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These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny

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Nanoflower 4

Wim L. Noorduin

Harvard researchers grew these lovely microscopic gardens using delicate chemical reactions.


Click here to enter the gallery

A nanorose may not smell as sweet as an organic one, but the red petals on this micron-scale flower are unquestionably just as beautiful. At Harvard University, materials scientists have perfected an underwater chemical reaction that results in these gorgeous, self-assembling nanoflowers.

The microscopic structures are crystals that build themselves, one molecule at a time, on a glass surface submerged in a beaker of water, barium chloride, and sodium silicate. When carbon dioxide from the air naturally dissolves in the water, it sets off the chemical reaction that causes the crystals to form.

Though the colors in these images are artificial, the intricate shapes of the nanoflowers are very real. The twists, curves, and ruffles are created when the scientists shift the components of the chemical reaction; the crystals naturally "grow" toward or away from various chemical gradients. For example, the broad-leaf shapes you'll see in the gallery formed in solutions with extra carbon dioxide.

"When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you're diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges," says Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and lead author of the paper in Science. "Sometimes I forget to take images because it's so nice to explore."

Click here to see more of these amazing creations.

    



Was The Oklahoma City Tornado The Worst In History?

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Oklahoma City Tornado

bschjoth

A disaster by the numbers.

Monday's tornado in the Oklahoma City area killed at least 24 people and leveled a massive number of homes and businesses. The L.A. Times quoted weather officials as saying the twister "was at least in the same league" as the harrowing tornado that struck the same area in 1999, while one local meteorologist called it "the worst tornado in the history of the world."

There's no single measurement that totally describes the destructive force of a tornado, but there are several ways to get a sense of the impact.

THE ENHANCED FUJITA SCALE

This scale, employed since 2007 in the U.S. as a measure of damage that a tornado causes, rates destruction from zero to five: crews survey the damage, then assign the tornado an estimated wind speed based on that damage. There's a long list of how to quantify the damage: uprooted trees indicate a certain wind speed, and same goes for window damage at strip malls. (Here are some photos that show the rough idea.) The scale runs from EF-0 (65-85 mph) to EF-5 (more than 200 mph). The first tornado to receive an EF-5 ranking hit Greensburg, Kansas on May 4, 2007. Here's a description, via The Weather Underground, of what an EF-5 is like: "Incredible damage. Strong frame houses leveled off foundations and swept away; automobile-sized missiles fly through the air in excess of 100 m (109 yd); high-rise buildings have significant structural deformation; incredible phenomena will occur."

It's tough to compare tornadoes using the EF scale alone, since several make it to the EF-5 level. The Oklahoma City tornado was initially rated as at least an EF-4 by the National Weather Service (meaning 166 to 200 mph winds), but after further surveys of the damage, the National Weather Service revised it to an EF-5.

DAMAGE DONE

Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has a breakdown of the five costliest tornadoes of all time:

1) Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, $2.8 billion
2) Topeka, Kansas, June 8, 1966, $1.7 billion
3) Lubbock, Texas, May 11, 19780, $1.5 billion
4) Bridge Creek-Moore, Oklahoma, May 3, 1999, $1.4 billion
5) Xenia, Ohio, April 3, 1974, $1.1 billion
6) Omaha, Nebraska, May 6, 1975, $1 billion

This event is being compared to No. 4, the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado, which struck almost the same area and was rated an EF-5 after it hit. That tornado, according to Masters, "damaged or destroyed 8132 homes, 1041 apartments, 260 businesses, 11 public buildings and seven churches." Early reports--maybe stressing very early, in this case--suggest the damage could be considerably worse than that event. (The front page of yesterday's Oklahoman proclaimed: "Worse Than May 3rd.") That could certainly prove true: Masters expects "that after the damage tally from the May 20 tornado is added up, Moore will hold two of the top five spots on the list of most damaging tornadoes in history, and the May 20 tornado may approach the Joplin tornado as the costliest twister of all-time."

PHYSICAL MEASUREMENTS

Smithsonian magazine examined a few other ways, besides the EF scale, that tornadoes might be measured. For example: estimates put the length of the tornado at between one mile and two, likely below the record 2.5 miles of a 2004 hurricane that hit Nebraska, which was ranked at F-4 (on an older version of the scale still comparable to EF-4) and only killed one person. Although the Oklahoma twister has been upgraded to EF-5, it still likely did not come close to the record-holder for wind speed--the 302-mph tornado that hit the same area on May 3, 1999.

LIVES LOST

But natural disasters like this will be remembered for the death toll. Although early estimates suggested it could be as high as 91, that number has since fallen to 24 confirmed deaths, which could rise as more bodies are uncovered. In the 40 minutes the tornado was on the ground, at least 237 people were injured.

The Tri-State Tornado is the deadliest twister in U.S. history, lasting for 3.5 hours in 1925 and killing 695 people in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. That makes it an outlier: the second most deadly tornado in history, the Great Natchez Tornado, killed 317 people in 1840. Worldwide, the deadliest tornado ever was the 1989 Bangladesh twister that killed at least 1,300 people.

THE OKLAHOMA CITY TORNADO

As Smithsonian points out, there are certainly some measurements, like time on the ground and sheer size, that made this tornado especially deadly, although it may not be the at the very top of any of those measurements. When all the damage has been accounted for, though, it might rank as one of the most damaging tornadoes in U.S. history, just thankfully not the deadliest.

    


Got A Wound? Science Says Rub Some Dirt In It

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MRSA

CDC

Antibacterial clays can kill antibiotic-resistant E. coli and MRSA, researchers found.

The colloquial medical advice "rub some dirt in it" appears to have some merit. Researchers at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have been experimenting with different clays, and it appears in research presented in the journal PLoS ONE that they've come across a family of antibacterial clays capable of killing pathogens ranging from E. coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as hard-to-kill MRSA.

Clays have been used as medical tools for ages, appearing in ancient medical texts going back as far as 3,000 B.C. Topically, they were used to treat wounds, a practice that became common in the 19th century. Early practitioners of clay therapy noted that clays tended to aid in healing, in reducing inflammation of wounds, and in pain management--though they couldn't have known why exactly.

It turns out that's probably because some clays--particularly clays rich in a certain group of metallic ions--work as antibacterial agents. In their study, the ASU researchers tested a variety of different clays with similar mineral composition but ranging compositions of metallic ions against E. coli and MRSA. They found that five metal ions--iron, copper, cobalt, nickel, and zinc--could fight the two bacterial strains, both of which are increasingly difficult to kill using standard antibiotics and antibacterials.

That doesn't mean these clays are silver bullet or any kind of antibacterial panacea. Not all clays are created equal and some lack the necessary concentrations of the necessary metal ions. Moreover, clays can contain other metals as well, like cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic (if you weren't paying attention in chem class, these are not metals you particularly want to introduce to your bloodstream).

But the researchers are optimistic that medicinal clays could find widespread use in certain therapeutic roles, particularly as bandaging agents as their absorptive and adhering characteristics make them somewhat ideal for sealing out external pathogens as well as absorbing and removing unwanted particulates or devitalized tissues from wounds--all while delivering a dose of antibacterial ions to the affected area.

    


Navy Completes First Flight Of Game-Changing MQ-4C Triton Spy Drone [Video]

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Triton on the Tarmac, May 21, 2013

U.S. Navy photo courtesy of Northrop Grumman by Chad Slattery

The long-range maritime drone will give the U.S. unprecedented surveillance of the world's oceans.

For the U.S. Navy and Northrop Grumman, it's shaping up to be a banner year in unmanned flight. While the carrier-based autonomous X-47B continues to hit milestones aboard the USS George H.W. Bush somewhere off the East Coast, out west in Palmdale, Calif., today the Navy flew its MQ-4C Triton maritime drone for the first time, marking the beginning of a sea change (pardon the pun) in the way the U.S. military patrols the oceans. The drone flew for 80 minutes and reached an altitude of 20,000 feet.

The Triton isn't a completely new platform. If it looks familiar, that's because everyone from the U.S. Air Force to NASA has been using its cousin--Northrop Grumman's reliable Global Hawk--for years now, for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, and meteorological data gathering, among other things. Triton is essentially an upgrade of the Global Hawk, optimized for maritime environments, with a strengthened airframe and de-icing features that allow it to rapidly ascend to and descend from high altitudes.

Those upgrades allow Triton to fly at altitudes nearly ten miles above sea level (its ceiling is listed as 60,000 feet, though it will likely stick to the 53,000-55,000 for most missions) for 24 hours at a time. That high vantage point allows its advanced sensors to take in a 2,000-nautical-mile view of the ocean in every direction. Carrying the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) sensor package (Popular Science awarded BAMS a Best of What's New award last year) along with a classified advanced radar system, Triton will be able to both detect and identify ships on the water.

That is, rather than registering as a simple blip on the radar screen, BAMS will be able to generate a picture of the shape of the ship and use that to identify it by profile. In that way, it will be able to tell a container ship from a Chinese frigate from a surfacing Russian submarine--from up to 2,000 nautical miles away (we felt that point was worth stressing here). Triton's strengthened airframe, augmented with de-icing technology, will then allow it to rapidly descend and ascend, so it can swoop in for a closer look at vessels of particular interest.

That's if everything works as advertised, and both Triton and BAMS are still in the early stages of development. The first flight by Triton is a big step forward. Though it's built on the back of the tested Global Hawk platform, the tweaks that have been made to the design are significant. In fact, a Global Hawk lent to the Navy by the Air Force for testing crashed at Naval Air Station Pax River last year--an event that was seen at the time as a potential setback for Triton and BAMS. So today's first flight is significant, as it marks the first airborne tests of a Triton and the beginning of the shift toward a brand new maritime capability.

That new capability is also quite significant. The Navy wants 68 Tritons based at five locations around the globe. Flying in rotations, they will be able to keep unprecedented tabs on the world's critical sea lanes and important littorals, working alongside and supporting the manned P-8A Poseidon mission (the Poseidon is replacing the P-3 Orion anti-sub warfare aircraft; basically the Triton, which is unarmed, will conduct the ISR and the Poseidon will handle any kinetic strikes or electronic warfare, should it be necessary). And because the Triton is unmanned and autonomous, it will require less intensive human labor to fly as well as less risk to human pilots.

"When operational, the MQ-4C will complement our manned P-8 because it can fly for long periods, transmit its information in real-time to units in the air and on ground, as well as use less resources than previous surveillance aircraft," said Rear Adm. Sean Buck, Patrol and Reconnaissance Group commander, in a statement. "Triton will bring an unprecedented ISR capability to the warfighter."

That's still a few years away, but today marks a critical step for the maritime capability, and a second huge leap forward for autonomous flight in just more than a week.

    


Portland, Oregon, Says No To Fluoridation

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Pro and Con

Images from Clean Water Portland (left) and Healthy Kids Healthy Portland (right)

So when is Portlandia going to do a skit about this?

Residents of Portland, Oregon, voted down, yet again, an effort to add fluoride to their tap water.

With 80 percent of the expected ballots counted, Mayor Charlie Hales "conceded defeat," the Associated Press reported.

Portland is the largest U.S. city not to have added fluoride in the water, nor any plans to add it, the Associated Press reported. Portlanders in the past have defeated three other attempts to fluoridate their water since the 1950s, Livescience reported.

In the U.S., 196 million people have tap water that's fluoridated to the optimal level to prevent cavities, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Everyone else has either unfluoridated water or water that naturally or artificially contains fluoride at higher levels than recommended. Portland's water has naturally occurring fluoride, but not enough to make a difference to dental health.

Supporters say putting fluoride in the tap water gets the protective chemical to low-income children who might not have access to regular dentist visits. Opponents say fluoride will harm the environment, may have ill human health effects and constitutes medicating people without their consent.

The ongoing debate reshuffles the usual political alliances in Portland, the Oregonian reported. Slate reported on the groups on either side. Major medical and scientific organizations support tap water fluoridation as a safe way of preventing cavities. Opposing groups are more varied, including the Sierra Club, libertarian groups and even the local chapter of the NAACP. Anti-fluoridation lobbying is generally homegrown, Slate reported, and has received far less funding than proponents they defeated.

Curious about the studies both sides have brought up to support their positions? Livescience's reporting slants toward generally anti-fluoride studies, while Slate underlines those studies' weaknesses.

    


Why Don't We Have More Drones Monitoring Wildfires?

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Scan Eagle

A remotely piloted aircraft, seen here launched by catapult.

U.S. Navy via wikimedia commons

Infrared eyes and remote pilots have a lot to offer forest firefighters.

Remote-controlled drones are much better at flying through smoke than human pilots: their infrared eyes can track the edge of a fire even through the thickest air. When the Forest Service asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to use unmanned aerial systems to monitor wildfires, the FAA said no, but offered an exemption: the Forest Service could fly the drone, so long as an operator on board another aircraft could see it at all times.

That undermines the whole reason for using a drone, of course, but such is the curious state of drone regulation today. In 2015 the FAA will pass new rules opening airspace to far more unmanned vehicles, and should have guidelines in place for how firefighters and law enforcement officials use drones.

Until then, organizations have to get authorization from the FAA to fly drones domestically. There's a growing list (and accompanying map) of groups that have FAA permission to fly drones. Groups not on that list have to request permission from the FAA to operate drones on a case by case basis, a process that can take days and has limited applicability in emergency situations. And even if an organization like the Forest Service gets timely permission, that permission often comes with the stipulation that drones be followed with a manned chase plane. Flying through smoke is a great task for a drone, but requiring another plane to follow along behind it defeats the whole point of using an unmanned plane in the first place.

Flying tracking the edges of forest fires should be one of the least controversial uses of drones ever. Congress has to approve of the FAA rules before they can take effect in 2015. It remains to be seen whether Congress will respect the difference between drones that save lives and drones that violate privacy.

[New York Times]

    


FYI: How Does Chewing Gum Freshen Breath?

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Minty fresh

Dreamstime

And which gum gives you the sweetest-smelling breath?

You're driving home from a first date, and it went great: You didn't sweat too much, your jokes worked 50 percent of the time, and she didn't get an "emergency phone call" in the middle of dinner. Only one thing stands in the way of your impending make-out session: the garlic bread you just ate. What's your move? Gum. But can you be sure it will work? Science says yes, as long as the garlic is the worst of your problems.

Bad breath originates from three different sources: the nose, the stomach and the mouth. While more serious problems like acid reflux and sinus infections may underlie the smell, the most common source of halitosis is the mouth. "Everyone has bacteria in their mouth," says Dr. Christine Wu, Professor and Director of Caries Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Dentistry. "There are billions of bacteria in one little chunk of plaque."

There are billions of bacteria in one little chunk of plaque.
Normally, the good bacteria balance the bad to form a healthy, odor-free ecosystem in your mouth. Your baby breath turns rancid when anaerobes overrun the system. These bacteria, which flourish in the absence of oxygen, usually live at the back of the tongue, where they are partially protected from oxygen and spit by a film of food, dead cells and mucus. Another source of stench is plaque, which your dentist has probably been lecturing you about since grade school. Eating too many sweets and failing to brush can cause plaque buildup on your teeth, which may spread into the pockets of your gums. Here the bacteria in plaque can cause not only gum disease, but terrible breath.

If you don't brush your teeth and the bumpy area on the back of your tongue every day, these bacteria will thrive and give you bad breath. Alternatively, if you are sick and your immune system can't maintain the balance of good and bad, anaerobes will reproduce very quickly, spreading through your whole mouth. This is the white coating you sometimes see on your tongue when you're sick: smelly bacteria.

What makes bacteria particularly offensive (and not so different from humans in this way) is their excrement. Dentists call this waste "volatile sulfur compounds," or VSC, and it has a foul odor, explains Dr. Cassiano Kuchenbecker Rösing, associate Professor of the Department of Conservative Dentistry at the University of Rio Grande do Sol in Brazil. The smell is comparable to rotten eggs, and is the difference between bad breath and get-away-from-me breath.

Extra spit works like a power washer, rinsing bacteria away.The good news is that there is a second line of defense against these harbingers of evil: enjoying a stick of gum. Gums with strong scents can cover unwanted odor, but they can also actively fight the odor-causing bacteria with a twofold attack. "The stimulation of saliva, which happens with chewing gum, is responsible for diminishing the bad breath," says Rösing, whose research finds that gum can temporarily reduce VSC production by more than 70 percent. The extra spit works like a power washer, rinsing bacteria and VSC away.

Ingredients can also make a difference. Wu's lab studies essential oils, which have the surprising ability to freshen breath. "Chewing gum can be a delivery system for [these] agents to kill germs," she says. To date they have found a number of effective ingredients, including cinnamon, peppermint and spearmint oils, as well as green and black teas. Wu says some plant oils act on the bacterial membrane, making it leaky and killing the bacteria. Teas, on the other hand, kill bacteria by attacking their metabolisms and affecting their growth.

The trick is to find gums with real essential oils, a task harder than you may think. Labels commonly list the umbrella term ‘natural and artificial flavors,' wherein the natural flavors may or may not be essential oils. Wu's tested recommendation: the "kiss a little longer" gum itself, Big Red.

This story was produced in partnership with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. For more FYIs, go here.

    


Why Do Cicadas Invade In Such Crazy Numbers?

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The explanation for the infestation.

Magicicada is a plague unlike any other, here in the northeast. And it is a plague with a reason: emerging in absurd, over-the-top, biblical numbers is the cicada's bizarre--but effective--means of survival.

The Magicicada, the genus of cicada that's about to blanket the northeast United States, is a very odd creature. It is, in the animal kingdom, a very tasty treat, which is unfortunate for the cicada, but not so odd. What's odd is that it has literally no protection against getting eaten: it has a mouth but it does not bite, nor does it sting nor pierce nor scratch. It is colored a shiny black, with luminous yellow/orange wings and absurdly bright crimson eyes, which do not give it any camouflage whatsoever.

Once molted into its adult form, it does not eat or move very much. It does, however, draw attention to itself by making a godawful racket, all the time. "They're not great fliers," says Cole Gilbert, a professor of entomology at Cornell University. "They don't fly much more than a couple hundred meters." The cicada sits there on a tree and makes noise to attract a mate, while looking shiny and obvious and defenseless and delicious.

It is an idiot bug.

Literally every insectivorous animal in the northeast--songbirds, carnivorous birds (hawks, owls), opossums, foxes, cats, shrews, snakes, spiders, and even dogs--will gorge on cicadas. Billions of them will be eaten during the one summer when this brood--Brood II--emerges from the ground. Billions.

This is a strategy called predator satiation. It's contrary to the survival strategies of almost every other animal: it intends for a huge percentage of its population to be eaten. It doesn't care. The idea is to overwhelm predators with numbers, since the predators can only eat so many. The only other species that practices predator satiation in the US is the salmon.

Gilbert estimates that anywhere from 15 to 40 percent of this brood will be eaten, but the density of Brood II is massive. There could be up to 1.5 million cicadas per acre, so even a loss of 40 percent leaves, well, probably still a couple billion cicadas from this brood alone. That said, 1.5 million per acre is very high; many areas won't have one percent that many. Gilbert estimates that the brood will need between 3,000 and 4,000 cicadas per acre "to swamp the predators." So each acre will need significantly more cicadas than that to survive to breed in that area again.

The Magicicada attack is an unusual event in the northeastern ecosystem; there are very few events in the lives of flora or fauna that occur so rarely and yet so regularly. So the ecosystem doesn't depend on the cicadas, the same way some animals may rely on certain seasonal fruits or the migrations of pollinating animals. Instead, the cicadas serve as a kind of bonus or treat. Red-wing blackbirds and eastern bluebirds have been found to have much stronger and healthier broods in years that coincide with Magicicada's emergence, as do mammals like foxes and raccoons. But one of the more surprising beneficiaries are the trees.

When cicadas lay eggs, they use their proboscis to cut little slits in thin branches and lay eggs in there. When the larvae hatch, they simply plop down onto the ground, bury themselves, and attach to the root system of the tree, where they'll remain for another 17 years, unseen. We're not really sure how they count to 17; there is a gene that differentiates the 17-year cicadas from the 13-year cicadas, but, says Gilbert, "we don't really have any way to see what the hell they're doing down there for 17 years." Occasionally, if too many cicadas make these slits in branches, the branch can break and droop. Entomologists call this "flagging," because, cut off from the rest of the tree, the leaves on the broken branch will turn brown, making them rather obvious amidst the otherwise green leaves. And the last year of the cicadas' lives underground is a bit harder on the tree, since the cicada larvae are eating more and more tree juices from the roots to get ready for their brief adulthood. But this is very minimal damage, and the cicadas repay the trees.

Cicadas molt when they emerge from the ground, leaving behind a chitin exoskeleton clinging to trees. That exoskeleton is very rich in nitrogen, and when it eventually falls to the ground, it decomposes and provides much-appreciated food for the (very slightly) weakened tree. The bodies of the adult cicadas, too, if they're not eaten, decompose in huge numbers, making the soil from the year after a Magicicada emergence incredibly rich and fertile.

    



The World's Largest Lego Model Is A Life-Size X-Wing [Video]

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Lego's life-size X-wing fighter

Dan Bracaglia

How'd they do it?


Click here to enter the gallery

This morning, Lego opened up a gigantic box in Times Square. Inside: a full-scale replica of an X-wing fighter made entirely of Lego bricks. It's the single-largest Lego sculpture in history, claiming more than 5.3 million bricks and weighing nearly 46,000 pounds. Last week, far away from the mayhem of midtown Manhattan, we had the chance to preview the sculpture, learn about the engineering that goes into a project of its scale, and (most importantly) sit in the cockpit and high-five Lego Luke Skywalker.

We met with Erik Varszegi, a Lego Master Builder based at the company's U.S. headquarters in Connecticut, in a hanger at Ronkonkoma airport on Long Island. Varszegi is one of 32 builders who spent a combined 17,336 hours constructing the model (that's about four months, if you do the math). Here's how they do it:

Every Lego model starts as a computer model. Designers use a proprietary software called Lego Brick Builder. The software first draws a grid over any 3-D object (a tank, a plane, the Death Star), and then it reinterprets that grid as Lego bricks. Corners are corners, while contours and curves become slowly sloping staircases of bricks.

The X-wing fighter, which stands 11 feet tall with a wingspan of 43 feet, is a precise 42-times scale model of the same kit you can buy at Toys ‘R' Us. That means for every one-by-one Lego peg on the kit, there's a 42-by-42 square on the sculpture. (And yes, there is a raised "LEGO" logo on each of those gigantic pegs.)

This model has an added complication: after its time in NYC, the X-wing will travel cross-country to Legoland in California, a state with a set of stringent seismic standards. The computer models help designers plan an intricate steel infrastructure that will ensure the X-wing won't shatter in a quake. It's also strong enough for you to sit in the cockpit or perch atop one of the engines.

After the steel substructure is complete, builders go about constructing the model one layer at a time. A temp-to-perm solvent binds the bricks together-after they've been clicked together. Builders put a dollop of glue inside each of the holes on the underside of a brick; the glue cures overnight, reacting with the plastic to fuse the two together permanently. Mistakes do happen, Varszegi admits, so if they catch a mistake the next morning, they can pry apart bricks with a little elbow grease and perhaps a flathead screwdriver.

The team also added some (literal) bells and whistles to the final sculpture. The engines have lights and speakers, and so they light up and cycle through a pre-programmed series of launch and battle sounds. Not to be outdone, R2D2 also chimes in.

For projects of this scale, Lego maintains a facility in Kladno, Czech Republic. Once it's completed, the fighter breaks down into 14 separate pieces that are packed in custom shipping containers and delivered by boat. For the move to Times Square, it was separated into four segments and was loaded onto trucks.

The X-wing unseats the Herobot 9000 robot at the Mall of America as the largest Lego sculpture in the world. Though ‘bot stands about 34 feet tall, it has slightly less than 3 million bricks and is grossly outweighed by the X-wing's tonnage. "It's almost too big," said Varszegi "from far enough away, you can't really tell it's Lego." Sorry Erik, to us that's the best part.

    


Cloned Human Embryo Study Comes Under Fire

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Single human SCNT blastocyst

OHSU Photos

An anonymous commenter has pointed out four different problems in last week's breakthrough paper.

A week ago, scientists from Oregon Health and Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center announced that they had successfully used human skin cells to clone embryonic stem cells. In the few days since the researchers' work came online, though, the research has been found to contain a few key errors.

An anonymous online commenter on PubPeer, a post-publication peer review discussion site, highlighted four potential issues regarding image reuse in the paper, published online in the journal Cell on May 15. (Unlike in mostcorners of the Internet, commenting anonymously isn't a mark of trolling on PubPeer, which aims to maintain "the rigor and anonymity of the closed review process currently used by the major journals.")

Lead author Shoukhrat Mitalipov, an senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, told Nature that after reviewing the data with one of the other authors, he realized three honest mistakes had made it through the uber-quick publication process.

The paper was accepted by Cell three days after submission and published only 12 days after that. By contrast, Mitalipov's previous work on monkey embryonic stem cells went through a six month publication process with independent data verification. Mitalipov maintains that the current research is still valid. "The results are real, the cell lines are real, everything is real," he told Nature.

Two sets of image reuse pops up in the paper, with the same images labelled as cloned stem cells referred to as cells created by in vitro fertilization elsewhere. Mitalipov says the images were in fact intentionally duplicated, but their labels were accidentally reversed. He also said that the wrong data was used in one of the scatterplots. In regards to the last critique of the paper--that scatterplots in the supplementary data show an exceedingly high degree of overlap in gene activity patterns of cloned stem cells cultured in different plates--Mitalipov is standing by his data.

Thrilling announcements of human cloning have a history of going awry in the aftermath of publication. In 2004 and 2005, Seoul National University's Woo Suk Hwang's lauded successes in human cloning were retracted after it was discovered his two papers were based on fabricated data.

Celltweeted yesterday that they are reviewing the allegations, and Mitalipov says he plans to issue an erratum to the paper.

[UPDATED: Cells from Mitalipov's research have already been sent to other scientists for continued study, according to an emailed statement from OHSU. They expect those scientists will be able to independently verify their validity as cloned cells in the course of their research.]

[Nature]

    


Scientists Find One Gene Responsible For All White Tigers

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White tigers in Chimelong Safari Park in China

Chimelong Safari Park

And it's our fault that they're super inbred.

Science may not be totally sure how the tiger got its stripes, but at least they've got this figured out. One team of biologists says it has uncovered the genetic mutation responsible for white tigers.

White tigers have black or brown stripes, white fur, blue eyes, pink noses and pink paw pads. They're not albino, as they have black-brown pigment in their eyes and in their fur. Scientists knew before that their coloring was recessive-"little a" instead of "big A," for anyone who remembers high school genetics-but little else about how it was inherited.

The new research pinpoints a change in just one place in one gene as the cause of tigers' white stripes.

To find the gene, the biologists examined a family of tigers living in the Chimelong Safari Park in southern China. The family included an orange female tiger, two white males with whom she mated, and the 13 cubs she bore (Presumably not all at once). Eight of the cubs were orange and five of them were white. The researchers sequenced the genome of the each tiger and looked for genetic variations that appeared in all of, and only in, the white tigers.

After continually narrowing their search, they eventually found one gene that seemed to make the difference. Called SLC45A2, the gene appears in several species, including humans. In people, variations in the gene are associated with light skin color in modern Europeans and with one type of albinism people get. In mice, horses, chickens and medaka fish, variations in SLC45A2 are associated with lighter skin or fur. In certain horses and chickens, mutations in SLC45A2 make the animals unable to make yellow-orange pigment, but still able to make black-brown pigment, just like white tigers.

Although they know that SLC45A2 is associated with all of these variously colored animals, scientists don't know enough yet to say exactly what the gene does that affects pigmentation.

The Chinese biologists were able to come up with some other interesting conclusions. Not much is known about white tigers in the wild because the last known free-ranging white tiger was shot in 1958. The geneticists think white tigers would have done fine in the wild, however, because their coloring is associated with just one gene, mutations in which don't usually cause other symptoms or problems in humans and chickens. Currently, many white tigers bred in captivity are born with deformities, including crossed eyes, or die prematurely. However, that's probably because they're inbred by people eager to make more white tigers, not because of their pigmentation, the researchers wrote.

They published a paper about their work today in the journal Current Biology.

    


Obama Set To Reboot Drone Strike Policy And Retool The War On Terror

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An MQ-9 Reaper, precision bombs and air-to-ground missiles at the ready

USAF

In a major counterterrorism address today, President Obama is expected to announce a significant shift in the drone policy that has been the cornerstone of his war on terror.

At 2 p.m. ET today, President Obama will address a crowd at National Defense University in D.C. to spell out some of the biggest vagaries of his administration--policies that are central to America's security and foreign policy that, nonetheless, have been shrouded in official secrecy, opaque statements of accountability, and open-ended legal jargon that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

In today's speech, Obama is expected to discuss the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay (which, despite 2008 campaign promises, remains open) and the future of America's war on terror now that Osama bin Laden has been, how shall we say, rendered irrelevant. But policy wonks and national security nerds are mostly interested in Obama's spelling out of the legal rationale that will govern lethal drone strikes going forward.

These three topics are deeply intertwined, of course. With the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and a reduced American presence in the regions regarded as power bases for the likes of al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and the Taliban, American security and intelligence forces have only two real options. Strike at suspected terrorists with drones, or somehow capture those suspects and detain them (at some place like Guantanamo).

It would seem that if the war on terror is going to continue (and it is--for another 10 or 20 years according to one recently-quoted Pentagon official) then it seems that either detention or the use of lethal strikes must increase. But that's not really the case, and in today's speech Obama is expected to outline why the administration thinks so.

In his first major counterterrorism address of his second term, the President is expected to announce new restrictions on the unmanned aerial strikes that have been the cornerstone of his national security agenda for the last five years. For all the talk about drone strikes--and they did peak under Obama--such actions have been declining since 2010. And it seems the administration finally wants to come clean (somewhat) about what it has been doing with its drone program, acknowledging for the first time that it has killed four American citizens in its shadow drone wars outside the conflict zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, something the public has known for a while now but the government has refused to publicly admit.

The Obama administration will also voluntarily rein in its drone strike program in several ways. A new classified policy signed by Obama will more sharply define how drones can be used, the New York Times reports, essentially extending to foreign nationals the same standards currently applied to American citizens abroad. That is, lethal force will only be used against targets posing a "continuing, imminent threat to Americans" and who cannot be feasibly captured or thwarted in any other way. This indicates that the administration's controversial use of "signature strikes"--the killing of unknown individuals or groups based on patterns of behavior rather than hard intelligence--will no longer be part of the game plan. That's a positive signal, considering that signature strikes are thought to have resulted in more than a few civilian casualties.

Reportedly there's another important change in drone policy in the offing that President Obama may or may not mention in today's speech: the shifting of the drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere (likely Yemen and Somalia as well) from the CIA to the military over the course of six months. This is good for all parties involved. The CIA's new director, John Brennan, has publicly said he would like to transition the country's premier intelligence gathering agency back to actual intelligence gathering and away from paramilitary operations--a role that it has played since 2001 but that isn't exactly in its charter.

Putting the drone strike program in the Pentagon also places it in a different category of public scrutiny. The DoD can still do things under the veil of secrecy of course, but not quite like the CIA can (the military is subject to more oversight and transparency than the clandestine services in several respects, and putting drones in the hands of the military also changes the governing rules of engagement).

So what does this all mean for the war on terror? If Obama plans to create a roadmap for closing Guantanamo Bay and draw down its drone strike program, it suggests that the administration thinks we are winning--as much as one can win this kind of asymmetric war. It appears the war on terror is shifting toward one in which better intelligence will lead to more arrests and espionage operations to thwart terrorists rather hellfire missile strikes from unseen robots in the sky.

The drones aren't going anywhere--they'll be a key technology piece deployed in those intelligence gathering operations. But much to the relief of drone-strike opponents, it appears America's policy of using lethal drone strikes to regularly eliminate her enemies--and whoever happens to be standing in proximity--will be put on a much tighter leash. Counterterrorism will go back to being more of a law enforcement exercise than a military "seek and destroy" mission. Lethal drone strikes will still occur, but their more judicious application is a welcome shift in policy for many Americans--and certainly for people in the parts of the world where they have been most prevalent.

    


Big Pic: Eruption Of Alaska's Pavlof Volcano, As Seen From The International Space Station

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Pavlof Volcano Eruption, May 18, 2013

NASA

The crew aboard the International Space Station managed to snap these three striking images of Alaska's Pavlof Volcano a few days ago, which capture (via their oblique angles) just how far these plumes can stretch and how huge they can be (we usually see these images from directly above, so it's hard to tell just how big they really are).

Pavlof is in the Aleutian Island arc, some 625 miles southwest of Anchorage. It began erupting last week, spewing an ash plume 20,000 feet into the air. For orientation purposes: The plume is extending southeastward, back toward the mainland United States.

[NASA Earth Observatory]

    


8 Ridiculous Nutrition Myths Debunked

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Eggsellent

Pier/Getty Images

From calorie counting to high-protein diets

There is a lot of incompetence in the area of nutrition and health. Even health professionals seem to constantly contradict each other. Here are 8 ridiculous nutrition myths, thoroughly debunked.

1. A Calorie is a Calorie

It is a common myth that all that matters for weight loss is calories in, calories out.

Of course, calories matter. But the types of foods we eat are also important.

Here are 3 examples of how "a calorie is NOT a calorie."

-Fructose vs. Glucose: Fructose is more likely to stimulate hunger, increase abdominal obesity and insulin resistance, compared to the same amount of calories from glucose (1, 2, 3).
-Protein: Eating protein can raise the metabolic rate and reduce hunger compared to fat and carbs (4).
-Medium vs. long-chain fatty acids: Fatty acids that are of medium length (such as from coconut oil) raise metabolism and reduce hunger compared to longer chain fatty acids (5, 6, 7).

Bottom Line: A calorie is not a calorie. Different foods affect our bodies, hunger and hormones in different ways.

2. Eating a Lot of Protein is Bad For You

Some people think that a high-protein diet will harm your kidneys and cause osteoporosis.

It is true that eating protein can make you excrete more calcium in the short term (8).

However, long-term studies show that protein intake is associated with improved bone health and a lower risk of fractures, not the other way around (9, 10, 11).

Studies don't find any association with kidney disease either (12, 13).

The two most important risk factors for kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure. Eating adequate protein helps with both, which should reduce your risk of kidney disease later in life (14, 15, 16, 17).

Unless you have a medical condition, there's no reason to be afraid of having more protein in your diet. It's a good thing.

Bottom Line: Eating a high protein diet may be protective against bone fractures and reduce the two most important risk factors for kidney failure.

3. The Healthiest Diet is a Balanced Low-Fat Diet

The low-fat guidelines first came out in the year 1977, at almost the exact same time the obesity epidemic started.

This diet was never actually proven to work. It was merely based on observations.

The National Institute of Health decided to test this diet and funded the Women's Health Initiative, which is the largest randomized controlled trial ever conducted on diet.

In this study, tens of thousands of women were placed on either a low-fat diet, or continued to eat the standard western diet like before.

The study went on for 7.5 years and the conclusions were very clear:

-The diet did NOT prevent weight gain. The low-fat group weighed only 0.4kg less than the control group after 7.5 years (18).
-The diet did NOT prevent heart disease either. There was no difference between groups after 7.5 years (19).
-The low-fat diet got tested. It didn't work, period.

Bottom Line: There is no evidence that low-fat diets lead to better outcomes. The largest randomized controlled trial ever conucted on diet proves that the low-fat diet is completely ineffective.

4. Everyone Should be Cutting Back on Sodium

Sodium is a crucial electrolyte in the body and our cells need to keep it within a very tight range, or we'll die.

For a long time, sodium has been thought to elevate blood pressure and therefore raise your risk of disease.

It is true that it can mildly elevate blood pressure in the short term (20, 21).

However, studies do not support the idea that lowering sodium helps improve actual hard outcomes like heart attacks.

Randomized controlled trials on sodium restriction show that there is no effect on cardiovascular disease or death. They also show that sodium restriction may increase triglycerides and cholesterol levels (22, 23).

Unless you have elevated blood pressure, there is no reason to avoid adding salt to your foods to make them more palatable.

Bottom Line: Sodium restriction has been thoroughly tested. None of these studies have found any evidence that it actually leads to better outcomes.

5. Saturated Fat Raises The Bad Cholesterol and Gives You Heart Disease

The myth that saturated fat raises cholesterol and causes heart disease is still alive today.

This ideas was based on some flawed observational studies conducted in the 60s and 70s.

Since then, many studies have re-examined this relationship and discovered that:

-There is literally no association between saturated fat consumption and cardiovascular disease (24, 25, 26).
-Saturated fat raises HDL (the good) cholesterol and changes the LDL from small, dense (bad) to Large LDL, which is benign (27, 28, 29).
-There is no reason to avoid natural foods that are rich in saturated fats. Meat, coconut oil and butter are perfectly healthy foods.

Bottom Line: Despite decades of anti-fat propaganda, saturated fat has never been proven to cause heart disease. New studies prove that there is literally no association.

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6. Coffee is Bad For You

Coffee has gotten a bad reputation in the past.

It is true that caffeine, the active stimulant compound in coffee, can slightly raise blood pressure in the short term (30).

Despite these mild adverse effects, long term observational studies actually show that coffee lowers the risk of many diseases. Coffee can:

-Improve brain function (31).
-Help you burn more fat (32, 33, 34).
-Lower your risk of diabetes… in some studies as much as 67% (35, 36).
-Lower your risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (37, 38).
-Protect your liver against cirrhosis and cancer (39, 40).

Coffee is also loaded with antioxidants. It is actually the biggest source of antioxidants in the western diet and outranks both fruits and vegetables, combined (41, 42, 43).

Bottom Line: Despite coffee being able to mildly elevate blood pressure, observational studies show a strong and consistent reduction in many serious diseases like Alzheimer's and type II diabetes.

7. Eggs Are Rich in Cholesterol And Can Give You Heart Disease

Eggs have been unfairly demonized because they contain large amounts of cholesterol.

However, dietary cholesterol doesn't necessarily raise blood cholesterol and eggs have never been proven to cause harm.

If anything, eggs are among the most nutritious and healthiest foods you can eat.

They're loaded with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

Studies show that egg consumption actually improves the blood lipid profile. They raise the HDL (good) cholesterol and change the LDL from small, dense to Large, which is benign (44, 45).

Observational studies show no association between egg consumption and risk of heart disease (46, 47, 48).

Additionally, some studies show that eggs for breakfast can help you lose weight… at least compared to a breakfast of bagels (49, 50).

Bottom Line: Eggs are one of the healthiest and most nutritious foods you can eat and there is no association between egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease.

8. Low-Carb Diets Are Ineffective or Dangerous

Low-carb diets have been considered dangerous because of their high amount of saturated fat.

For this reason, they have been thought to raise your risk of heart disease and other chronic illness.

However, since the year 2002, more than 20 randomized controlled trials have been conducted and compared low-carb against the standard of care, the low-fat diet.

In almost every one of these studies, low-carb diets:

-Cause significantly more weight loss than low-fat diets (51, 52).
-Drastically lower triglycerides, an important risk factors for heart disease (53, 54).
-Raise HDL (the good) cholesterol (55, 56).
-Improve blood sugar and insulin levels, especially in diabetics (57, 58).
-Change the LDL cholesterol from small, dense (bad) to Large (benign) - which should lower the risk of heart disease (59).
-Lower blood pressure significantly (60, 61).

Low-carb diets are also easier to follow and have an outstanding safety profile. There is no evidence of any adverse effects, despite the scare tactics (62, 63, 64).

They are certainly a much better choice than a low-fat, calorie restricted diet… which many mainstream organizations still push despite zero evidence of effectiveness.

9. Anything else…?

If there are any other myths you want to add to the list, make sure to leave a comment below.

This article was republished with permission from Authority Nutrition.

    


Discovered: Molecule That Triggers Itchiness

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Scratching

Wing-Chi Poon

At long last, researchers have identified what happens in the nervous system as an itch begins.

What really causes itching, and how it works, is surprisingly little understood. But researchers at the National Institutes of Health will publish a paper tomorrow in Science that details the discovery of a small molecule released in the spinal cord that triggers the sensation of itching in mice. The culprit molecule is called natriuretic polypeptide b, or Nppb.

Itching was long regarded as simply a less intense form of pain. In 1987, H.O. Handwerker, a German scientist, used histamine to induce itchiness in participants. Those participants itched until they couldn't take it, but did not feel an increase in pain, suggesting itching and pain were transmitted along different pathways. Then in 1997 a group of researchers from the University of Eerlangen-Nürnberg and the University of Uppsala discovered a nerve fiber that mediates itch sensations in particular.

In 2011, Washington University's Center for the Study of Itch was opened, touted as the first of its kind in the world to study itch specifically. The Center for the Study of Itch names 2007 as the year where neuroscientists began making more rapid progress in studying itching specifically, finding advances in the field that pain researchers had previously overlooked or ignored. The GRPR peptide receptor, the first itch-specific receptor to be identified, was announced in the June 2007 issue of Nature by researchers at Washington University.

In January 2008, Dr. Gil Yosipovitch, a dermatologist and researcher at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center talked to Newsweek about how much progress has been made in understanding itching and scratching.

"What we do know is that the itch doesn't stand alone. Rather the itch involves not only the skin, but also the spinal cord and the brain. We used to think that the itch shared the same neurological pathway as pain," Yosipovitch told Newsweek. "But now we know that the itch has its own neural road, if you will. There are actually some nerves in the spinal cord that are itch-specific."

The NIH study published in this week's Science further shows the distinctiveness of itch, showing that it's a "sensation that is uniquely hardwired into the nervous system with the biochemical equivalent of its own dedicated land line to the brain," according to Mark Hoon, scientist at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and senior author of the paper, in a statement. The molecule Nppb was found to be necessary to respond to itchy substances--an itch start switch of sorts-- something that previous research suggested was unlikely.

"The larger scientific point remains," Hoon said in a statement. "We have defined in the mouse the primary itch-initiating neurons and figured out the first three steps in the pruritic pathway. Now the challenge is to find similar biocircuitry in people, evaluate what's there, and identify unique molecules that can be targeted to turn off chronic itch without causing unwanted side effects. So, this is a start, not a finish."

    



Who Wouldn't Want To Stay In This Totally Insane Space Hotel!?

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Space Hotel

Mobilona

It's got a wind tunnel! Also: a zero-gravity spa!

Last week, the U.S.-based consortium Mobilona unveiled plans for this crazy building: a futuristic "space" hotel filled with stuff you associate with ideas about the future from, like, the 1930s. The 984-foot, 1.5 billion euro ($1.9 billion) building would include a vertical wind tunnel, a 24-hour shopping mall, a marina for parking yachts, and a zero-gravity spa (not even totally clear how that works). It would all be stationed on an artificial island.

So who wouldn't want this? Oh, maybe a major city in a country devastated by the economic downturn.

When Mobilona submitted plans for the project to planning officials in Barcelona, they got some icy responses. "We are a city of culture, knowledge, of creativity, and of innovation, and our project (for the city) will follow a different path," the city's mayor said in a TV interview.

Bummer! With prices like 300 to 1,500 euros per room (about $390 to $1,900), it could make for an affordable place to take the kids on a zero gravity spa/wind tunnel trip. Or you could splurge and get the six-story mansion penthouse full-time for 70 million euros, or about $90 million.

Oh, well. Maybe they'll have better luck in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, where they're also planning similar behemoths.

[Telegraph]

    


U.S. Army Creates Shoebox-Size Universal Battery Charger

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Army Battery Charger

U.S. Army

It charges eight batteries and two USB devices at once.

Battery chargers are finally getting a military upgrade. This is big! Not in a literal sense-that honor goes to the previous battery charger used by the U.S. Army, which was the size of a suitcase and either vehicle-mounted or left to rest on a table. It was hardly something a soldier could carry into the battlefield or on patrol.

Now, the military has downsized to a charger smaller than a shoebox. Dubbed, creatively, the Universal Battery Charger, the new charger weighs only six pounds. It can charge eight batteries and two USB devices at once, which is useful for the GPS systems, radios, and smartphones soldiers keep with them. The charger itself can draw power from available electrical sources. According to Marc Geitter, an engineer on the project, this includes generators, fuel cells, solar panels, wind turbines, and vehicle cigarette lighters.

Soldiers aren't always near available power sources, so the Universal Battery Charger will come with a foldable solar panel. Additionally, the new charger is designed specifically to work with another (very awesome) army development in portable energy, the Re-using Existing Natural Energy Wind and Solar System, or RENEWS. Transported in two 70 pound cases, RENEWS is a portable wind turbine with solar panels that can power two or three laptops continuously. Combining it with the Universal Battery Charger adds versatility to the system, and gives soldiers access to power even when far beyond the grid.

    


New Water-Repellant Fabric Is Like A Second Skin

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A tiny channel of canals directs water away from where it shouldn't be.

We've seem some neat ideas for water-repellant materials that suggest sweat stains will one day be as dead as dial-up. Here's one more: Researchers at the University of California, Davis, are developing a fabric that acts like human skin, channeling and releasing excess moisture.

Beads of sweat form and fall when there's excess water on the body, and the idea behind this project is similar: hydrophilic threads are stitched into a fabric made from a hydrophobic material. Put water in touch with the fabric, and the water will be pushed toward the hydrophilic material, then drawn through gaps and expelled on the other side. (Sweat itself actually doesn't smell; that smell's released by bacteria on skin breaking down proteins in the sweat. So hopefully a sweater made out of this stuff wouldn't be gross for everyone nearby.) All the other parts, meanwhile, stay "completely dry and breathable."

Going to the gym in the future is going to be the best.

    


Social Media Replaces Police Missing Persons Searches In France

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A postcard from 1899 imagining French Police in the year 2000

Instead, the police are on the ground and asking people to use social media for searches.

wikimedia commons

French police have abandoned in-progress searches for missing adults and will no longer accept new search requests. Instead, families should turn to social media, the government announced.

An almost century-old program in France is coming to an end. "Searches in the interest of the family" became a function of French police after World War I to reunite families disrupted by the conflict. Now, in a letter to police chiefs nationwide, the French Ministry of the Interior is telling police departments to end in-progress searches and refuse new requests to search for missing adults, unless there are signs the person may be in danger. Instead, police should direct people towards social networks.

In a way, this is a logical result of technology performing a task better than government can. In the early 20th century, police had one of the better networks for information, especially when they were organized on the national level, like in France. Combined with a governmental proclivity to collect information on citizens, be it for taxes or land registry or through other legal documents, the best place to find information on someone was in government records. It made sense, then, that a bureaucracy already tasked with finding and recording information on persons of interest would be a natural fit for reuniting families.

These days, social media networks allow private citizens to easily dig up information on just about anyone. A single individual with a internet access today may be more equipped to find a missing person than an entire police department was a century ago.

French police aren't abandoning all missing person searches-those in danger, like crime victims, missing children, or suicidal people, fall under a different procedure, one still very much in line with police operations. Instead, police are handing off the less urgent requests, like finding a deadbeat behind on child support payments, to citizens themselves.

It's a brilliant labor-saving move by the French police, but it has an uncomfortable footnote. What does it mean when social media companies possess far more information about us than governments a century ago had about our great-grandparents?

Hold on a second, let me tweet that.

    


Scientists Train People To Not Be Jerks

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To be excellent to one another, just try out some Buddhist meditation.

If you're kind of a jerk, but at least concerned about your jerk-ness, take heart: researchers say they've shown it's possible to increase compassion in adults.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison actually has a whole department dedicated to this kind of thing, the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, and researchers there set up an experiment recently to see if they could get a group of people to be more excellent to each other.

First, the team had the group try the Buddhist technique of compassion meditation: thinking about a time someone was suffering, then chanting, "May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease." The people focused on a loved one, like a friend or family member, then themselves, then a stranger, and finally a "difficult person" in their lives. (If only they had an estranged family member they strongly disliked; they could knock out three at a time.) A control group, meanwhile, got cognitive reappraisal training, a technique for turning negative thoughts positive. Both the groups were trained for 30 minutes a day over the internet for two weeks.

So how do you measure compassion?

The researchers here used a game. Two anonymous players--one the "Dictator" and one the "Victim"--shared a pool of $10. The dictator decided how much money the victim got. As dictators are wont to do, the victim didn't get much: only $1 out of the $10. The person playing then had to decide how much of his or her $5 to give to the victim. The Buddhist-meditators were more likely to share more of the dough.

The researchers started the study with fMRI scans and performed them again on both groups after the training. The groups were shown images of suffering while in the machine, like a crying child or a burn victim. They found that the people with meditation training had increased activity in the inferior parietal cortex (that's not necessarily a perfect indicator of empathy, but it suggests something's going on, at least).

It's not entirely clear how long this effect lasted, but it's reassuring to think that there are ways of increasing niceness in the world. If only we could forcibly give it to the people who cut us off on our work commutes.

    


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