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Fruit Punched: What Is The Point Of Flavored Mouthguards?

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MoGo flavored mouthguards A product in search of a reason to exist MoGo
A boxer weighs in.

A mouthguard is the single most important piece of safety equipment in any fighting sport. Sure, the gloves are iconic, but they only protect the tiny bones of the hand. The headgear sure looks safe, but its actual value in protecting against brain damage has been called into question (and pro fighters don't get to wear one anyhow). It is the humble mouthguard that ultimately keeps a fighter's teeth intact, keeps him from biting off his tongue, wards off broken mandibles, and helps cushion the brain from blows to the jaw. In the heat of battle, under attack from a determined foe, a mouthguard may be a fighter's only real line of defense.

Sane people, therefore, are quite happy to wear mouthguards. So why would someone need to create a dubious gimmick to entice people playing dangerous contact sports to wear a mouthguard? Well, I don't know. But of course, someone has. Capitalism at work.

What's New
"The challenge with current athletic mouthguards is that the experience of wearing one is just not that great," says the first line of the brochure touting MoGo: The Flavored Mouthguard. Now, let me stop you right there, MoGo: The Flavored Mouthguard. I would argue that the experience of wearing a mouthguard is great, compared to the alternative, which is tooth fragments embedded in one's tattered remains of a tongue. Compared to that, the average athletic mouthguard is quite attractive.

It is a product that satisfies a need that no one ever had.But not attractive enough, according to MoGo, which has, as you may have surmised, embedded flavor inside of mouthguards, resulting in The Flavored Mouthguard. It is a product that satisfies a need that no one ever had. "If only this mouthguard tasted like old gum," no boxer has ever said. (I tested these mouthguards while boxing; they could also be used in football or any other contact sport.) When I explained to the old boxing trainers in my gym that my new mouthguard was flavored, they squinted at me incomprehendingly, as if I'd told them that I would be boxing while standing on my head from now on.

What's Good
Let it be acknowledged: these MoGo mouthguards are perfectly good and functional mouthguards. They are of the "boil and bite" variety, meaning that you submerge them in boiling water for a minute to soften them, then bite into them to shape them to your mouth. Their cushioning is generous. When properly fitted, they work just fine.

And the flavor? Well, the Mint flavor was not so bad at all! It had only the faintest whiff of flavor, like a piece of Doublemint that had been worked over for an hour or so. And its color scheme was a decidedly non-embarrassing shade of green. The "Bubble Gum" flavor comes in a decidedly embarrassing shade of pink. Being too insecure in my manhood to try this out personally, I passed it on to my middle-aged boxing trainer, who used it while sparring for a week. He was not a fan of the flavor, but pronounced its overall performance as "not bad." He's also given to pronouncing direct punches to his face "not bad," so keep that in perspective.

What's Bad
Well, how about the Orange flavor? It was the first MoGo mouthguard that I tried, and it was not an attractive experience. MoGo's particular artificial orange flavor bears an uneasy resemblance to the flavor of bile creeping up the back of your throat just before you vomit. Not, as you can imagine, the flavor that you want to experience while being punched in the gut. The flavor is not strong enough to make you conscious of it during the midst of a fight, but inserting the mouthguard at the beginning of each round provides a brief burst of Sickly Orange aroma. It's a distraction.

MoGo's artificial orange flavor bears an uneasy resemblance to the flavor of bile creeping up the back of your throat.Mouthguards should ideally be clear, or, if colorful, should boast a color scheme that makes a statement, like the colors of your country's flag, or a "scary fang" print to intimidate your opponent. MoGo's color scheme is simply a solid black of Crayola-like color, which is neither inspiring nor intimidating. Also, these mouthguards feature a "tether" hole in the front, so they can be attached to a helmet, should the sport require it. That's fine for football players, but for boxing, it just creates an overhanging bucktooth-like rubber protrusion on the front that is better if snipped off.

MoGo makes a flavored mouthguard designed to be worn with braces as well. Thoughtful, but if your child already has to suffer the indignities of boxing with braces, the least you can do is not also force him to wear a Fruit Punch-flavored mouthguard. The kid has suffered enough.

The Price
At $11.99, the MoGo mouthguards are actually quite well priced. They're several dollars cheaper than the average regular mouthguard of the same quality. They presumably knocked off a few bucks to make up for the flavor.

The Verdict
The MoGo Flavored Mouthguard may be studied in business schools for generations to come as a case study in "Meeting a Demand That Doesn't Exist." The only thing better than this new product is the old product that it supposedly improved upon.

Hamilton Nolan writes for Gawker and boxes poorly in his spare time.




Electric Brain Stimulation Warps Your Perception Of Faces [Video]

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Distorted Face Portrait of Picasso by Juan Gris. Google Art Project/Wikimedia Commons
A new study uncovers the two nerve centers responsible for face recognition--and the lack thereof.

Two nerve clusters in the brain are crucial for perceiving faces, a finding that could help treat people who suffer from face blindness and that could inform why some people have such good facial recognition. Like many other neurological studies, the research team was able to benefit from a patient's desperate measures to treat his debilitating seizures. It wasn't quite the man who mistook his wife for a hat--more a man who mistook his doctor for some other guy.

Ron Blackwell of Santa Clara, Calif., was at Stanford's medical school for treatment when this study was performed. Researchers working with his doctors were able to stimulate his brain and totally distort his perception of faces. "You just turned into somebody else. Your face metamorphosed," he said, surprised. You can see his reaction in the video below.

The brain centers are located in the fusiform gyrus, part of the temporal lobe. Back in 2010, Stanford associate professor of psychology Kalanit Grill-Spector discovered that this region contains two brain clusters, dubbed pFus and mFus, which respond more strongly to faces than to other visual stimuli--hands, legs, cars, guitars, etc. It plays a role in face blindness, clinically known as prosopagnosia. Oliver Sacks made it famous (he himself suffers from it), describing how patients just can't tell faces apart.

Thanks to Blackwell, Grill-Spector now knows how these regions function when it comes to faces.

Last September, Blackwell was in the hospital for a week-long procedure in which part of his brain was exposed to a patch of electrodes, which his neurologists would use to monitor the electrical storm that sparks a seizure. As luck would have it, two of the electrodes were inserted in Blackwell's fusiform gyrus right where they would spark the pFus and mFus centers. This was done under the direction of his doctor, Josef Parvizi, an associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences. Parvizi's lab collaborates with Grill-Spector's.

Thanks to this, the doctors were able to stimulate both nerve centers at the same time and watch what happened. They also used fMRI and electrocorticography, or intracranial recording, to monitor his brain activity. Instantly, Blackwell's perception of his doctor's face changed--and when the stimulation stopped, the face reverted back.

"I was as surprised as the patient was when he suddenly saw my features seem to melt," Parvizi said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the team also identified the brain region that sparks Blackwell's seizures, but decided not to take out any tissue because it was too risky. But his seizures have since abated, apparently.

This research will be published today the Journal of Neuroscience.



How The Sound Of Rain Helps Engineers Diagnose Unsafe Bridges

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Brian Mazzeo and Spencer Guthrie Brigham Young University
Structurally flawed bridges produce a different sound when splashed with water. If we listen in during the rain, we can hear the problem--and fix it--before it gets worse.

To test the safety of a bridge, engineers rely on some pretty low-tech methods. One common way of doing it is to drag a chain across the bridge and listen in for the hollow-sounding spots. But, weirdly, an even-lower-tech method might speed things along: Have the rain do the work for you.

In the same way that structural deficiencies can be detected with something solid, two engineers from Brigham Young University--Brian Mazzeo and Spencer Guthrie--are listening in for the tell-tale acoustics by splashing bridges with water. They're looking for something called "delamination." In a concrete bridge deck, the layers used to build the bridge can become separated over time--it's a major concern with some aging bridges. Right now, some of the processes (like the chain-dragging) can take hours, and shut down lanes for that time.

The water solution is simple, and could potentially fix the traffic problem. One day, the researchers say, it might be as easy as misting a bridge as they cruise by in a car. (No, you don't have to wait for it to actually rain. Although that's more poetic than car-misting.) It might also make its way into related industries, like aircraft construction, where delamination of composite parts is a problem.

[BYU]



Boeing Tests A Missile That Knocks Out A Building's Power [Video]

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A room full of computers gets shut down while the missile flies by above the building.


In whatever sense that there's a "good" missile, this new one from Boeing seems like it. Rather than a missile that demolishes a target (along with everything nearby), countries have been clamoring for something more discreet: a weapon that knocks out the lights instead, crippling a target without collateral damage.

Last week, Boeing engineers tested out CHAMP--Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project--on buildings in the Utah desert. In the first test, the missile sailed over a two-story building, then let loose microwaves to shut down a very '90s-looking room full of computers. The TV cameras set up to record the test got knocked out, too, and six more were hit by missiles during the one-hour test.

The big draw for this, of course, is that it makes battles less messy by focusing on the electronic component instead of the human one. That might be true, but it doesn't necessarily mean the battle would end as soon as CHAMP gets launched. As Boeing put it in a statement:

"This technology marks a new era in modern-day warfare," said Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works. "In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy's electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive."

[Boeing]



This Tiny Sticker Is Bigger Than The Giant Samsung Galaxy Note II

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Samsung TecTile Sticker Dan Nosowitz
By appealing to the lazy bum in all of us, Samsung's TecTiles have become the first NFC-based product that's actually fit for human use.

At any given time there are a whole mess of buzzwords and concepts floating around the tech world, evolving incrementally until eventually they become something we can all actually use and enjoy (or, alternately, until they are replaced or forgotten). "The cloud," meaningless as that term is, has already transitioned into "thing everyone uses all the time." Something like 3-D printing, on the other hand, is still at a comparatively early stage--you can technically do it, but nobody knows quite why you would, given the current state of the tech, and nobody knows what the application will be that makes it useful for normal people.

Near-field communication, or NFC, is, I think, suddenly usable for normal people, in one very specific product: TecTiles, from Samsung. If you want a full primer on NFC, read this, but in short, NFC is a communications protocol, sort of like Bluetooth but without the need for elaborate searching and pairing. It's a tap-based connection: tap to connect to a speaker, tap to transfer data, tap to pay, tap to talk, tap to share. Eventually, this is the tech (or perhaps the basis of the tech) that'll let you replace your wallet with your phone. Credit card, gift cards, subway pass, identification, that'll all be digital, and you'll share it with a tap. But the infrastructure isn't nearly in place to do that smoothly, as Christina Bonnington of Wired found out when she went wallet-less for a month.

TecTiles are NFC-enabled stickers, priced at $15 for five. They're nonthreatening, easy, and fun. They're little stickers and do little things. They make it easier to do things you were going to do already. You'll use them for just that reason and then all of a sudden, you'll understand NFC. So when it comes time to put your wallet in a box in your closet and use your phone to pay for things in stores, check your ID in bars, and pay for the subway, you'll be prepared. And that's much more interesting than the Galaxy Note II, which is, you know, a massive phone that's pretty much like the last massive phone Samsung made.

Most new Samsung smartphones, including the very popular Galaxy S III, the very good Galaxy Nexus, and soon-to-be-popular Galaxy Note II (the latter of which launches in the US today, and which I used to test the new TecTiles) support them. You put the stickers on, well, anything, and tapping them with your phone makes your phone do various things. Imagine a QR code, except imagine it's easy to use and also not stupid.

Example: Put a TecTile on your bedside table. When you tap it, your phone dims, your alarm switches on, your volume turns to an appropriate level for an alarm clock, and your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turn off to save battery.

A movie theater could stick one onto its entrance. Tap it with your phone and you check in on Foursquare, tweet about it, update your Facebook status, update your Google+ status, share your location on Glympse, and connect to the guy next to you on LinkedIn. Which is all subterfuge, because the real benefit is that the same TecTile also set your phone to silent mode so when all of your social networks explode with fascinating updates while you're in the theater, nobody else has to know about it.

Stick one on your car's dashboard. Tap it with your phone, and it turns on Bluetooth to connect to your car stereo, launches the navigation app, starts playing your favorite driving song, and texts your mom to say you're leaving now.

Version 3.0 of the TecTile software, which is also brand-new today, adds a bunch of new features, pretty much all of which are great. Most important is that you can now do multiple actions (like all of those examples above) with the same TecTile--earlier, it could only do one, which is of limited use. You can make private TecTile commands, so only your phone will work with it. That'll cut down on accidental triggering by other phones and also let you do any weird private texting/calling stuff without fear. There's also just flat-out more options now--you can tell a TecTile to trigger airplane mode, check in on all kinds of social networks, play/pause music, forward calls, and more.

The app is still kind of barebones, but that's fine. This is a utility, not a showcase for transition animations. And its simplicity is why I like it more than something like Locale, an Android app that can change some of these settings based solely on where you are. TecTiles are basically foolproof.

Then there are new "Profiles," which I don't much like. The idea here is that you can set your phone to have a "meeting" profile or a "car" profile or a "home" profile, and your TecTile will do different things. But the whole point of the TecTile is that it does a bunch of stuff with one tap rather than making you change any settings on the actual phone, so I am not real thrilled that this addition requires you to either change a setting on the actual phone or create a new TecTile that exists solely to switch your profile. I'd rather have the ability to, I don't know, set individual times for the TecTile, so it does something different at 9 a.m.compared to 11 p.m.

I also wish the Samsung phones supported inductive charging, like the Nokia Lumia 920 (or, hell, the years-old and now-extinct Palm Pre). Inductive charging is a magnet-based wireless charging method, and the NFC-enabled Lumia 920 will launch alongside a speaker that I'd love Samsung to emulate/steal. Stick the phone on the speaker, and the NFC triggers a Bluetooth connection and also begins charging. It'd be great if Samsung could add that to the many things the TecTiles can already do, though it'd take a bunch of new hardware instead of just a firmware update, like Version 3.0. (It's worth noting that the TecTiles app is not Samsung-specific, but Samsung isn't promising they'll work with anything but Samsung phones. We'll test them with the Lumia when we get one.)

Samsung's biggest weakness as a phone-maker might be its complete lack of editing--any idea that technically works in testing gets the green light to be stuffed into a phone--but the thing about that is that every once in awhile, one of those ideas will be really great. And TecTiles are really great!



Double-Diamond Anvil Creates Pressures Greater Than Earth's Inner Core

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Pressure Chamber Argonne National Laboratory
With that much pressure, unique compounds can form and materials change their chemical and physical properties.

With a new megapressure environment, scientists will be able to replicate pressures one and a half times stronger than those found at the center of the Earth. The specialized anvil cell can create double the amount of pressure than anyone had previously demonstrated, an environment where new materials can be formed and where minerals behave very strangely.

Scientists at institutions in Chicago, Germany and Belgium used a super-powerful X-ray beam at the Argonne National Laboratory to do it. It uses a half-century-old technique, diamond anvil cells, by adding a set of micro-anvils. A diamond anvil cell uses two brilliant-cut diamonds, like the kind you would see in an engagement ring, but instead of a point at the bottom, they have flat surfaces. A sample goes between the two diamonds, which are then compressed together to create high pressures. The technique can create about 320 to 360 gigapascals, which is about 3 million times the atmospheric pressure found on Earth's surface and about the pressure you would find at the core.

This new one builds on this technique by adding micro-anvils, about 10-20 microns in diameter, between the larger two quarter-carat diamonds. It's an anvil inside an anvil. The secondary set is made from nanocrystal diamond "semi-balls," according to Argonne Lab. They are stronger and less brittle than other diamond crystals, and they can create 640 GPa of pressure--six million times that of atmospheric pressure, and nearly double the pressure at the center of the Earth.

Using this anvil-within-an-anvil, scientists will be able to create huge amounts of static pressure, rather than relying on shockwaves to compress things further. That means a longer observation time to study what happens to the doubly compressed sample--and it could revolutionize high-pressure science, researchers say. This could improve studies of materials like iron, which could help explain how Earth coalesced. Observations with the new double anvil were published this week in Nature Communications.

[Argonne National Laboratory]



Here Is What 84 Million Stars Look Like. You're Welcome.

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84 Million Stars This is a gigapixel mosaic of the central parts of the Milky Way. Click here to enlarge. ESO/VVV Consortium, Acknowledgement: Ignacio Toledo
This is the largest, deepest, and most accurate color-magnitude diagram ever produced, containing more than 10 times the stars in any previous study.

In this picture, you are looking at a central concentration of ancient stars in the bulging part of our galaxy. The bulge is full of dust, gas and most of the stars in the Milky Way, which makes it hard to study--astronomers have to suss out stars from crowded, dusty zones and figure out how far they are from us. This new image catalogs 84 million of them, which is 10 times the number of stars cataloged in any previous study.

The image covers 315 square degrees of sky, and 500 square degrees of the galactic bulge. The stars are shown here in three filters, which allows observations based on the stars' age, chemical makeup and movement around the Milky Way. The colors represent the apparent brightnesses of the stars. It's a 9-gigapixel image--if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be a whopping 9 meters long and 7 meters tall, according to the European Southern Observatory.

To build the image, Chilean astronomers Roberto Saito and Dante Minniti and their colleagues used the VISTA telescope and combined several star catalogs together. The image serves as a galactic census, noting each star's position in a single moment during its life. Where a star falls depends on how bright and hot it is. The journal Astronomy & Astrophysics published the data that made the image possible.



Daily Infographic: Which Political Party Really Rules America?

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Balance of Power Felix Gonda
An amazing visualization of America's shifting political tides

Yes, there's an election coming up, but that's not what makes today's infographic worth highlighting.

What makes Felix Gonda's Balance of Power graphic worth highlighting is that it displays a massive amount of information--156 years of presidential elections by state, electorate, and popular vote, plus the political allegiance of each member of Congress--in a way that is both comprehensible and compelling.

In short, it's an impressive feat of data visualization. Explore it!

How it works: Drag the knob over the timeline to watch the balance of power shift. The pie chart in the center traces presidential elections, and the ring of stars outside shows how each state voted (you can also mouse over each star to see the voting breakdown in that state). The two rings beyond that show seats in the House and Senate:




NASA Is Building A Mocked-Up Deep-Space Habitat In Texas

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Deep Space Habitat Concept NASA
Testing the technology that might bring humans to Mars

When it's done, the concept for a ship that'll take astronauts to deep space won't look like much. Actually, it kind of sounds like a mess: the "Deep Space Habitat" is being cobbled together from scrap parts of the International Space Station, and even a museum mockup. Obviously, it's not going to send anyone to deep space. But it does give us a tantalizing look at what it'll look when NASA does take the next steps in space travel.

Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center and experts Johnson Space Center in Houston (led by astronaut Alvin Drew) are tinkering with the spaceship mockup, deciding the right size, necessary equipment, and everything else that's going to make a mission to Mars, a near-by asteroid, or the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (277,000 miles away from Earth) as pleasant as possible. In the same building where the Apollo Moon buggy was built, scientists can adjust the mockup to find the optimal form for the vessel to do that. Eventually, a future ship like it could be stationed at one of those spots as a jumping-off port to other parts of space.

The team's also planning what kind of toys will be sent along and built in. Some of it's the sort of thing you might expect from a trip like this--life support systems, food storage, etc.--but other parts of it are especially interesting. One of the best is a 3-D printer, which would allow astronauts to create any tools they need right on the spot. On the lower-tech side, there's also greenhouse for astronauts to grow their own and food, and a barrier of water on the outside that could be used to shield explorers from cosmic rays.

Now we just have to wait for the mission.

[Aviation Week via Yahoo!]



Science Confirms The Obvious: Strict Parents Raise Conservative Kids

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Parenting Scientists can predict a child's future ideology from his temperament at just 54 months. Wikimedia Commons
Are you a bleeding-heart liberal? A rigid right-winger? Blame your parents!

What makes a conservative? What makes a liberal? New research suggests that political socialization begins with parenting. Mothers and fathers who adopt an authoritarian parenting style (as opposed to an egalitarian style) tend to raise children who endorse conservative ideologies as adults.

But it isn't just as simple as nurture over nature. Children with fearful dispositions are more likely to grow up with conservative values, too. Researchers at University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana confirmed these theories in an important, if not exactly earth-shattering, study published in Psychological Science recently.

Psychological scientist Richard Fraley and his colleagues looked at early childhood and youth development data from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In the longitudinal study, parents of 1-month-old children answered a questionnaire, which Fraley et al. used to determine whether the parents were more authoritarian or egalitarian. (Authoritarian parents were defined as being more likely to use punishment, emphasize obedience, and have strict rules for discipline and behavior, whereas egalitarian parents were seen as less rigid and more open to their children voicing opinions and bending the rules.)

When the kids turned 4 and a half, their mothers filled out questionnaires on their children's temperaments. At age 18, the children with authoritarian parents were more likely to be conservative. The researchers found similar results among the fearful children--those who were afraid of the dark or who would get upset watching a sad event on television--regardless of how they were raised. At age 18, they had more conservative values than those who had restless, active or attention-focusing temperaments as children.

Fraley and his colleagues hope future studies will look at things like parent-child conflict and genetic makeup to link parents' influence and temperament on children's political ideology. Then we'll be able to draw stronger conclusions about why conservatives and liberals believe what they believe.

It's not a stereotype if there's science behind it, right?



CNN Pulls Controversial Story Suggesting Women Vote With Their Hormones

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Screenshot From CNN CNN
The study linked women's ovulation cycles with how they would vote at the polls.

After public scrutiny over an article about how women's hormones might affect how they vote, CNN has pulled the story from its site. Go there now, and you get a message on how "some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN." (It's still floating around the web, though. You can read it in full here.) In short, the article writes about a study, to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science, that found a link between women's ovulation cycles and how liberal or conservative they feel--enough to potentially sway their votes by a large margin come November. It noted that a lot of political scientists who'd read the study disagreed with the conclusions, or at least thought they were framed improperly, but there was still some heavy blowback around the web. [CNN]



5 Things You Need To Know About The Microsoft Surface

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Pink Microsoft Surface RT Microsoft
The first crop of reviews of Microsoft's Surface--bar none, the most interesting and exciting gadget of the season--are out, and they're...mixed. Here's what we gleaned.


1. Windows RT? What Is That?

Windows 8 is two OSes in one. The Surface has two models with two different versions of that OS. This is confusing! So here's the breakdown.

"Windows 8" is the next version of Windows. It'll be everywhere, just like Windows 7 is everywhere. In it are two distinct interfaces--you can think of one as Tablet Mode and one as Laptop Mode. Laptop Mode is Windows like you all know it. It's slightly updated in the usual ways--a bit prettier, a bit easier to use, a slight shuffling of options and controls--but it is emphatically the Windows we've been using for a decade or so. The other interface, Tablet Mode, is made for touch, and was previously known as Metro, then it was known as Modern UI, and now, infuriatingly, Microsoft is just calling it Windows 8. This is going to be confusing as all hell for Microsoft to explain to customers! Here's what Tablet Mode looks like on a desktop:

If you've used an Xbox or a Windows Phone lately, Tablet Mode will be familiar--it's a bunch of colorful squares with information and pictures and stuff on 'em. If you haven't used an Xbox or Windows Phone lately, this will be wildly unfamiliar. It doesn't look like any kind of Windows that's ever graced a computer before. On touch devices like the Surface (and Microsoft is pushing touch devices very hard; this is what you'll see advertised pretty much everywhere), Tablet Mode is what you'll see. On some of those devices, regular old Laptop Mode will be lurking beneath it, and Tablet Mode will function a bit like a very fancy Start menu. (Actually, you hit the Start button to switch between Tablet Mode and Laptop Mode.) These two disparate OSes use totally different software; Tablet Mode uses apps, like an iPad, and Laptop Mode uses, well, regular Windows programs, in the regular way.

The Microsoft Surface RT, which is what everyone's talking about this week, competes with the iPad. It is not a laptop. It does not have regular Windows. So, unless WinAmp releases a Tablet Mode app, you will not be using WinAmp. Oddly, the Surface RT has, like, a trick version of Laptop Mode. It looks like Windows but only has five programs--mostly Office-related and also Internet Explorer--and you can't use new ones, though there is Windows Explorer (the file browser). This is weird and misleading and confusing, yes.

The Microsoft Surface Pro, which nobody has used because it hasn't been released and in fact, Microsoft hasn't even given us a firm release date yet, does compete with laptops. It'll have the full Laptop Mode in addition to Tablet Mode, so you can use WinAmp just fine. It'll also be more expensive.

2. Try the Keyboard Before Buying

Microsoft has made a huge deal out of the Touch Cover, a super-thin soft cover with pressure-sensitive keys that Microsoft is counting on to make the Surface RT more capable than other tablets. Early response has been mixed; Peter Bright at Ars Technica says "the damn things work, and work well," but notes that there is a distinct learning curve. Sam Biddle at Gizmodo says "the buttons are pressure activated, barely buttons at all, and spaced in such a way that typos are inevitable and constant," and calls it a "letdown." Josh Topolsky at The Verge says it "works reasonably well" but "wasn't a completely pain-free experience." Tim Stevens at Engadget, on the other hand, actually managed to write his review on the Touch Cover, and loved the spacing and layout. So, find yourself a Microsoft Store--they exist!--and try it out. Because the thing costs $100 when bundled with the Surface and $120 to buy it separately. Not cheap.

3. You Can't Hold It On Your Lap

It's a tablet with a detachable keyboard, so it won't sit upright in your lap or on your stomach like a normal laptop. You can discard the keyboard and use it like an iPad, but if you want a laptop experience, you'd better find yourself a table. This is one of those little things that may turn out to be a big thing in the regular lives of owners.

The Surface does have a hyper-designed kickstand--Microsoft has talked about the kickstand almost as much as, like, Windows 8 itself--but it's not adjustable, to the chagrin of The Verge's Josh Topolsky, who found it "usually too upright in most scenarios I tried it in, but not unusable by any means." But a kickstand is no good for a lap!

4. There Are Few Apps

Yes, it's Windows, but the Surface RT cannot, remember, run regular Laptop Mode programs. So Microsoft's starting from scratch and building a completely new app ecosystem, which is, like, really hard. Remember that it took Google years to build out Android's ecosystem, and, worryingly, that Microsoft has had a lot of trouble getting Windows Phone's app selection strong enough to compete with Android or iOS. Gizmodo's Sam Biddle says the "'ecosystem' feels more like a tundra. There's no Twitter or Facebook app, and the most popular 3rd party client breaks often. The Kindle app is completely unusable. There's no image editing software." Eep!

Some folks are saying that, well, this is Windows, after all, so people will definitely rush to develop apps for it, because everyone uses Windows. Those folks are wrong, because this isn't Windows--it's "Windows." Laptop Mode and Tablet Mode are not two versions of the same thing; they're two completely different operating systems. Tablet Mode, the one that's launching tomorrow, is brand new and so far, it is completely unproven as a standalone operating system. I'm not saying it won't catch on, but I will say that it's definitely not a given that this'll catch on as fast as it needs to.

5. It Has A USB Port

This is a bigger deal than most people think. The iPad and the most Android tablets are stuck with super awkward ways to get non-cloud data onto them--expensive dongles and weird importing software and things like that. The Surface has an honest-to-god USB port in it. It'll charge your phone! And you can import documents and videos and photos and music with a hard drive or USB flash drive! Just like a computer! It's weird to get excited about this, since tablets mostly exist in the cloud and are better for it, but it's a small thing that makes the Surface RT behave more like a laptop (even though, you know, it's not).



NASA's New, Stunning Imagery Of Solar Storms

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An image filter helps researchers find patterns in the sun's violent weather systems.

Scientists who study solar weather try to find patterns in the violent, chaotic motion of magnetic field lines above the sun's surface. Though the lines aren't actually visible, their patterns are illuminated by the streams of hot plasma that travel along them. But, while the giant coronal loops that form during major solar storms are easy to pick out, the field lines are generally so tangled up that it's hard to pick any one of them out.

To help solve that problem, researchers can apply a gradient filter to the images. The filter increases contrast, bringing the solar weather patterns into focus.

Use the slider on the image below to compare a photo of the sun, with and without the gradient filter:

And check out NASA's excellent visualization of the gradient sun here.



Furry Racism At The Pound: Why Is It Harder For Black Cats To Find Homes?

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It's Not Easy Being Black Wikimedia Commons
A Berkeley study searches for the link between cat color and cat personality.

Are people spooked by black cats? Darker felines sure seem to get the short end of the stick when it comes to adoption. Black cats stay in shelters longer and are more likely to be euthanized than their lighter-colored counterparts. Researchers at University of California at Berkeley conducted a study to find a link between cat color and people's perception of cat personality. The findings were surprising: People do judge feline personalities by color, but don't assess black cats negatively relative to other cats.

Researchers conducted an online survey consisting of 49 statements pairing five cat colorings (black, white, orange, bi-colored, and tri-colored) with 10 personality traits (active, aloof, bold, calm, friendly, intolerant, shy, stubborn, tolerant, and trainable.) Survey respondents assessed statements like, "Tri-colored cats are friendly," on a seven-point scale.

Orange and bi-colored cats are rated high in friendliness, tri-colored cats are high in intolerance, and white cats are high in aloofness. However, the researchers concluded that black cats weren't rated significantly higher or lower in any trait than other color groups. Effectively, people perceive these cats as having neutral personalities compared to other cats. So why the cold shoulder at the adoption agency?

Mikel Delgado, lead author of the study, said in a press release, "Previous research supports the existence of ‘black cat syndrome,' where black and brown cats are less likely to be adopted than cats of other colors." She adds, "We were interested in whether people's perceptions of the interaction between personality and coat color might play a part."

Superstitions might be one reason why black cats are the last to get adopted, especially around Halloween. But Berkeley researchers offer another conclusion: While 94.7 percent of respondents said that personality influences their decision to adopt, personality may be less important to potential adopters than they think. After all, assessing the personality of a cat based on its coat isn't a foolproof method.

If it all comes down to looks, it may be that subconsciously, people don't think black cats are pretty enough. The researchers suggest that if shelters had empirically reviewed tools to assess cat personality, they could better match them to potential owners and try to work around their color biases.



11 Gorgeous Illustrations Of Science's Biggest Mysteries

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Immortality Steven Guarnaccia
Why do we have fingerprints? How long can trees live? Why do cats purr? Artists illustrate humanity's most burning scientific questions.

Why do we have fingerprints? Do immortal creatures exist? How do migrating animals navigate?

In a new book called The Where, The Why, And The How, 75 artists set out to illustrate some of the biggest, strangest, most curious scientific mysteries of our time.

Here are 11 of our favorites:




Can We Make It Rain With Lasers?

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We can certainly try.

PopSci is pleased to present videos created by Motherboard, Vice Media's guide to future culture. Motherboard's original videos run the gamut from in-depth, investigative reports to profiles of the offbeat forward-thinking characters who are sculpting our bizarre present.

The ability to create rain on demand goes a long way to breaking the crushing effects of a drought, but current methods are costly, environmentally damaging, and not guaranteed to work. Jérôme Kasparian, a French physicist at the University of Geneva, has an alternative, and it's awesome: He's developed a method of seeding condensation using powerful laser bursts. The technique is called laser-assisted water condensation, and may be the key to bringing rain with the flip of a switch.

In this episode of Motherboard's Upgrade series, Kasparian explains how weather lasers are more precise than chemical seeding, and have the advantage of being turned off and on with a flip of a switch. And what power that switch has: Each pulse carries several trillion watts of energy. That burst is powerful enough to remove electrons from atmospheric molecules, creating charged particles that water molecules stick to, forming droplets.



Today On Mars: Curiosity Entertains The Idea Of An Escorted Return Trip To Earth

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Curiosity: Another Self-Portrait It's a vain little rover, isn't it? NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's chief of Mars exploration suggests that a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s or 2040s could return the robotic relic to Earth.

Mars Rover Curiosity's mission is slated to run for just two Earth years, but the directory of NASA's Mars Exploration Program thinks it could have enough power to run for two decades. In fact, he says, Curiosity may actually return to Earth someday.

Not under it's own power, of course. But NASA's Doug McCuistion says it is his personal hope, if not that of the entire Mars team NASA, that humans will touch down on the Red Planet in the 2030s or 2040s. And if they do, there's no reason why they might not pay a visit to some of the hardware we've left behind there. Some museum would likely be thrilled to have Curiosity, so why shouldn't a manned mission bring it back to Earth?

Not to completely rain on McCuistion's parade, but one obvious reason is weight. One can certainly imagine a manned mission to Mars landing a couple of decades from now, but it's hard to imagine the return mission wasting payload capacity on a man-made rover when it could be returning sample materials native to Mars. Nonetheless, it's nice to think we might someday safely return our rover to Earth if for no other reason than to say that we have the capability to do so.

[BBC]



China Is Building A Brand New Green City From Scratch

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Great City The entire city will be built from scratch on farmland near Chengdu, China. © Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
Chengdu Tianfu District Great City is supposed to be a prototype that can be replicated elsewhere throughout China.

A tiny pocket city built from scratch next to a crowded urban center could alleviate some of China's crowding and pollution problems. A Chicago-based architectural firm designed a master plan for the city, which will be built within eight years and host 30,000 families, or roughly 80,000 people.


Click to launch the photo gallery

Chengdu Tianfu District Great City will connect via mass transit to Chengdu, a megalopolis of 14 million in southwest China. Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture says its planned city will use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water than a conventional city with the same population. It's designed to be self-sustaining and environmentally conscious, using waste summer heat to provide winter heating. A power plant will use co-generation technology to provide both electricity and hot water.

Great City will cover just 1.3 square kilometers, or 0.5 square miles. This is about 245 football fields of space. That is not a ton of space for 80,000 people. And that's the idea--everything is supposed to be so close that you can walk anywhere within 15 minutes.

Here's a breakdown of land use:

  • Total site: 800 acres
  • Urbanized area: 320 acres
  • Buffer zone with natural landscape: 480 acres
  • Within the urbanized area:

  • 15 percent of land reserved for parks
  • 60 percent for construction of buildings
  • 25 percent for infrastructure, roads and pedestrian streets

The focus on open space is a nod to the Chengdu Plain, where Chengdu is located. The farmland is so fertile it's known as s the "Country of Heaven" or "The Land of Abundance," says Wikipedia.

Gordon Gill, one of the architects and firm partners, said a main goal was keeping residents connected to nature. "We've designed this project as a dense vertical city that acknowledges and in fact embraces the surrounding landscape--a city whose residents will live in harmony with nature rather than in opposition to it," he said.

The high-density city is designed to be a prototype, which could conceivably be replicated anywhere else in the country. It's supposed to start construction later this fall.



How To Properly Butcher And Eat A Triceratops

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How To Eat A Triceratops Nate Carroll via Nature
Step one: Remove head.

When it came to dining on Triceratops, the Tyrannosaurus had a problem. That nutrient-rich meat in the Triceratops neck was a Late Cretaceous delicacy, but with that huge bone and keratin frill in the way it was notoriously difficult to get to. Now, paleontologists at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., have developed a new theory for how the T. Rex devoured the best part of his meal: beheading. According to an analysis of bit marks and scarring on the recovered bones of triceratops, T. Rex devised a method of decapitating its fallen prey to expose that succulent neck meat. The best part of all this, of course, are the sketches outlining exactly how this happened (one of which you can see above). Click through to Nature to see, frame by frame, how pencil-sketch-T-Rex made Triceratops into a meal.

[Nature]



Which Is Worse: The Study About Women Voting With Their Hormones, Or The Trolly Story About It On CNN?

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Screenshot From CNN CNN
"There's almost no way to stop [the study] from being spun into the 'war against women' story," coauthor Vladas Griskevicius says. Is he right, or was the study the problem?

After public blowback over a CNN article about a study suggesting that women vote according to their menstrual cycle, one of the study's authors, and the journal itself, are standing behind the research--if not the actual CNN story that prompted the backlash in the first place. (That story has since been pulled, but you can still read it here.)

The thrust of the forthcoming study is that single women who are ovulating are supposedly more likely to vote for Barack Obama, while women who are married or in committed relationships are more likely to vote for Mitt Romney. That's by a pretty wide margin, too, the study suggests: as much as 26 percent. (The full study, "The Fluctuating Female Vote: Politcs, Religion, and the Ovulatory Cycle," is available here under "Selected Works.")

Such dramatic findings have raised questions about the validity of the study; some even wonder whether it should've been conducted at all. But perhaps the most controversial aspect are the conclusions the authors drew: "We believe that the key difference between these two groups is that the married/engaged women have more invested in their relationship, and therefore have considerably more to lose if their current relationship were endangered," they wrote. As the lead author, Kristina Durante, was quoted as saying in the CNN article: married/ engaged women are "overcompensating" for those feelings, then going ever-more-certainly for the safe, conservative candidate that represents traditional values. In short: Not only is ovulation causing changes in voting, but it's because of women's husbands. Double whammy controversy. It's the same for single women voting liberal: They're more open during their ovulation cycle, the authors argue, and not concerned about spousal feelings.

Durante, a University of Texas at San Antonio professor, didn't respond to request for comment, but one of the co-authors of the study did: Vladas Griskevicius, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Minnesota. He stands by the study, but doesn't feel the same about the CNN article.

CNN gives the most real estate to talking about the study, but is careful to distance itself (multiple times) from the study's conclusions. You might not have gotten that it if you didn't read past the headline: "Do hormones drive women's votes?" After that, it's mostly detailing the study and quoting multiple researchers who carefully plugged holes into the conclusions. The main conclusion to the answer in the headline seems to be: "Probably not, but one study says yes." The CNN author, Elizabeth Landau, later tweeted about the outcry.

"It was taken into a media spin of the study," Griskevicius says. In the context of the article, he says, it looked like the study suggested, "whereas women vote with their hormones, men will vote with their brains." And that certainly was one of the concerns raised: Paul Kellstedt, associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University, was quoted in the CNN article as saying, "The reader [of the study] may be left with the impression that women are unstable and moody in ways that extend to their political preferences, but that men are comparative Rocks of Gibraltar."

Griskevicius says there's plenty of literature to suggest men make behavioral decisions based on changes in hormones--testosterone, specifically--but that it wasn't what the study was about, and so it wasn't included. What it was about, he says, was answering a question: Do ovulation cycles have an effect on how women vote? The researchers found that the response was yes, he says, and so they can't be (or shouldn't be) held liable for the public outrage that results. It's "being published in a top peer-reviewed scientific journal," he says, and went through the normal vetting process for studies like it, so why the anger? "There's almost no way to stop it from being spun into the 'war against women' story," he says.

They could've, of course, included that existing body of research. As for skepticism about how much the cycle could actually influence voting, Griskevicius insists the study--which will be published in the next six to eight months--is sound. The researchers were surprised by the numbers the first time, too, then ran a second study to test them out and got the same results. Which doesn't really prove anything: That might make the findings less of an anomaly, but it wouldn't correct for potential problems with the study's methodology. Susan Carroll, a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, is quoted in the CNN article--with some of the most vocal concerns about the study--and expanded in an email about the study's use of MTurk.


I would also point out that the study apparently analyzes survey data, not data from a lab or field experiment. Since the authors used MTurk, their samples certainly are not random and there is no guarantee that they are at all representative. Although the research is not based on experimental design, the authors apply statistical techniques (ANOVA) generally used for experimental research to the survey data, making the fact that these are survey data less obvious. The use of survey data makes all the more problematic the authors' failure to apply statistical controls for demographic variables, such as age or income, which may well account for the observed differences between women who are single and in committed relationships, since these variables are not controlled for through experimental design.

Eric Eich, the incoming editor of Psychological Science, directed questions to a spokesperson for a comment, who gave an official statement from the Association for Psychological Science, which publishes Psychological Science:


It has come to our attention that CNN has reported on a forthcoming paper in Psychological Science, which argues that women's ovulatory cycles may influence their political decision making. Specifically, the paper offers evidence that ovulating single women tend to report attitudes that are more liberal and more pro-Obama, while ovulating women in committed relationships tend to report attitudes that are more conservative and more pro-Romney. While we recognize that studies of gender and behavior are often controversial, we stand behind the integrity of this study and the journal. The research went through the regular peer-review process before it was accepted for publication. The article is currently in production and will be published in its final form at some time in the near future. We direct further media inquiries to the lead author of the paper, Kristina Durante of the University of Texas, San Antonio, whose comments about the research are hers alone.

"Whose comments about the research are hers alone"? Uh-oh. That doesn't sound particularly good for Durante, even if the journal does stand behind the facts in the study.

A word on peer review: It's the best process we have for making sure only the most scientifically valid studies make it into publication, but they're emphatically not a full endorsement from the scientific community. There are plenty of other studies that make it through review--into other top journals, too--and still end up getting plenty of flak after publication (or, in this case, before it). In that sense, CNN probably doesn't deserve the heat it's getting, or the journal at least deserves to be getting more.

CNN, for the record, didn't respond to requests for comment about why, exactly, the article got pulled. All we know on that end is what's pasted where the story used to be:


A post previously published in this space regarding a study about how hormones may influence voting choices has been removed.
After further review it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN.
We thank you for your comments and feedback.



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