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Science Confirms the Obvious: Literature is Good for Your Brain

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Reading Makes You Smarter But you already knew that. margolove via Flickr
Reading might make you smarter, but it also gives your brain a cognitive workout that it doesn't otherwise get

In news that probably isn't going to blow your mind, researchers have found that reading is good for your brain. But it's not as straightforward as "book learnin' is good for you." By asking a test group of literary PhD candidates to read a Jane Austin novel inside of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a Stanford researcher has found that critical, literary reading and leisure reading provide different kinds of neurological workouts, both of which constitute "truly valuable exercise of people's brains."

The study was conducted under the supervision of cognition and neurobiology experts at Stanford, but it is the brainchild of literary English scholar Natalie Phillips, who was interested in figuring out exactly what the value of studying literature is. Aside from the pursuit of literary knowledge and the aspects of culture, history, and the humanities that are tied up in our collected written works, does reading impart any kind of tangible benefit to us as humans?

It turns out it does, at least in terms of where blood flows in our brains when we engage it in reading. The experiments were structured so that subjects inside the fMRI machine could reap a chapter from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park projected onto a mirror inside the machine. The readers were instructed to read in two different ways: as they would read for leisure or pleasure, and as they might read for critical analysis, as if they were trying to comprehend the text for an exam.

The fMRI machine allows the researchers to see blood flowing through the brain, and what they found was intriguing: when we read, blood flows to regions of the brain beyond the ones responsible for executive functions. Rather, it flows to areas associated with close concentration. That may not seem so odd--reading requires concentration--but they also found that critical, close reading requires a certain kind of complex cognitive function that we don't usually employ. Both styles of reading, the researchers say, initiate kinds of cognitive function that go beyond simple "work" and "play."

Moreover, the study showed that simply by asking the readers to alter their method of reading--from "leisure" to "analytical"--they could drastically alter the patterns of neural activity and blood flow within their brains. The study could have implications in the way reading affects the brain and how we train our brains to be better at things like concentration and comprehension. In the meantime, it confirms something that you've known to be true since your first-grade teachers told you so: reading is good for your brain.

[Stanford]




Video: Big Dog Is Back

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DARPA's Newest LS3 Demonstrators DARPA
And now less terrifying (sort of)

DARPA's terrifying Big Dog is back, this time a little less terrifying (but still pretty terrifying).

Two of the robotic platforms, dubbed Big Dog by manufacturer Boston Dynamics--and termed the Legged Squad Support System (LS3) by DARPA--were demoed for the Commandant of the Marine Corps and DARPA's own (new) director, Arati Prabhakar today. As a result, the rest of us get a new video of Big Dog in action.

The idea behind the LS3 is that one day it or something like it could traverse terrain alongside dismounted troops, carrying cargo for them; following them across, over, and through rough terrain; and interacting with them. That kind of deployment is still a ways off for Big Dog, but the latest iteration seen here is a step in the right direction. For one, it demonstrated new gaits and improved perception of the world around it. But perhaps most importantly, this Big Dog is 10 times quieter than the earlier deafening prototypes, which bounced around unnaturally while emanating a deafening (and position-telegraphing) mechanic roar.

[DARPA]



Vintage PopSci: NYC Tornadoes Were Nothing Compared To These "Supernatural" Storms Of '35

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"A whirling vortex that can snatch up a horse and buggy": July 1935
"Static electricity charged barbed wire fences, stalled automobiles, and made men's and women's hair stand on end"

This weekend's tornadoes in New York City were mere gentle breezes compared with the monster twisters that terrorized the American prairie during the Great Depression.

In this PopSci article from July 1935, reporter Edwin Teale explains how massive dust storms, "once ascribed to supernatural causes," decimated crops, choked herds of cattle, destroyed wooden buildings and buried farm equipment. The so-called black blizzards also had other, spookier, effects: static electricity in the air charged barbed wire fences, and dust that reached the clouds caused red, blood-like rains.

Here's the full text of "Strange Pranks of the Wind":

"Black blizzards of dust recently swept across the Middle West. From the Rockies to the Mississippi, from upper Kansas to the Texas Panhandle, the scourge left its trail. In rolling clouds and suffocating billows, it blotted out the sun, paralyzed traffic, and buried fertile fields under a drifting blanket of dust.

When scattered showers cut through the haze, cowboys were driving herds from dust-choked ranges, farmers were digging out wagons and tractors, and statisticians were calculating that, in wide areas, crops would be cut to drought-time proportions.

In Kansas, alone, approximately 70,000,000 tons of dirt rode the winds from the western half of the state to eastern counties. Ninety-six miles of trucks, each hauling fifteen tons a day, it is estimated, would have to work for a solid year to return the soil transported by the breeze in less than a week. Dust damage in one Kansas town of 1,500 inhabitants was put at $10,800 or $7.20 for each person in the community.

A million-dollar Government war chest and 200,000 tractors, mobilized in Kansas, represent the initial move the fight the menace of wind-borne dust. In many areas, the fields will be ‘listed,' or furrowed, every ten feet to form barricades and hold the drifting particles in check.

Recent droughts and the plowing up of western grass lands during the war-time wheat boom, are largely responsible for present dust storms. In line with the Government program of replanting these grass areas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture last year introduced from abroad nearly 1,800 varieties of plants and grasses valuable for checking soil erosion.

When the dust blizzards were at their height, strange things occurred. Static electricity, generated by the flying particles, charged barbed wire fences, stalled automobiles, and made men's and women's hair stand on end."

Read the full story in our July 1935 issue: Strange Pranks of the Wind.



Brilliant 10: Christy Haynes Reveals the Secrets of the Body's Blood-Clotting System

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Christy Haynes Courtesy Christy Haynes
An inside look at the elusive platelet

Human blood cells are fairly well understood. That's not true of platelets, the tiny nucleus-free discs that circulate in the blood and play a key role in regulating clotting. Platelets are less than a fifth of the size of a typical red blood cell, and until University of Minnesota chemist Christy Haynes started studying them, scientists had no way to see what was happening inside.

Haynes's lab is the first to success-fully isolate an individual platelet under a microscope, place a Christy Haynes
Age 35
University of Minnesota
minuscule electrode onto it, and measure the messenger molecules released when the cell is chemically stimulated. This technique has allowed Haynes a first glimpse into how platelets talk to each other and how scientists might manipulate them to control blood-clot formation, develop new therapeutic treatments for platelet disorders, and perhaps even stop the spread of tumor cells. "A lot of people think that platelets act like a Trojan horse," Haynes says. "They circulate through your bloodstream, cloaking the cancer cell, and your body doesn't detect it."

In addition to studying platelets, Haynes is trying to create a model immune system on a chip that will clarify how immune-system cells communicate with one another. Her success, says her doctoral adviser, Richard P. Van Duyne of Northwestern University, is due to her rigorous and creative experiment design. "She has an enormous track record of being able to make experiments work on the first shot."

Click here to see more from our 11th annual celebration of young researchers whose innovations will change the world.



The Next Generation of Cocaine-Smuggling Drug Submarines

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Sinking the Submarine The U.S. Coast Guard released this photo of a sinking self-propelled semi-submersible that U.S. and Honduran officials interdicted in north of Honduras on March 30, 2012. The splotch you can see on the sub was actually water on the photographer's lens. Courtesy U.S. Coast Guard
The latest models come with A/C, shark paint jobs and quick-scuttle technology to easily sink the ship (and the drugs inside them)

Drug smugglers will resort to any number of creative DIY solutions for bringing their illicit goods to the United States, from marijuana catapults to mega-tunnels. But a new fleet of diesel-powered, fully submersible narco-subs could be the bane of law enforcement's existence.

Far from the rickety, barely-submerged metal husks first discovered a few years ago, the latest fiberglass models come equipped with air conditioning, shark paint jobs and quick-scuttle technology, to easily sink the ship and the drugs inside them. The subs would be "the envy of all but a few nations," as the New York Times describes them.

Intelligence officials first heard of drug-smuggling subs in the 1990s, but the vessels didn't start getting serious attention until 2006, in the eastern Pacific Ocean. In November of that year, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a semi-submersible they dubbed "Bigfoot," because officials weren't sure it existed until they saw it. Now, federal authorities have seized at least 25 such ships in the Pacific.

But new versions are cropping up in new locations. Drug submarines hadn't been spotted in the Caribbean until August of last year, but now they are growing in number, according to the Times. There have been five interceptions in the Caribbean so far, according to the Coast Guard.

In a raid last August, Coast Guard officers intercepted 15,000 pounds of cocaine, worth $180 million, in a sub captured off the coast of Honduras - the first time a submarine was intercepted in the Caribbean. That was a semi-submersible model, made of fiberglass and wood and painted to blend in with the sea surface.

The government has since captured three newer, fully submersible models, which can haul 10 tons of cocaine and conceivably travel beneath the surface all the way from Ecuador to Los Angeles, according to the Times.

The semi-submersibles are typically a little less than 100 feet long, and can carry four or five crewmembers and up to 10 metric tons of drugs, the Coast Guard says. Officials estimate they're very cheap to make, costing about $1 million and capable of moving $150 million to $180 million in cocaine per load, according to the Miami Herald.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former U.S. drug czar and a SOCOM commander, told the Herald this spring that the first subs were far from advanced - he evoked memories of the Monitor and the Merrimack, the wooden subs from the American Civil War. "It was Colombian, they had two Russian engineers, probably just unemployed sub guys helping to design the thing," McCaffrey told the newspaper. "I thought it was the silliest thing I ever heard of in my life."

Nowadays, things are definitely different: The newer, more sophisticated subs are probably built by independent contractors, who more than likely would sell them to the highest bidder. This has counterterrorism officials worried, the Times says. The subs are built in the thick jungles of central America, where they would be hard to detect via aerial surveillance.

But sometimes they can be found in their drydock states. In 2010 Drug Enforcement Agency, the and the Ecuadoran military seized a submarine that had been built and hidden in the jungle. That twin-screw, diesel electric-powered sub was about nine feet high from the deck to the ceiling, according to the DEA. It was about 30 meters (98 feet) long and described as "sophisticated," even containing its own air conditioning system. That sub never set sail, but the discovery in Honduras pointed to a potential Caribbean fleet. Now it sounds like a growing trend.

[via New York Times, Miami Herald]



Today on Mars: Nice Undercarriage

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Ready to Roll This is Curiosity's wheel, photographed by the Mars Hand Lend Imager (MAHLI) instrument. And there you can see the rim of Gale Crater in the distance. And th- wait, what is THAT BLACK DOT? Click here for a ginormous closeup of the speck. (It's just a dust grain.) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
Curiosity's hand-cam snaps some new photos that put Instagram filters to shame

The Mars rover Curiosity is still busy checking itself out, photographing its wheels and undercarriage after taking a lovely self-portrait the other day sol. No, this was not edited with the Instagram Earlybird filter.

The ground at Gale Crater is made of pretty compact, fine-grained stuff, as you can see from the rusty-colored dust on the wheels. That's good because the rover won't sink into the sand, but it might make it hard for her to scoop up the dirt when the time comes.

Those holes in the wheels, on the far side of the wheel in this image, form the rover's visual odometry, spelling JPL in Morse code.

Curiosity is downloading thousands of pictures of itself and its surroundings, completing a few new checkouts before she rolls toward a rock outcropping called Glenelg, probably sometime in the next couple Mars-weeks.



Vintage PopSci: Reporter Climbs the World Trade Center Construction Site in 1971

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From supply platform at 109th floor, Gannon peers down at lower Manhattan skyline: 1971
"They will soar 1,350 feet, higher than anything man has ever built"

Two years before the official opening of the Twin Towers in 1973, PopSci reporter Robert Gannon visited the 110-story construction site - and nearly chickened out. To reach the top of the world's tallest building, Gannon had to climb wobbly wooden ladders lashed to metal beams (while the builders teased him for his "hippie mustache.") "More and more open spaces in the building's skeleton, my boggled mind noted. I looked across to New Jersey. The day was one of those rare clear ones when New York City shimmers in the crystal air."

When he finally crawled to the edge, with mid-winter winds blowing straight through his coat, Gannon looked 100 feet down at the Empire State Building and thought the city "lay like a balsa, three-dimensional model of lower Manhattan… a plane flew around a toy Statue of Liberty stuck into a smudge of mud."

Read on for more from "Topping Out the World's Tallest Building."

Read the full story in our May 1971 issue: Topping Out the World's Tallest Building.



FYI: Why Do Girls Throw Like A Girl?

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Erin DiMeglio YouTube/CBSNewsOnline
The genders are more alike than they are different, with one notable exception.

You don't need to look any further than last week's news cycle to see proof that a girl can throw a ball: Erin DiMeglio, the first female quarterback to play high school football in Florida, made a splash by taking a spot on her team. But some research indicates it's an uphill battle.

It may be a borderline-offensive schoolyard taunt, but "throws like a girl" has an element of truth. Studies suggest that girls often don't throw as well as boys. (Boys v. girls is a little diminutive, but it's an important distinction; we'll get to that.) In fact, the "throwing gap," as it's called, is one of the biggest differences between the genders. It's not just the largest gap in physical activities--although it's the largest gap in that field--it's possibly the most salient gap. Period. 

Literature on this put forward by Janet Hyde, professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, has shown the disparity. Her Gender Similarities Hypothesis states, in short, that the two genders are more alike than they are different, and there's a lot of data to support the idea. (You can, and should, read about how similar we are here.) 

Counting standard deviations--the measurement of difference between sets of data--she shows how even the widest psychological differences, like physical aggression (0.60 standard deviations, leaning toward men) aren't as much as you might expect. Less than 0.10 standard deviations or between 0.11 and 0.35 standard deviations was common, and those are both defined as small differences. She also measured motor behaviors in boys and girls ages 3 to 20 to get a sense of the difference. Some of those, like grip strength (0.66, toward the gentlemen again), were large compared to the rest of the data, but still small to moderate overall. Throwing velocity and throwing distance? Both blowouts, at 2.18 and 1.98 standard deviations, respectively. Well above anything else, psychological or physical. 

Before puberty, the physical differences between boys and girls (see?) aren't enough to account for the throwing gap; structurally, their bodies should produce the same distance and speed in a throw. Nonetheless, girls are more likely to, for example, throw in a dart-tossing motion or step forward with the incorrect foot, which means a weaker throw. The age group from Hyde's report still falls into post-pubescence, when those natural, physical differences in size and muscle can distort the data, but even at age 4, says Jerry Thomas, dean of the College of Education at the University of North Texas in Denton, the difference is three times higher than any other motor function. In the U.S., where we're so proud of The National Pastime, the effect of doting parents vetting their boys while letting the girls slide on the skill has an effect--the same way it does anywhere baseball or other throwing-heavy sports are popular--but Thomas has researched this, too. 

To account for the effects of nurturing, Thomas studied aboriginal children in Australia, who throw the same amount regardless of gender. The girls threw tennis balls at about eight-tenths the velocity of their male counterparts. In the U.S. that's only slightly more pronounced, as The Washington Post points out, with girls throwing about 51 to 78 percent of the velocity. That suggests there's some kind of explanation in addition to nurture. 

Thomas pegs evolution for that, hypothesizing that throwing was the most important trait for hunting, and that the best (male) hunter was more likely to pass on his genes with the woman of his choosing. There's no way to test that theory, of course--"It's not one of those things you can go back and randomly assign people to groups and try to figure out"--but the other skills he studied, like running and jumping, would be more necessary for both sexes to use, so might account for why the gap is less pronounced today. Skills that might not be used as much by either sex, even ones as similar as underhand throwing, as opposed to ready-for-the-buffalo-slaying overhand, wouldn't show the same difference.

So what, exactly, does an ideal throw look like? Thomas says it's a three-pronged movement: a solid step forward; "differentiated rotation," i.e. the movement of the hips; and the lag of the ball, when a longer stretch of the arm might produce a better throw. "It's the only skill I know of that I can make a statement and everybody can tell me the mechanics of what it looks like: throws like a girl," Thomas says. But nonetheless, a solid throw looks something, probably, like what high school quarterback Erin DiMeglio does. 

[The Washington Post]




"There Is No Such Thing As Time"

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Gamma-Ray Burst European Southern Observatory
Astrophysicist Adam Frank's new book mixes cosmology with humanity. How does our understanding of the universe and cosmic time inform our daily lives? Especially if time is an illusion?

The "rebels" who fight the Big Bang theory are mostly attempting to grapple with the concept of time. They are philosophers as much as cosmologists, unsatisfied with the Big Bang, unimpressed with string theory and unconvinced of the multiverse. Julian Barbour, British physicist, author, and major proponent of the idea of timeless physics, is one of those rebels--so thoroughly a rebel that he has spurned the world of academics.

Julian Barbour's solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.

"If you try to get your hands on time, it's always slipping through your fingers," says Barbour. "People are sure time is there, but they can't get hold of it. My feeling is that they can't get hold of it because it isn't there at all." Barbour speaks with a disarming English charm that belies an iron resolve and confidence in his science. His extreme perspective comes from years of looking into the heart of both classical and quantum physics. Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-D entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change. In Barbour's view, the question must be turned on its head. It is change that provides the illusion of time. Channeling the ghost of Parmenides, Barbour sees each individual moment as a whole, complete and existing in its own right. He calls these moments "Nows."

"As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows," says Barbour, "and the question is, what are they?" For Barbour each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. "We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less."

Barbour's Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book's spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity existing without time, existing outside of time. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them in a step-by-step fashion makes a story unfold. Still, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent. As Barbour says, "The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands." The physics of reality for Barbour is the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment. Instead all the different possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom throughout all of creation, exist simultaneously. Barbour's Nows all exist at once in a vast Platonic realm that stands completely and absolutely without time.

"What really intrigues me," says Barbour, "is that the totality of all possible Nows has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical
rules." The question of "before" the Big Bang never arises for Barbour because his cosmology has no time. All that exists is a landscape of configurations, the landscape of Nows. "Platonia is the true arena of the universe," he says, "and its structure has a deep influence on whatever
physics, classical or quantum, is played out in it." For Barbour, the Big Bang is not an explosion in the distant past. It's just a special place in Platonia, his terrain of independent Nows.

Our illusion of the past arises because each Now in Platonia contains objects that appear as "records" in Barbour's language. "The only evidence you have of last week is your memory. But memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the Earth's past is rocks and fossils. But these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. The point is, all we have are these records and you only have them in this Now." Barbour's theory explains the existence of these records through relationships between the Nows in Platonia. Some Nows are linked to others in Platonia's landscape even though they all exist simultaneously. Those links give the appearance of records lining up in sequence from past to future. In spite of that appearance, the actual flow of time from one Now to another is nowhere to be found.

"Think of the integers," he explains. "Every integer exists simultaneously. But some of the integers are linked in structures, like the set of all primes or the numbers you get from the Fibonacci series." The number 3 does not occur in the past of the number 5, just as the Now of the cat jumping off the table does not occur in the past of the Now wherein the cat lands on the floor.

Past and future, beginning and end have simply disappeared in Barbour's physics. And make no mistake about it, Barbour is doing physics. "I know the idea is shocking," he says, "but we can use it to make predictions and describe the world." With his collaborators, Barbour has published a series of papers demonstrating how relativity and quantum mechanics naturally emerge from the physics of Platonia.

Barbour's perfect timeless arrangement of Nows into the landscape of Platonia is the most radical of all solutions to the conundrum of Before. But his audacity reveals an alternative route from this strange moment in science's history. In an era in which the search for quantum gravity has multiplied dimensions and the discovery of dark energy has sent cosmologists back to their blackboards, all the fundamentals seem up for grabs. Barbour is willing to step back even further and offer "no time" as a more basic answer to the question "What is time?"

This is an excerpt from Adam Frank's book About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang, newly available in paperback. It's from a chapter titled "The End of Beginnings and the End of Time," discussing radical alternatives to the Big Bang.



Sperm Can't Turn Left, Or Don't Want To

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Sperm Up Close Joyce Harper, UCL, Wellcome Images
A new imaging technique allows researchers to follow the agile, elusive male reproductive cell.

Sperm are small, but they're quick-an individual sperm can wiggle through a space 25 times the length of its body in a single second. (For comparison, a human would have to run 540,000 miles per hour to achieve the same relative speed.)

The sperm's combination of tininess and agility makes them almost impossible to track, since researchers have to zoom way in with their microscopes to see the frenetic flagellates at all (think of following a fast-flying bird through binoculars, except moreso).

That's where Aydogan Ozcan (one of PopSci's own Brilliant Ten!) comes in: the UCLA engineer has developed a method to record the motion of individual sperm cells using a "lens free" imaging platform.

To track the sperm, Ozcan and his team positioned two LEDs-one red, one blue-at a 45-degree angle with each other, and pointed them at a sample gamete-filled fluid. When the multi-directional, multi-colored lights illuminated the sperm, they cast holographic shadows-shadows that can be reconstructed to obtain 3-D images-which Ozcan recorded and processed.

The technique allowed the researchers to track the motion of about 15,000 sperm cells simultaneously. The team found that, rather than moving forward in a straight line, about 5 percent of sperm swim in a small helical, or corkscrew, pattern. Perhaps more surprising was that almost all (about 90%) of the helical swimmers spun to the right.

In their paper, which came out this week in PNAS, the authors did not venture a guess as to why sperm stick to swimming in a right-handed spiral rather than a left-handed one. They did mention that the new technique will be helpful for tracking lots of other microorganisms, as well as testing the effects of various chemicals and drugs on the swimming habits of sperm.



3 Reasons Why Football Is Evil [Vintage PopSci]

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Football: A sport plagued by brutality and extravagance State Library and Archives of Florida via flickr
A mathematics professor issued an urgent warning about football in 1894. America ignored him.

The National Football League recently put up $30 million to study the long-term effects of repeated brain injuries, after thousands of former players sued the organization for allegedly concealing the links between concussions and brain damage. Somewhere, the ghost of Yale University Mathematics Professor Eugene Lamb Richards is feeling mighty vindicated: In October 1894, he wrote a 13-page screed for PopSci about how violence, greed, and unreasonable practice hours would abase the otherwise great sport of football:

As to the disadvantages of football, the sport is like everything else: it is subject to evils. The question is not whether there are evils attending the game, but whether the evils overbalance the good. I admit the evils, but I maintain that ... they are not yet great enough to call for the abolition of the game.
Evil No. 1: Excessive time devoted to practice. So much time devoted to practice is not necessary for success. On the contrary, it interferes with success, so that this evil is bound to work its own cure.
Evil No. 2: Extravagance in expenditure of money earned. Undoubtedly every year much more money is spent than is necessary... it must be remembered that the age is extravagant; that more money is wasted in dress, in furniture, in all the vain show of living than was spent thirty years ago.
Evil No. 3: Brutality. The present style of mass play and momentum play puts a premium on weight and brute force. The mingling men in masses makes injuries more probably than in an open style of play.

Despite his (incredibly farsighted) judgement of the game's flaws, Richards also believed that football had the potential to impart great "moral effects" on college lads:

If there is one virtue most to be desired in a manly character - without which, indeed, it ceases to be manly - that virtue is courage. And of the college sports there is not one which cultivates this manly virtue more than football.

Read the full story in our October 1894 issue: The Football Situation.



Write Your Name In The Stars With This New Font

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The Future Now GalaxyZoo
Plenty of galaxies look like letters, so why not use them as letters?

When you spend lots of free time categorizing images of galaxies, you start to see recognizable shapes--including the letters of the alphabet. Over the past couple of years, the volunteer galaxy hunters over at the Zooniverse compiled a list, and now it's available on a whole new section of the site. You can write your name in the stars!

My Galaxies is a collection of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that Galaxy Zooites believe look like letters. Some might be a bit of a stretch, but when you see a whole word in context, you can't mistake it.

"When you've got pictures of millions of galaxies and an energetic group of Zooites, there isn't much that can stay hidden," explains Steven Bamford, senior research fellow at the Centre for Astronomy and Particle Theory at the University of Nottingham. Bamford created a new font using the Galaxy Zoo imagery. So far, 6 percent of users had the word "love" in their messages, and 1.8 percent had swear words of some kind. Be creative and make your own here.

[via PhysOrg]



This Escape Pod Could Save Lives In A Tsunami

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Safety Capsule Matt Duncan with his four-man Tsunami Survival Pod. Gold Coast Bulletin
Watching footage of the 2011 Japanese tsunami inspired Matt Duncan's design.

Australian business owner Matt Duncan usually builds steel-hulled houseboats, but he was so affected by last year's devastating tsunami in Japan that he's turned his focus to seaworthy survival craft. His bright orange Tsunami Survival Pod can accommodate four people for two and a half hours.

Duncan tells the Gold Coast Bulletin that he couldn't take his eyes off the TV last spring after a tsunami ravaged Japan. "I was home the day the tsunami hit, watching it on television and just thinking, 'What could I have done to save these people?'" he recalled. He watched hours of footage and observed how different objects responded to the action of the waves and the other debris pulled out to sea.

Within a few days, he'd designed this safety pod, using the spiral-welded steel he uses for his houseboats. It has crumple zones to absorb impacts; racing-style seats and five-point safety harnesses for four passengers; a flashing beacon to alert rescuers; and hooks for helicopters to grab and lift it to safety. It even has one-inch-thick polycarbonate windows so you don't feel claustrophobic.

He said the pods will retail for $8,500 in Australian dollars, or about $8,872 USD, and they can fit in an average garage. A tsunami usually comes with at least some warning, so someone could conceivably wheel it out and hop in before the water rises. Check out some more images of it here.

[via News.com.au]



How An Underfunded Team Of Spanish Astronomers Could Help Solve The Mystery Of Dark Energy

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Looking Back Astronomers hunt for dark energy by comparing the universe now to how it was soon after the big bang. Gary S. Chapman/Getty Images
For less than $10 million, the team is trying to figure out one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy

Since 1998, when astronomers discovered that a mysterious force known as dark energy is blowing the universe apart, scientists have launched at least a dozen multimillion-dollar projects to figure out what, exactly, dark energy is. These range from the $71-million BigBOSS project to the $900-million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is scheduled to see first light in 2019. But in an era of shrinking research funding, the advantage might go to scientists who can work on a shoestring budget-people such as Basque cosmologist Narciso "Txitxo" Benítez, who says he can scoop every one of those projects for less than $10 million.

Benítez is a cosmologist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. During his 20-year career, he has published papers on both the most distant known supernova and the closest one, and he was a core member of the ALHAMBRA survey of galaxies. Now, he is on a mission to define dark energy (like hundreds of other astronomers around the world) and has launched a project called J-PAS to do it.

The first step in that long quest is to determine where dark energy is and where it's been. Astronomers can do that by measuring the location and redshift of millions of galaxies, thereby mapping the universe's expansion. As galaxies move away from Earth, the light they emit becomes stretched in the direction of the "red" end of the visible light spectrum. The more distant a star, the farther light emitted by that star has traveled through an expanding universe, and thus the more redshifted it will be. If the galaxies in one part of the sky are accelerating away from us more quickly than those in other places, then that part of the sky contains more dark energy.

Benítez is betting that a quick and dirty approach-locating as many galaxies as possible, as fast as possible-will win him the race. It's a far different strategy from his competitors'. The BigBOSS project, for example, will examine 5,000 galaxies at a time, splitting the light that reaches its telescope into hundreds of individual wavelengths using a prism-like device known as a spectrograph. J-PAS will attempt to study about 60,000 galaxies at a time with a telescope and a 1,300-megapixel digital camera, the second largest in the world. The camera will photograph each swath of the sky 56 times, with 56 different filters, each one isolating different colors. By imaging a fifth of the entire sky, Benítez says he'll measure the velocities of tens of millions of galaxies, producing enough data to start mapping dark energy by 2018-two years earlier than any of his competitors.

Benítez has about a hundred collaborators, mostly from Spain and Brazil, whose governments are providing most of the funding. Over the past two years, the Spanish government built a new observatory at a site 6,420 feet above sea level in Spain's Sierra de Javalambre, an arid mountain range, specifically to house J-PAS's instruments. In June Benítez's group installed an 80-centimeter test telescope. If all goes well, the main instrument-a 2.5-meter telescope, still small by the standards of big astronomy-will begin imaging galaxies at the end of 2014.

Plenty of things could go wrong. The repetitive imaging process could cause delays. The camera, which Benítez has outsourced to an independent company, could be insufficiently accurate (most are built by academics). Even the observatory's site could be a problem. Astronomical research typically takes place under the crystalline skies of Hawaii and Northern Chile, which get 300 clear nights a year. The J-PAS site will receive only about 190. As a result, many astronomers are skeptical about the project's chances. David Schlegel, a lead researcher on BigBOSS, isn't sure that J-PAS will be able to distinguish between different j-models of dark energy. Others say that Benítez has underestimated the challenges of building a working telescope from scratch. Joshua Frieman, director of the Dark Energy Survey, an ongoing redshift-measuring project, takes a more diplomatic view. "Science advances, in part, by people trying different things," he says. "In the grand scheme of things, competition is healthy."

The results of this competition could help predict the fate of the universe. If dark energy has varied throughout space or time, then the accelerating expansion of the universe could be temporary. But if dark energy is constant, the universe will likely keep expanding faster, pushing galaxies farther apart for eternity.



Mysterious Martian Spheres Might Be The Weird Work Of Water

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Martian Spherules Small spherical objects fill the field in this mosaic combining four images from the Microscopic Imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The view covers an area about 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) across, at an outcrop called "Kirkwood" in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The individual spherules are up to about one-eighth an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./ USGS/Modesto Junior College
This unusual cookie-dough-looking clump of Martian soil, never before seen, hints at a watery past or a major crater-causing impact.

Strange new spheres on the surface of Mars have planetary geologists buzzing--they might be the result of water, they could be left over from a major crater-causing impact, or they might be something else. And they're not even from NASA's new rover. The bumpy spherules could be one of the most exciting finds of the Mars rover Opportunity's already long life, NASA scientists say.

"To me, it feels like the beginning of the mission, and we're back at [landing site] Eagle Crater. It really, really does," Opportunity's principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, said in an interview. "I think this is going to turn out to be a more subtle, perhaps more difficult problem to solve, but we have eight and a half years of experience under our belts."

Though the team is still gathering evidence, and no one is sure exactly what the spherules are, deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson said he is working on two hypotheses already.

"One idea is these represent impact deposits, left over on the rim of Endeavour, or they represent an older section of a sedimentary deposit and happen to be preserved on the rim," he said. "I go back and forth. We have a lot of data to acquire. Both hypotheses are viable in my head."

Since the onset of Martian spring earlier this year, Opportunity has been rolling along the rim of Endeavour Crater, a huge pit hundreds of meters deep and stretching 14 miles wide. The crater is deep enough to harbor evidence of ancient water, which may be less acidic than the past lakes Opportunity has already found elsewhere.

A few months ago, spectral evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's CRISM instrument (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) indicated there were clay minerals at Opportunity's latest outpost, Cape York, on the side of Endeavour Crater. Clays form in the presence of water, so the rover team wanted to check it out. Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, picked a spot to turn uphill.

My intuition tells me we're on to something very special.

"Either by blind luck, or good spectral signatures--which I think is the case--it turns out where we drove uphill is one of the most exciting spots we've seen in the entire mission," he said in an interview. "But we don't know what the story is yet."

Opportunity spotted a rocky outcropping, characterized by wind-eroded fins, and moved in to take some closeups. The speckly, pebbly surface is covered in spherules a few millimeters across, which reminded many team members of the Mars "blueberries," one of Opportunity's earliest finds. But the blueberry spherules have a lot of iron oxide and hematite, whereas these new things are made of basalt--they may look similar, but they're totally different. The rover team is excited, to put it mildly. It may be even more important than the rover's news of a gypsum vein last fall, Arvidson said.

"It indicates that water has been moving through these outcrops and depositing materials in the veins. If this is sedimentary, it's really a bonus--it might be as exciting as the initial measurements we made after we landed in Eagle Crater," he said. "We can have a conversation in about two months, when we have all the measurements done. But my gut tells me, my intuition tells me, we're on to something very special."

The spherules are special in part because they're unique--they're the densest accumulation of spherical objects found to date on Mars, and they appear to be crunchy on the outside and softer in the center. If they're evidence of sedimentary deposits, this would be exciting because it would be yet more evidence that water has had a major influence on the history of Mars. If they're relics of a crater impact, that's interesting because they haven't been seen before, so planetary scientists will have to work out how and why they happened here. But at this point, how they formed is still a geologic puzzle, Arvidson and Squyres said.

Squyres said he won't rule out any possibilities: "It would be foolish at this point to rule out any plausible hypotheses. This is Mars--it's a complicated place."

The spot has been dubbed Kirkwood, after a mine in the Sudbury impact crater in Canada. Oppy later bumped further uphill toward a lighter, slabby formation dubbed Whitewater, where it is sitting today and taking some measurements, Arvidson said. "This is such an important site that we'll be here for a while," he said.

During the coming weeks, Opportunity will grind some of these rocks and perform further analysis with its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer to determine what they contain. It will move up and down the formation, driving laterally, to explore as many sections as it can, Arvidson said.

All of the planning meetings for this new discovery are happening on the fifth floor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Squyres and Arvidson are living on Mars time for the Curiosity mission. Curiosity is on the fourth floor. This week, the rovers' shifts happened to coincide - Opportunity now works on Earth time, while Curiosity's human controllers will live on Mars time for another two months. Squyres, who has been flying back and forth between Pasadena and Ithaca, N.Y., joked that he was confident he was on the West Coast Tuesday, but don't ask him what time zone that is.

"It is extremely rewarding, and more than a little bit exhausting, to have such exciting things going on with two different vehicles on different sides of the planet," he said.




The U.S. Conducted Atomic Weapons Tests On Beer

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Wasp Prime Test From Operation Teapot Wikimedia Commons
An uncovered file documents Cold War-era investigations into an important question: is it safe to drink beer that was exposed to an atomic bomb detonation? And does it taste OK?

The atomic bomb reached deep into the world's collective consciousness, changing everything forever. Testing something like that meant serious research into how a nuclear explosion would affect every part of life, including: "Will this bomb irradiate my beer?"

Documents uncovered by Alex Wellerstein at Restricted Data show that the infamous Operation Teapot--a series of 14 nuclear weapons tests beginning in 1955--featured tests on packaged food, including beer. Those staged mannequins and houses in the Nevada desert you might know from old footage? Beer and soda was placed in them, because, hey, you still need to kick back a little after The End of Days.

Both cans and bottles were tested in different proximities to two bomb blasts (one equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, the other to 30 kilotons). No surprise, the cans fared better, but both did surprisingly well overall. The closest beverages were just over 1,000 feet away from the blast; the farthest were two miles back. The irradiating effects on both were minimal, and the scientists claimed it would be drinkable for "emergency use," which Wellerstein points out means OK "in the short term."

The taste--yes, they were concerned about the taste--was surveyed by some short-straw-drawing individual (and eventually sent to laboratories) who goes unnamed. It's rated as a little strange-tasting but, thankfully, not Apocalypse-bad.

[Restricted Data via NPR]



Arrr! Did Captain Kidd Hide His Gold In An Ox-Swallowing Underground Vault? [Vintage PopSci]

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Did Captain Kidd hide his loot in the tide-guarded money pit of Oak Island?
Gather 'round, ye flea-bitten cockroaches, fer a pirate's tale o' treasure an' science.

(In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, today's Vintage PopSci, from April 1939, has been carefully translated from land lubberish.)

As spring sails in t' 1939, a treacherous crew o' Yankee engineers is preparin' fer a kraken-sized adventure. Th' greasy-haired curs have their spyglasses set on a mysterious, sea-guarded vault said t' hold th' lost treasure o' Cap'n Kidd. Aye, but they're not th' first rascals t' seek th' half-drowned booty. Ye olde PopSci will tell th' tale...

Th' year were 1795. Three meddlin' lads were huntin' on Oak Island, off Nova Scotia, when they happened upon a beastie o' a tree with a limb hacked right off:

The top of this stub was deeply scarred, as though by running ropes or cables, and beneath the limb the boys found a circular depression in the sod, roughly a dozen feet in diameter.
The next day, they returned with picks and shovels. Pirate lore of the region centered about Mahone Bay, and they were certain they had stumbled upon buried loot. Ten feet below the surface, they struck a heavy platform of hewn timbers. Below it must lie doubloons and pieces-of-eight! But when the wood was removed, only more earth was found below. At twenty feet, they struck another platform.

And so th' scurvy louts kept diggin', hoistin' up clay in buckets til they reached another platform. Soon winter blew in and th' scallywags had t' give up their quest.

The skeptical mainlanders rejected the boys' story as a hoax and refused their help. Unable to proceed alone, the three bided their time. Two married, settled down on Oak Island, and brought up children within sight of the mystery pit. It was when one of these children was born that a physician from Truro, N.S., a Dr. John Lynds, became interested in the island. He organized the first Oak Island Treasure Company. Together with a group of his friends, including the original discoverers, he began operations in 1803.
As the workman descended, they found some marker or platform at every ten feet... Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety feet, the pit continued downward.

When the intervenin' mongrels went home fer th' night, a peculiar thing happened. Th' bloody pit filled up with 60 feet o' water!

Later shafts, sunk by other treasure seekers, have told the same story. Only in the immediate vicinity of the money pit is the endless flow of water found.
Baffled by this mystery, the 1803 company exhausted its funds and ceased operations. Nearly half a century went by before a second treasure company, in 1849, began afresh the search for hidden gold.

That's when th' thieving blighters were joined by th' mangiest, saltiest bilge rat o' them all: a coal prospector. The pox-faced lubber brought along a horse-powered drilling mechanism to aid in disturbin' th' pirate vault.

Boring down through the mud of the water-filled shaft, the drill struck the platform at 100 feet, bringing up chips that showed it was made of spruce. Then, it dropped twelve inches and began boring through four inches of solid oak. Beyond the oak, it passed through twenty-two inches of what appeared to be loose metal - which the treasure seekers were sure was golden coins.

Arr, but ol' Cap'n Kidd's loot wasn't t' be had that easy. Convinced they had finally found th' booty, the larcenous sluggards brought in great pumps from th' mainland t' try t' drain th' watery pit.

Enormous quantities of water were drained away. Yet the level in the shaft remained the same. They then discovered that they were, in effect, trying the bail out the sea. The water was salty and the level in the pit rose and fell with the tides. In some mysterious way, the pit was connected with the ocean water around the island.

Avast! Read the rest o' the tale at yer own peril, in our April 1939 issue: Captain Kidd's Gold?.



This Is What The Depression Sounded Like

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Aldo Leopold in the Country Aldo Leopold is shown at his shack in Sauk County, Wisc., circa 1940. Researchers have reconstructed the soundscape of the naturalist's famous shack, using his detailed field notes. UW Digital Archives
Digital birds reconstruct the soundscape of famous naturalist Aldo Leopold.

The great American naturalist Aldo Leopold once wrote that he was glad he would not be young in a future without wilderness. Indeed, he may not have been thrilled to know the sonic environment he enjoyed each day is gone; the sound of highways now mingles with birdsong, which itself has changed with the redistribution of species. But he took such detailed and copious field notes that we can recreate that environment, hearing the sounds of nature as Leopold himself would have.

This "resurrected soundscape" is the first sonic setting to be recreated from real data, rather than from informed imagination, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Leopold, regarded as the father of wildlife ecology, would sit on a bench before sunrise at his Wisconsin shack during the 1930s and ‘40s. He would jot down the morning chorus of birds, noting the light level and time when he heard the first calls. He even mapped the birds' distribution around his Sauk County, Wisc., home. Stan Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of wildlife ecology, and Christopher Bocast, a UW-Madison graduate student and acoustic ecologist, worked with 30 minutes' worth of Leopold's notes and compiled a list of species and sounds. The recordings are compressed into a five-minute clip, so it's a bit more of a din than Leopold would have heard. The background noise comes from a rural Wisconsin setting, and the bird calls came from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library.

The detailed writings of naturalists have long served as a database for ecologists and historians curious about environmental changes over time. Henry David Thoreau's interest in phenology, the timing of seasonal changes, is helping inform botanists' understanding of climate change. Similarly, comparing what Leopold heard with what you can hear today can help scientists draw comparisons between past and present.

"Leopold recognized that you can get a pretty good sense of land health by listening to the soundscape," Temple told UW News. "If sounds are missing and things are there that shouldn't be, it often indicates underlying ecological problems."

[via ScienceDaily]



Today On Mars: MAHLI Translates Martian Discoveries For Human Eyes

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The MAHLI Calibration Target Two images were combined to take this photo of the calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). That penny at the bottom? It's a sly nod to geologists' practice of putting coins in photos for size reference. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
To get an idea of the color or size of an object on Mars, it helps to have a point of reference.

Mars rover Curiosity has plenty of tools to help it see and explore, but we need some assistance to understand what those discoveries would look like back on Earth. The rover took this snapshot on a recent "sol" (Mars day) of the tool that helps make that possible: the MAHLI calibration target.

It's two combined photos, actually, taken by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, a handy camera used for close-up inspections. The calibration target is on the end of Curiosity's robotic arm, and this was taken as part of a week-long test of the arm's mobility. On the target, you can see a penny (for size reference), color chips (color reference, of course), a metric standardized bar graphic (size), and a stair-step pattern (depth).

The penny is unique (even by non-Mars-roving-penny standards): it's from 1909, the first year Lincoln pennies were minted and the centennial of Lincoln's birth.

[NASA]



How Bats Can Help Scientists Design Better Robots

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Micronycteris microtis This common big-eared bat is eating a katydid. Wikipedia
Bats can detect ultra-small perturbations in the air, and understanding this ability could improve sensitive detection equipment.

Bats are great at hunting down prey via echolocation, in which their ultrasonic chirps bounce off anything in the air. Specialized ear designs and other features detect the returning sounds, helping the bats determine the location of a moving target. But what about when the target is still?

Bats have been observed seeking out and catching inert insects hiding amid clutter, and finally scientists think they've figured out how the animals do it. The flapping motion of a bat moves the air sufficiently to ruffle the wings of their insect prey, and this trifling perturbation can be detected. Understanding the way bats do this could help improve biomimetic sensors, according to Roman Kuc, professor of electrical engineering at Yale University, and his colleague/son Victor Kuc.

The father-son team filmed a common big-eared bat, Micronycteris microtis, with a high-speed camera. The bat hovered over a completely still dragonfly sitting on a leaf, and was able to detect it and pick it up. Watching the playback in slow motion, the Kucs noticed the dragonfly's wings move ever so slightly in the air current caused by the flapping bat. The dragonfly wings moved in sync with the bat wings. The Kucs then made a model of the induced wing movements and how they affected the returning echoes, according to Yale's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

To do it, they took a real dragonfly, plastic leaves and a robotic sonar system to generate sound pulses. They used an airbrush to puff air at the dragonfly, simulating the beating bat wings. The resulting echo waveforms gave it away: The leaf didn't really ruffle, but the dragonfly wings did. The Kucs say that bats can figure out the difference, and use it to detect the location of prey that is otherwise silent and totally still.

The study is published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[Yale News]



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