The Dramatic Expanse of Antarctica's Noctilucent Clouds onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Dramatic Expanse of Antarctica's Noctilucent Clouds

S

It's summer at the South Pole, which means it's time for the frozen continent's noctilucent clouds to make an appearance. But over the last several decades, these beautiful electric blue clouds have been appearing earlier than usual — and they're getting bigger. It's yet another example of climate change at work.

Noctilucent clouds, or NLCs, are the highest clouds known to science, forming at the edge of space some 50 miles (83 km) above the Earth's surface. They're seeded by disintegrating meteoroids and form when sunlight hits the tiny ice crystals that make up the clouds. At times they appear to glow a mesmerizing electric blue.

NLCS appear in summer on account of favourable wind patterns and the flow of humidity in the atmosphere. During summer, when the amount of airborne water molecules are at their greatest, they're pulled up from the lower atmosphere to mix with the "meteor smoke" at the edge of space. It's also a time when the upper atmosphere is coldest, allowing the ice crystals of NLCs to form.

Image: James Russell of Hampton University/NASA.

Over the last few decades and years, these clouds have become more intense and widespread. During the 19th century, NLCs could only be viewed in polar regions — but now they're appearing as close to the equator as Colorado and Utah. Some scientists say this is climate change at work. As NASA reports:

One of the greenhouse gases that has become more abundant in Earth's atmosphere since the 19th century is methane.

"When methane makes its way into the upper atmosphere, it is oxidized by a complex series of reactions to form water vapor," explains Hampton University Professor James Russell, the principal investigator of AIM. "This extra water vapor is then available to grow ice crystals for NLCs."

If this idea, one of several, is correct, noctilucent clouds are a sort of "canary in a coal mine" for one of the most important greenhouse gases. And that, says Russell, is a great reason to study them.

[ Source: NASA | Top image: NASA/AIM ]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Dramatic Expanse of Antarctica's Noctilucent Clouds

Last night's Nikita was one of the best hours of TV I've seen in ages onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Last night's Nikita was one of the best hours of TV I've seen in ages

S

How do you follow up one of the weirdest cliffhangers in television history? With an episode chock full of jaw-dropping moments and one terrible shock. They could have called this "The Last Temptation of Nikita." This show is going out on an amazing high note.

Spoilers ahead...

Parts of last night's Nikita felt like a dream sequence, or one of those science-fiction tropes where someone gets trapped in a dream world where they have everything they've ever wanted. But it was real, and it was fascinating.

In last week's episode — which I apologize for not recapping, but life got in the way — Nikita started getting too close to the Shop's conspiracy to start a war with Pakistan using brainwashed doubles, and using Nikita as the fall guy. So the Shop's head, Philip, contacted her and offered her a deal. Nikita offered a counter-deal: he and Amanda should turn themselves in and she wouldn't hunt them down. In the end, Philip gave her exactly what she wanted. Exactly.

S

Nikita gets pretty much the perfect happy ending, and it's painful to watch because you know it's an illusion. The bad guys faked their own downfall, sacrificing one operation to keep their larger organization intact, and set Nikita up as the big hero who rescued the President that she was supposed to have killed.

The scenes where Nikita and Michael bask in their victory are flooded with sunlight, so that they're washed out and overexposed — and this codes them, visually, as being like a dream sequence or hallucination. Nikita not only gets to be a hero, she gets a medal, in a somewhat less impressive sequence than the end of Star Wars. She gets pardons and immunity for everybody. She gets forgiven for everything she's done.

But Nikita's real bribe here is that she gets to tell the truth, the whole truth, for once. At the start of the episode, on a military base that could almost be mistaken for suburbia, she tries to figure out a cover story that she and her team can tell — but then it's too late, and anyway she realizes the truth is the only thing that will work. After years of lying and hiding, she comes out and explains everything she's done — much of it in public, to a Senate hearing. Her reward isn't just the medal, it's getting to come clean.

Nikita fears that if she tells the whole truth, everyone will hate her — but Michael convinces her that if she shares her whole story, they'll all love her instead. The whole world will see her the way Michael does. And he's right. Her approval ratings go through the stratosphere. (The one thing this episode needed was some more talking heads going on about Nikita the Hero.)

S

The scenes of Nikita explaining the whole storyline of the show, from her origin story to becoming an assassin for Division to going rogue to bringing Division down, could just be the show nodding at its past and maybe patting itself on the back a bit — but instead, they come off like Nikita finally getting to unburden herself.

I would have gotten away with it, too...

The great thing about this is that Nikita really wouldn't ever learn the truth — that Amanda is still alive, and the bad guys are still out there, with mind-controlled duplicates all over the place — on her own initiative. She's too invested in her dream world, and being the hero of the story is a trap as well as a reward. She can't do anything to tarnish her new forgiveness.

But there are two people who just won't let it rest. One is Ryan, who's too much of a paranoid conspiracy nut to accept how many mistakes the Shop suddenly made before Nikita brought them down: Sending Ramon, an operative Nikita and Michael knew, to help hijack that Pakistani missile, sending a guy after Alex who would get caught and squeal, and giving Ronald Peller a computer to talk to his son. Ryan creates a brand new wall of crazy in his house at the military base, and starts trying to piece together who these new bad guys are.

Meanwhile, Amanda is still out there, and visibly rankles at the idea that the sacrifice of the Shop means that they have to leave Nikita alone and preserve the illusion of Nikita's victory at all costs. (In fact, you could argue that Nikita did win, since preserving that illusion means the bad guys, the Group, can't make any overt moves that she's likely to notice for several years, at least.)

Amanda very nearly gets herself shot by her new boss, whom we'll call Tennis-Playing Guy since he's always playing tennis. But then she sells him on some line of bullshit about how the duplicates need to have their brainwashing upgraded so they don't go off the rails — and he lets her personally brainwash all 50-something of their duplicates. Soon she has a small army of rich and powerful people completely devoted to her. Oops.

When Ryan goes to see Phillip in prison, he barely even bothers to pretend that Ryan's not on to something — you could argue the smarter play would be to send Ryan off in a wrong direction, so he follows some bogus leads and ends up just seeming like a crazy person at last. Or pretend that Amanda was always the brains of the operation and now she's dead, and maybe she was losing her grip at the end there. Or whatever.

Instead, Phillip immediately has Ryan seized, and taken off to see Amanda, who tries to do her brainwashing mojo on him. Phillip escapes, gets into a totally awesome shootout with Amanda's thugs, and finally — when it's clear he's cornered and there's no other way — decides to throw himself out a window rather than compromise his commitment to the truth. This is absolutely the perfect end for a paranoid conspiracy guy, and just screamingly heroic — and yet terrible and sad as fuck, too.

Meanwhile, Alex has sent Sam off to Paris with a bunch of fake diamonds, to test his reliability once and for all, and Sam has unexpectedly passed the test — but then he gets nabbed by the creeps he owes money to. They take him to Club Besson (ha) which doesn't look nearly Fifth Element enough, and Alex goes to rescue him, in classic Alex style. The great thing about the Alex/Sam subplot is the part where Alex tells Sam that he needs to figure out who he is (after having been a duplicate of Owen for so long) and that he shouldn't be figuring out who he needs to pretend to be to make Alex happy — he needs to find himself, for real, and then maybe they can be together. This, interspersed with Nikita finally getting to be herself in public and open up about her past, is a subtler thematic resonance than I'm used to seeing on network TV.

S

So in the end, Nikita discovers Ryan's sacrifice, and he tells her just enough before he dies to let her know it's not over. And now, she has a choice: carry on with the charade and try to work within the system to bring down these bad guys, or go do what she does best. Michael argues she has no choice but to carry on and stick to the story she's already told — and Amanda tells Tennis-Playing Guy the same thing — but they're wrong.

The episode's final moments consist of a Nikita voice-over in which she tells someone they have to go bring these guys down, and this is how it was always going to end. Not with the shiny happy ending where everybody's together and we're all forgiven and it's all lovely, but with Nikita and her partner, on their own, risking everything. In the final shot, we see Nikita back where she started — going rogue and teaming up with Alex.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Last night's Nikita was one of the best hours of TV I've seen in ages

A Map of the Weirdest Sex Laws in the United States onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Map of the Weirdest Sex Laws in the United States

S

Is your sex life against the law? Better make sure. We've painstakingly compiled a map of all the most biarre and unnecessary laws regulating what you do, with whom, and where. Check out our complete map of all the weirdest laws regulating sex in America below.

You've probably seen lists of freaky sex laws before — they're all over the place. And guess what? Most of those are urban legends.

When you see laws like "It's illegal for one partner to reach climax before the other," or "It's illegal to have asheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone," or "Only sex in the missionary position is legal," or "No sex in an ambulance responding to an emergency call," or "No dancing with a hat on," or "No sex in a meat freezer," or "Legistators may not make laws wearing a penis costume," they're probably just made up or grossly distorted. Sorry to burst your bubble.

And yes, that one about "a man may not shoot a pistol when his female partner has an orgasm" is also made up, as far as we could tell.

So here's our complete map. Click to enlarge!

S

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. To see our complete list of verified and bizarre sex laws click here.

Also remember, several states still have laws against oral and anal sex on their books, despite the Supreme Court shooting down sodomy laws in 2003. Also, a surprising number of states allow necrophilia, along with underage marriage in some circumstances.

Sources: We stuck to laws that we could verify the existence of, or derive from reliable sources. Findlaw.com has listings of sex-related laws for every state in the U.S., along with links to the actual state codes. HG.org has some verified listings. Also, The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities by Nathan Belofsky, an attorney, is a goldmine of verified sex laws. Finally, DumbLaws.com provides statutory info for some (but not all) of its laws.

Map design by Reuben Fischer-Baum. Additional research/reporting by Emily Stamm and Jason Krell.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Map of the Weirdest Sex Laws in the United States

Do boys get better breast milk? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Do boys get better breast milk?

S

In many mammals, humans included, the composition of a mother's breast milk varies with the sex of her offspring, with sons receiving nutritionally richer milk than daughters. Interestingly, the opposite has been found to be true in impoverished mothers.

SciAm's Marissa Fessenden explains:

Researchers at Michigan State University and other institutions found that among 72 economically sufficient mothers in rural Kenya, women with sons generally gave richer milk (2.8 percent fat compared with 1.74 percent for daughters). Poor women, however, favored daughters with creamier milk (2.6 versus 2.3 percent). These findings, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in September, echo previous work that showed milk composition varying with infant gender in gray seals and red deer and with infant gender and the mother's condition in rhesus macaques. The new study also follows findings that affluent, well-nourished moms in Massachusetts produced more energy-dense milk for male infants.

Together the studies provide support for a 40-year-old theory in evolutionary biology. The Trivers-Willard hypothesis states that natural selection favors parental investment in daughters when times are hard and in sons when times are easy.

According to Fessenden, it stands to reason that the imbalance would be most common in polygamous populations, where males can father offspring with multiple females. The line of reasoning is as follows:

In those societies, a son can grow to be a strong, popular male with many wives and children, or he can end up with neither. Well-off parents who can afford to invest in sons should do so because their gamble could give them many grandchildren. Conversely, poor parents should not heavily invest in sons because it is unlikely to pay off—their offspring start at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. For those families, daughters are a safer bet because as long as they survive to adulthood, they are likely to produce young.

Given the hypothesized link to polygamous social systems, it would be interesting see how breast milk nutrition varies across a variety of monogamous and polygamous mammalian species. Social monogamy is fairly rare among mammals, having been observed in 27% of primates, and on the order of 5% of mammals overall. Scientists still aren't sure how monogamy evolved in the first place, but it would be fascinating to investigate whether a differential nutrient profile in maternal breast milk co-evolved with its practice. Understanding this connection could help us better understand the selective pressures of parental investment (while shedding light on the ways polygamy might affect our evolution moving forward).

[AJPA via SciAm]

Top image via Shutterstock

Related

How did monogamy evolve?

From an evolutionary standpoint, monogamy doesn't seem to make much sense – especially for males. And yet, it's practiced by a significant… Read…

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Do boys get better breast milk?

This video imagines a San Francisco patrolled by semi-autonomous drones onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This video imagines a San Francisco patrolled by semi-autonomous drones

Alex Cornell's video Our Drone Future puts a drone's-eye view on San Francisco, imagining the city patrolled by a drone that interacts with a monitor, but operates on its own.

Cornell made this video with DJI Phantom Drones and "a liberal interpretation of FAA regulations." It doesn't push the idea of drones invading our privacy as far as it could, but it's a neat bit of video concept art. Here is how Cornell describes the concept:

In the near future, cities use semi-autonomous drones for urban security. Human officers monitor drone feeds remotely, and data reports are displayed with a detailed HUD and communicated via a simulated human voice (designed to mitigate discomfort with sentient drone technology). While the drones operate independently, they are "guided" by the human monitors, who can suggest alternate mission plans and ask questions.

Specializing in predictive analysis, the security drones can retask themselves to investigate potential threats. As shown in this video, an urban security drone surveys San Francisco's landmarks and encounters fierce civilian resistance.

[via Laughing Squid]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This video imagines a San Francisco patrolled by semi-autonomous drones

What the Hell Happened to This Skull? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What the Hell Happened to This Skull?

S

In short: It's been exploded. But how did that come about?

I say "exploded,” but it’s obvious that this skull has not been blown to smithereens. Rather, it has been carefully disarticulated and spread asunder, its constituent parts mounted in such a way that they maintain their relative positions in space, even if they are not actually touching. Like an "exploded" view of an F1 engine injector or the chassis of a Boeing B-17, an exploded skull is a puzzle, loosely fitted – one that allows the viewer to consider the part, the whole, and their functional relationships all at once.

And yet, two things set this skull apart from the technical diagrams in your car's user manual. The first is that a skull is biological. The Earth is, in many ways, a machine, and so are its organisms, but we rarely think of them in this way. To gaze upon an exploded skull, then, is to confront our mechanical essence, to ruminate on those philosophies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that first sought to understand nature in mechanistic terms.

S

The second is its tangibility. Since its origination during the Renaissance, the exploded view has been for the most part a graphic technique, existing only on the page. Disarticulated anatomies created from actual, physical specimens, like the assorted animal skull pictured above, helped amplify the the spatial and conceptual aspects of component illustrations by bringing them into the real, three-dimensional world. [Image Credit: Foley Gallery, New York, NY, via Spinner et al.]

It is this second consideration that separates exploded skulls — like the ones pictured above — from the illustrations of visionaries like Leonardo da Vinci, whose anatomical studies depicted disarticulated head-parts as early as the turn of the sixteenth century.

S

The page on the left is taken from da Vinci’s iconic “Weimar Sheet”); innovative though da Vinci was, a physical analogue to his drawings would not exist until hundreds of years later, when a French anatomist and surgeon by the name of Beauchêne brought the disarticulated technique into being. (This is why exploded cranial specimens are commonly referred to as “Beauchêne Skulls.”)

There’s some interesting history regarding the origin of Beauchêne skulls. For years, the exploded skull technique has been widely misattributed to one Claude Beauchêne, an imaginary anatomist in Paris in the 1850s. Alternatively, it has been misattributed to the famed psychologist and physician Edmé Pierre Chauvot de Beauchêne, who lived between 1749 and 1825. But in 2011, researchers from the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Neurologic Surgery discovered that the widely known preparation technique takes its eponym not from either of these figures, but Edmé Francois Chauvot de Beauchêne, the largely overshadowed son of Edmé Pierre.

Lead author Robert Spinner describes the discovery in Clinical Anatomy:

Research on the genealogy of the Beauchêne family revealed that both the attribution of the technique and the timeframe were inaccurate. We could not locate a Claude Beauchêne who would fit the descriptions. Furthermore, the anatomic skull preparation would not be consistent with the intellectual talents of Edmé Pierre Chauvot de Beauchêne. We identified sources that established an earlier time for the technique (early 1800s) and a prosector named M. Beauchêne at the École de Médecine in Paris. This information unambiguously links the contribution to Edmé Francois Chauvot de Beauchêne, the son of Edmé Pierre. Both Beauchêne p`ere and Beauchêne fils made significant contributions in their respective fields and should both be recognized individually and collectively.

While both Beauchênes made significant contributions to their respective fields, Spinner and his colleagues rightfully point out that the two of them should really be remembered individually. “The correct identity of the Beauchêne responsible for the technique has been elusive,” writes Spinner. “Edmé Francois Chauvot de Beauchéne should be recognized and remembered for the technique currently bearing his name, still in use today.”

Related

The Earth Is a Machine

The more we learn about ecosystems, the more obvious it becomes that we won't save the Earth until we admit that our planet is a giant,… Read…

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What the Hell Happened to This Skull?

​Dracula faces his greatest foe yet: A board meeting onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​Dracula faces his greatest foe yet: A board meeting

Here's how insane Dracula is: It feels like very little happened in this episode, even though there was sex, murder, major goal achieving, the secret of life after death was discovered and Dracula even walked in the sun. Because all this actually is kind of subdued for Dracula.

The episode begins with that most feared of vampire stories: The daytime board meeting. Patrick from Coupling (I can't bring myself to call him Browning) decides to have a board meeting in the middle of the day in a solarium to see if Grayson is a vampire; Lady Jane is certain he's not, if only because having repeated sex with a dude and not noticing he's a vampire would be a bit embarrassing. Speaking of sex, Mina and Harker get to it after getting drunk at a dinner paid for by Grayson. The next morning, Harker wants to elope, but Mina thinks its because they had sex and shuts him down.

The big news is that a company called Empire & Colonial has the alloy he needs for his crazy electricity stuff, so of course Grayson wins the company if a poker (thanks to his Dracula powers allowing him to see the cards reflected in people's eyes). Actually, the big news comes a little earlier, when Renfield tells Grayson that the Dresden Triptych is going up for auction, although Patrick from Coupling also wants it, but since we have no idea what this is, it's just a minor mystery for now.

Back in her lab, Mina finds a container of blood and injects it into some cheek cells (sure), reanimating them. So she inject a dead rat with the blood, but sticks it in a storage bin before she notices it too has started moving again. When she tells Van Helsing about this, he freaks and fires her, which is actually good because he was about to murder he with Van Helsing's Silver Hammer instead.

Meanwhile, Harker published his article on Shaw's bribery, pissing off the Order, because Shaw is worthless to them now, and pissing off Grayson, because he's playing some sort of mind game. Davenport gives Harker tickets to a play, where Harker discovers the woman who had told him about Shaw's financial indiscretions is actually an actress.

Also meanwhile, Lady Jane invites Lucy over for lunch and tells her girl-on-girl action is a very natural part of a woman's maturation, and she should just jump the next time Mina gives her a sign. This goes about as poorly as you'd expect; Mina touches her friend's check, Lucy kisses her and declares her love, Mina suddenly realized that perhaps Lucy had secret agenda during all those sleepovers, and tells Lucy to get out.

Finally, the board meeting approaches, so Dracula and Van Helsing have to go for broke. Dracula gets in what I'll call the Electric Jesus machine, since it requires him to pull the ol' crucifixion pose, and Van Helsing and Renfield do the requisite electrocuting and Grayson walks into that board meeting in full daylight, with his head held high. Of course, he only has about three and a half minutes before he combusts, so he has Renfield bring him "urgent news" so he has an excuse to go. Davenport tries to delay him, but Grayson manages to get into his cab just before he starts smoldering and screaming in agony. But that's okay, because he visits Vera the actress, drinks her down, and then is feelin' fine.

Yeah. That's what a slow episode of Dracula looks like.

Assorted Musings:

• The Dresden Triptych is a real thing, a massive religious painting from the 1400s. I have no idea what it has to do with Dracula or the Order, but I bet it will be exceedingly crazy.

• I assume Dracula is going to eat Lucy next episode? I don't know what she's going to do otherwise. Maybe Lady Jane recruits her... and that's why Dracula takes her out. That could be cool.

• You know, there are four episodes of Dracula left, and I still don't have the faintest clue where all this is going. Not even slightly.

• Next week there's two Grimms, so the next episode of Dracula will air on January 3rd. See you then!

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​Dracula faces his greatest foe yet: A board meeting

Americans believe the U.S. is becoming "less powerful" in the world onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Americans believe the U.S. is becoming "less powerful" in the world

S

A recent survey by Pew Research Foundation reveals that over half of Americans believe that the U.S. is less powerful and prestigious in the world than it was 10 years ago. Is this the beginning of a U.S. decline?

Pew explains in a report on their new findings:

The survey of the general public, conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 6 among 2,003 adults, finds that views of U.S. global importance and power have passed a key milestone. For the first time in surveys dating back nearly 40 years, a majority (53%) says the United States plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago. The share saying the U.S. is less powerful has increased 12 points since 2009 and has more than doubled – from just 20% – since 2004.

The report covers a lot more ground, including granular questions about U.S. foreign policy. But the dramatic shift in public perception of the U.S.'s status in the world is the standout finding, and may suggest that the country is slowly headed into a decline as a world power. Alternatively, it may suggest that citizens fear the U.S. is headed into decline, which is why they are more likely to say that the nation is less powerful than ever.

Another interesting aspect of the Pew study is that it contrasts the views of foreign policy experts with average U.S. citizens. Among policy experts, 57% believe that dealing with global climate change should be a top priority; only 37% of the U.S. public does.

Read the full Pew report on citizens' attitudes about the U.S. in the world

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Americans believe the U.S. is becoming "less powerful" in the world