger is wearing sunglasses, say, or if our view of their face is obscured, we still tend to assume we're being stared at.

The study showed a distinct bias toward assuming people are staring at us. The researchers theorize that this is protective; in many primates, direct gaze is a threatening or aggressive gesture, so you'd want to make sure not to miss if one was staring at you. So our brains give the benefit of the doubt that way--better to incorrectly think we're being stared at than dismiss the idea and suffer the wrath of some other ape.

The next stage of the research is to figure out if this bias is learned or innate, and what that might tell us about those with autism or social anxiety, who tend to have skewed results (those with autism having a more difficult time telling if someone is looking at them, and those with social anxiety overestimating how often this happens).

You can read the brief over at the University of Sydney's website.

    



Somebody Just Shelled Out $5.3 Million For A Francis Crick Letter Describing DNA

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Francis Crick's Letter To His SonChristie's via io9
Which makes it the most expensive letter ever sold at auction

Describing the double-helix structure of DNA was arguably the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century. So it was a big deal when this letter, penned by one half of the duo who discovered the structure, went on sale at a New York auction. Now the letter has been sold--for $5.3 million.

Francis Crick wrote the letter to his 12-year-old son in 1953. The full transcript is here, which is worth reading just for the wonderfully understated beginning:

Dear Michael,
Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery.

Watson and Crick, along with Maurice Wilkins, were later awarded the Nobel Prize for that "probably... most important discovery."

The $5.3 million bid makes this the most expensive letter ever sold at auction (previous king: an Abraham Lincoln letter sold in 2008 for $3.4 million). The buyer was anonymous, but we're assuming he or she really wanted this little piece of history. If you're looking for something cheaper, the auction house, Christie's, is also selling a series of Crick's other mementos. Bidding starts at $250,000 for Crick's Nobel medal.

[Guardian via io9]

    


An Illustrated Tour Of Australia's Museum of Copulatory Organs

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An art museum dedicated to the reproductive organs of fruit flies, spiders, snails and more









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The Dubai Police Are Getting A Lamborghini

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Police LamboDubai Police
And we are understandably jealous

Are the Dubai police looking for additions to their squad? Because we could use an excuse to drive this Lamborghini Aventador, which the city of Dubai has given to its force.

The 217 mph machine costs about $400,000, making it, uh, high-end, to say the least. The oil-rich Dubai (with its awesome buildings) can probably afford it, and that oil might also help offset the car's fuel costs: as Yahoo! Autos points out, police cars spend most of their time idling, waiting for a crime, which makes this behemoth a gas-guzzler most other countries wouldn't have much reason to invest in.

So the question now is: Will this turbo-charged vehicle strike fear into the hearts of would-be criminals, or will they commit a crime just for a ride in the backseat?

[Yahoo! Autos]

    


9 Percent of Americans Say They'd Bonk A Sexbot

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Sex Robotvia VH1
Can a married person ethically use a sex robot? Is that cheating? And more questions answered by today's best poll (about people having sex with robots).

A poll conducted by the Huffington Post and YouGov focused on the desires and ethical questions surrounding the most pressing issue of our immediate future: sex with robots.

To be fair, the poll also asked Americans about robots in the military, which is, like, a legitimate question given our recent discovery that we can have robots shoot people, as well as questions about robotic (autonomous) cars and robots in the workplace. These are all more pressing issues, given that those are all here and affecting people right now. Google and various automakers are testing autonomous cars, robots have a huge effect on the workplace, and did we mention that we're shooting people in Afghanistan and Pakistan with robots?

But! That's all not as interesting as robosex. So! 18 percent of respondents (a sample of 1,000 Americans, with the aim of even representation across age, sex, race, income, etc) said they believe sexbots will be available by 2030. 9 percent admitted they'd have sex with one.

The survey also asked whether sex with a robot constitutes infidelity. 42 percent said it would, 31 percent said it would not. Respondents over the age of 65 were much more likely to see robosex as infidelity, because that's not something Ronald Reagan would do, I guess.

So, readers: Would you bonk a robot? Related: Would you be okay if your partner bonked a robot?

    


Iranian Scientist Says He Has A Future-Predicting Machine

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Looper's Time MachineCopyright of Looper, LLC, and courtesy of Sony Pictures
We see no reason to doubt this.

Ali Razeghi, a 27-year-old businessman and scientist in Tehran, has registered "The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine" with Iran's Center for Strategic Inventions.

Razeghi told a state news agency that the machine can "predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy." A user touches the machine and receives a printout of his or her future, much like the coin-operated fortune-tellers one sees at carnivals. Razeghi said a country with such a machine will be able to predict any unfortunate events years in advance, giving it time to prepare.

Wow. Pretty crazy, right? What does the prototype look like?

"The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight," Razeghi said.

Ah. So we'll just hang back here and wait five to eight years to see if those predictions we can't see come true. In the meantime, perhaps it can determine the future of Iran's humanoid robot, or what year President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will go to space. Even better, maybe it can somehow help the country find the secrets of North Korea's nuclear fusion program.

[The Telegraph]

    


Who Or What Left This 60,000-Ton Ancient Artifact Under The Sea?

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Underwater Cairn Sonar The conical pile of rubble is approximately 70 meters (230 feet) in diameter. Shmuel Marco
Shall we take bets on how the ancient-alien conspiracy theorists will spin this one?

Put on your tin-foil hats and special anti-Illuminati underwear. A recently discovered mysterious ancient rock structure under the Sea of Galilee, possibly built in the same era as Stonehenge, has archaeologists stumped. To a certain slice of the population, any unexplained man-made rock pile is clearly evidence of an extraterrestrial visit.

Before we get too carried away, let's look at the actual data. The researchers, from Ben-Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa and Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, all in Israel, describe the cairn as a cone of unhewn basalt rocks, measuring approximately 70 meters in diameter and 10 meters tall. The site itself rests near a now-defunct ancient outlet of the Jordan River, an area that has had economic importance in the area since the Bronze Age. Due to various contextual details, the researchers suspect that the cairn was constructed sometime between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. Their findings were published in a recent issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

The paper is relatively thin on details. To date, the only data the researchers have are their side-scan sonar images and new photographs from a dive team. No excavations have yet been undertaken, and thus the purpose, age and even how the thing was built are all currently up for debate. The researchers aren't even sure if the cairn was assembled on dry land, during a period of low water levels in the lake, or if it was purposefully build underwater. Nearby sites have yielded huts and hearths, indicating that at some point in the past, that whole area was above-water and inhabited. Other research points to earthquake-related subsidence of the land surrounding the Sea of Galilee, so it is quite possible that all of these archaeological sites in the area were built along the lakeshore, then submerged after an earthquake shifted the land.

These days, the cairn sits about 30 feet underwater, surrounded by schools of tilapia fish. Which brings us to the researcher's theory that this cairn is supposed to be an ancient fishery, a structure that attracts fish, making it easier to catch them and support a large settlement along the shore. Smaller fisheries have been found in the Sea of Galilee, so this theory isn't as far-fetched as one might think. But until the researchers excavate the cairn and determine if it was meant to be underwater, the purpose of the cairn remains pure conjecture.

    


Brassiere Support Is A Lie, Say French Scientists

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Unnecessary Boob-Ruining Contraption?Pedula Man via Flickr
Strapping breasts down won't keep them from their inevitable journey south, according to the preliminary results of a 15-year study.

In a 15-year study from the University of Besançon in eastern France, sports science professor Jean-Denis Rouillon found that wearing a bra may not actually keep a woman's breasts from sagging, nor alleviate back pain.

Though the results from Rouillon's study were only preliminary and might not apply to all women, previous work on the science of breast-cages has supported the theory that bras are way more about fashion than function. A pair of D-cup breasts weigh between 15 and 23 pounds, but studies have shown most sports bras can't contain their rampant bouncing. And yes, there are researchers that study the way boobs bounce.

Since 1997, Rouillon and his team have been measuring the incremental changes in orientation of the breasts of 330 female volunteers using a slide rule and caliper. (Apparently breast science has not advanced past the slide-rule era.) Rouillon has emphasized that the volunteers, ages 18 to 35, didn't necessarily encompass the full range of breast diversity, and might not be representative of the global population.

However, the researchers found that the nipples of women who didn't wear bras lifted an average of 7 millimeters toward the shoulders in a year, and the breasts became firmer, according to The Connexion.

"Medically, physiologically, anatomically - breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity," Rouillon told France Info radio yesterday. "On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra."

This is because when strapped into a bra, "supporting tissues will not grow and even they will wither and the breast will gradually degrade," Rouillon said. Yeesh.

Overall, he called bras "a false necessity." Yet he also warned that those who have worn a bra for years won't derive any benefit from sending their underthings up in flames. So feel free to throw off the sag-inducing chest oppressor and deny gravity no more, ladies. But if you don't have the body of an 18-to-35-year-old French woman, it may not help.

[The Local]

    



Experiment Gives Phantom Limb Syndrome To People Who Have All Of Their Limbs

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A simple illusion caused subjects to mentally process an extra hand.

You've probably heard of phantom limb syndrome. Because of odd wiring in the brain, a majority of amputees get the (frequently painful) sensation of having a limb, even after it's gone. But a team has shown that you don't have to be an amputee to have this feeling.

Neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden created the illusion of a phantom limb in non-amputees like this. First, they had subjects sit down and place their arm behind a screen, so it was out of view. Next, behind the screen, the scientists tickled the unseen hand with a paintbrush. While they did that, the scientists waved a second paintbrush in front of the subjects, in full view. The two paintbrushes--the invisible one tickling the hand and the other just brushing the air in front of the subject--made the same movements.

The scientists discovered that the majority of subjects, within a minute, had the sensation of an invisible hand reaching out toward the paintbrush in mid-air. To test the sensation, researchers placed a knife in the air, where the the subjects reported feeling the third hand (eep). The subjects' sweat was measured as a way of testing stress, and when the knife was placed across the "invisible" hand, the subjects sweated more. As a control, if the knife was waved in front of the subjects without having the phantom hand induced, they didn't experience elevated stress.

Another experiment included in the study had subjects close their eyes and quickly point with their left hand to their right hand. After a while, with the phantom limb feeling induced, the subjects would end up pointing to the phantom hand. An fMRI test also showed that participants' brains lit up when they had the phantom limb in the same spots that light up when a real hand is touched.

The researchers say this could lead to a better understanding of phantom limb syndrome, and maybe, eventually, a way of treating it.

    


5 Ways Hackers Could Kill You Right Now

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Artificial PacemakerWikimedia Commons
You will never want to fly again.


Click to launch the gallery.

The internet is abuzz with news that it is now possible to hijack an airplane with an Android. This arrives hot on the heels of an announcement that the Department of Defense is classifying some cyber capabilities as weapons. I'm pretty skeptical of all the fearmongering over cyberterrorism; as security threats go, cyber is one of the least deadly. But, thought experiment: If hackers really did want to spend their time, energy, and knowledge carrying out a deadly attack, how would they do it? Here are five possible, but highly improbable, scenarios. (Paging, Hollywood!)

    


Cash Raised Through Crowdfunding Tripled In Three Years [Infographic]

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Crowdfunding By The Numbersstatista
In 2012 alone, money raised for crowdfunding projects grew 81 percent.

Do you remember the moment when crowdfunding became A Thing? Sites like Kickstarter have been around for a few years now, and the amount they've grown in that time is bananas, as this infographic from Statista shows. From 2010 to 2012, cash spent on crowdfunding tripled, from $900 million to about $2.7 billion. (If they included data back to 2009 here, it would've been a 529 percent increase between then and 2012.)

What's equally interesting, though, is where that money's coming from. Crowdfunding is apparently something mostly done in Europe and North America; the two account for 96 percent of crowdfunding payments.

Statista used data from research firm massolution for this infographic. The firm predicts that money spent on crowdfunding could reach $5.1 billion in 2013. We're optimistic about that, too.

[Statista]

    


Long-Necked Giant Was Fastest-Growing Dinosaur

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Lufengosaurus Wikimedia Commons
The Lufengosaurus grew like a 30-foot weed.

During the Jurassic Period, nearly 200 million years ago, a dinosaur called Lufengosaurus roamed what is now the Yunnan Province in southern China. The long-necked plant eater was the biggest guy around at the time, at almost 30 feet long, and new research suggests it grew faster than all other known dinosaurs and living birds.

Because, as you might imagine, the fossilized embryos of dinosaurs are somewhat difficult to stumble upon, we haven't known much about how they developed. With the recent discovery of a collection of eggshells and embryonic Lufengosaurus bones in various stages of development in a bone bed in Yunnan, an international team of paleontologists has been able to piece together an unprecedented amount of information about how these creatures developed within the egg. The team, led by Robert Reisz from the University of Toronto Mississauga, published their findings in Nature today.

The discovery site is thought to be a collection of multiple Lufengosaurus nests that were destroyed by flooding around 190 million years ago. The researchers found 200 bones, though no uncrushed eggs or nests remained.

The widely varying sizes of femur bones found suggest that these dinosaurs grew rapidly before they even hatched-"faster than anything we have ever seen," according to Reisz. He told Nature that Lufengosaurus's rapid growth rate, both during its short incubation period and likely after, probably helped them survive by outgrowing any potential predators.

The fossils are the oldest dinosaur embryos ever discovered (by about 100 million years, David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum told Nature). Bone-tissue samples from the site contained what could turn out to be the oldest organic material ever found in a terrestrial vertebrate, what Reisz thinks may be preserved collagen.

[Science NOW]

    


Oh, Lord: Samsung Announces Enormous Phone Called "Galaxy Mega"

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Samsung Galaxy MegaSamsung
The inside story of how this toboggan of a phone came to be

Somewhere at Samsung's sprawling campus, deep in the headquarters of the mobile phone division, there is a PowerPoint slide with a simple line graph. On one axis is "sales," and on the other is "screen size." The graph shows a positive correlation between the two.

This graph has no extra information or context. It does not note that the marketing budget for Samsung's enormous phones is much larger than for the smaller phones. It does not note that Samsung also, typically, reserves its best hardware for its large phones. It does not note that Samsung no longer even makes flagship phones with screens smaller than about 4.5 inches. It does not note that its chief competitor, Apple, essentially created the category and has succeeded with a phone that's never had a larger screen than 4 inches.

The executives look at this graph often. Whenever a reviewer says phones like the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Mega, which has either a 6.3- or 5.8-inch screen, whichever you prefer, is absurd to use, that it requires two hands, that its screen sucks up battery life, that it doesn't fit in a pocket, that when you use it to make phone calls you look like a child with his head down on a school desk, that these phones represent the worst tendencies of Samsung, a company with the creativity and aesthetic sensibility of a bundle of Swiss chard--the executives point to this graph. "But look," they say, with the tone of a parent explaining the ways of the world to a toddler. "The line goes up."

And so Samsung continues on the path laid out by this graph, blowing past the 6-inch mark with a phone that is larger than several gadgets called "tablets." We can talk about this phone in terms of "feet" now. This phone is over half a foot long. That is a fact, with numbers.

This phone has middling specs. It's not even as fast, in the oblique and increasingly useless list of numbers that constitute "speed," as the Galaxy S 4. I won't list them here. You can't make me.

The Samsung Galaxy Mega will be available in May, starting in Europe.

    


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