Want to close the gender gap? Give men paternity leave. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Want to close the gender gap? Give men paternity leave.

S

One of the biggest problems for young families is dividing up childcare duties. Women still get saddled with the bulk of the work, which can cause stress and undermine their careers. But many countries have found a solution to the problem: paternity leave. More freedom for men has meant more for women too.

Photo via Imgur

Writes Liza Mundy in a fascinating story in The Atlantic:

While paid paternity leave may feel like an unexpected gift, the biggest beneficiaries aren't men, or even babies. In the long run, the true beneficiaries of paternity leave are women, and the companies and nations that benefit when women advance. In October, the World Economic Forum released its latest global gender-gap report, showing that countries with the strongest economies are those that have found ways to further women's careers, close the gender pay gap, and keep women—who in most nations are now better educated than men—tethered to the workforce after they become mothers. One strikingly effective strategy used by the highest-ranking countries is paternity leave, which, whatever else it may accomplish, is a brilliant and ambitious form of social engineering: a behavior-modification tool that has been shown to boost male participation in the household, enhance female participation in the labor force, and promote gender equity in both domains.

In Quebec, Canada, a 2006 program created a province-wide paternity leave that lasts 5 weeks. As a result, in 2010, 80 percent of fathers took paternity leave — up from 10 percent in 2001. This has created a new social norm, according to economist Ankita Patnaik, who has studied the Quebec program. She told Mundy that "families felt they were wasting something" when fathers didn't take time off. "Now dads might feel bad for not taking leave—your baby loses this time with parents." Interestingly, paternity leave sets household changes in motion that last for years.

According to Mundy:

The policy has achieved many of the hoped-for long-term outcomes, chief among them more fluidity in who does what around the house. Previous studies found that fathers who take paternity leave are more likely, a year or so down the road, to change diapers, bathe their children, read them bedtime stories, and get up at night to tend to them. Patnaik's study confirmed this; looking at time-use diaries, she found that men who were eligible for the new leave—whether or not they took it—ended up spending more time later on routine chores like shopping and cooking.

As a result, women felt that men were taking more responsibilities with childrearing and were less likely to suffer from depression. More importantly, they returned to their previous jobs in much higher numbers than they did before the 5-week paternity leave program. So the labor inside the home and outside is more evenly shared between the father and mother.

Paternity leave is a social experiment whose goals appear to have worked far better than anyone could have hoped.

Read more in The Atlantic

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Want to close the gender gap? Give men paternity leave.

Scientists finally know what created these mysterious rainforest structures! onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists finally know what created these mysterious rainforest structures!

After six months of waiting – followed by nine more days of waiting – we finally have an answer to one of the most baffling Internet mysteries of 2013: The mystery architect behind these beautifully complex Amazonian web-towers is....

Top Photo Credit: Troy Alexander

A spider! A research team led by entomologist Phil Torres cracked the case by keeping close tabs on close to forty of the structures, which they discovered by venturing into the rainforest near Tambopata Research Center, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. "Half of the structures were built on cecropia trees," writes Wired's Nadia Drake, who accompanied the team on their adventure. "Many were on bamboo. A few were on leaves. And, most them appeared to be in clusters containing between two and six structures."

S

One of the three hatched spiderlings. Photo Credit: Jeff Cremer/PeruNature.com via WIRED

By monitoring the structures they discovered for days on end, Torres and his team managed to observe three spiderlings emerge from three separate towers and scurry off. That's right – just ONE spiderling per tower, which, it turns out, are, in fact, elaborate egg sacs. The spiders have yet to be formally identified, but whatever they are, the level of parental investment struck the researchers as very unusual, given that each structure harbors a single young.

Read all the fascinating details on the team's expedition and discovery over at Wired.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists finally know what created these mysterious rainforest structures!

Here are Nature magazine's 10 people who mattered in 2013. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here are Nature magazine's 10 people who mattered in 2013.

Here are Nature magazine's 10 people who mattered in 2013. They range from engineers making breakthroughs in cloning and solar cell efficiency, to a scientist who studies sexual assault trends and a diplomat who called attention to global warming. These are the people who are changing the world of science.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here are Nature magazine's 10 people who mattered in 2013.

This is the only piece of art we've left on the Moon onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This is the only piece of art we've left on the Moon

S

This tiny sculpture is called Fallen Astronaut, and was placed on the lunar surface by the crew of Apollo 15 on August 1, 1971.

The figurine, which was crafted in the likeness of an astronaut-in-spacesuit, measures just more than three inches tall, but the "Smallest Memorial in the Universe," as Walter Cronkite called it in a 1972 interview with its creator, Belgian sculptor Paul van Hoeydonck, gave rise to storm of controversy disproportionate to its physical size. Over at Slate, Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro have the in-depth story of the scandals and conflicts that "obscured one of the most extraordinary achievements of the Space Age."

It begins:

One crisp March morning in 1969, artist Paul van Hoeydonck was visiting his Manhattan gallery when he stumbled into the middle of a startling conversation. Louise Tolliver Deutschman, the gallery's director, was making an energetic pitch to Dick Waddell, the owner. "Why don't we put a sculpture of Paul's on the moon," she insisted. Before Waddell could reply, van Hoeydonck inserted himself into the exchange: "Are you completely nuts? How would we even do it?"

Deutschman stood her ground. "I don't know," she replied, "but I'll figure out a way."

She did.

At 12:18 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Aug. 2, 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 placed a 3 1/2-inch-tall aluminum sculpture onto the dusty surface of a small crater near his parked lunar rover. At that moment the moon transformed from an airless ball of rock into the largest exhibition space in the known universe. Scott regarded the moment as tribute to the heroic astronauts and cosmonauts who had given their lives in the space race. Van Hoeydonck was thrilled that his art was pointing the way to a human destiny beyond Earth and expected that he would soon be "bigger than Picasso."

In reality, van Hoeydonck's lunar sculpture, called Fallen Astronaut, inspired not celebration but scandal. Within three years, Waddell's gallery had gone bankrupt. Scott was hounded by a congressional investigation and left NASA on shaky terms. Van Hoeydonck, accused of profiteering from the public space program, retreated to a modest career in his native Belgium. Now both in their 80s, Scott and van Hoeydonck still see themselves unfairly maligned in blogs and Wikipedia pages—to the extent that Fallen Astronaut is remembered at all.

And yet, the spirit of Fallen Astronaut is more relevant today than ever. Google is promoting a $30 million prize for private adventurers to send robots to the moon in the next few years; companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are creating a new for-profit infrastructure of human spaceflight; and David Scott is grooming Brown University undergrads to become the next generation of cosmic adventurers.

Governments come and go, public sentiment waxes and wanes, but the dream of reaching to the stars lives on. Fallen Astronaut does, too, hanging eternally 238,000 miles above our heads. Here, for the first time, we tell the full, tangled tale behind one of the smallest yet most extraordinary achievements of the Space Age.

Read the rest over at Slate.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This is the only piece of art we've left on the Moon

Here's how massive packs of penguins move as a single unit onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here's how massive packs of penguins move as a single unit

S

Penguins have evolved a really neat way of staying warm. To conserve energy, they form densely packed huddles with a triangular lattice structure. What's amazing is that these packs — which can include thousands of individuals — actually move. A recent physics study shows how it's done.

Male Emperor penguins have it rough. As keepers of the eggs, they have to endure Antarctic winters featuring temperatures as low as −58 °F (−50 °C) and wind speeds reaching 120 mph (200 km/h). Huddling is obviously a great strategy; when crammed together, their body surface temperature can rise to 98.6 °F (37 °C) in less than two hours. Of course, this strategy can only work if there's a system to keep everything in order. With thousands of individuals packed into tight spaces, there's great potential for chaos to set in.

And indeed, previous studies have shown coordinated movements in regular wave-like patterns within these huddles. Scientists assumed that these waves were triggered by individual penguins that disturb the huddle structure, and that the propagating wave acts as a way to remove defects and to restore order.

But until the recent study, the precise mechanisms that govern these wave transmissions were unknown — or if they were caused by the same individual in the huddle.

But all is now clear after a team of researchers applied a mathematical model frequently used to study road congestion, flocks of birds, and schools of fish (i.e. a coupled system of differential equations that measure the positions and velocities of individuals). It predicted how autonomous individuals can incrementally move step-by-step within a tightly packed huddle — and in a way that's quite reminiscent of how cars inch forward in a traffic jam (characteristic "stop-and-go waves" and intermittent behavior).

S

Fascinatingly, the waves can emerge from virtually any point in the huddle, and the rest of the huddle will adapt. So it's not a matter of cold penguins at the exterior trying to inch their way in. But this only works so along as their steps don't exceed a two centimeter threshold distance (about the thickness of the penguin feather layer).

The researchers say this allows for perfectly compact huddles that maintain each bird's maximum fluffiness and insulation. "[T]he model confirms that the traveling waves help to achieve an optimally dense huddle structure, and describes how huddles can merge," write the authors in the study.

The physics models were later confirmed by optical flow velocimetry of video recordings taken of the penguins in their natural habitat.

Read the entire study at New Journal of Physics: "The origin of traveling waves in an emperor penguin huddle."

Image: NJoP

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here's how massive packs of penguins move as a single unit

New calculations suggest the Universe could collapse at any time onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com New calculations suggest the Universe could collapse at any time

All things being equal, the universe is set to continually expand, eventually ripping itself to shreds in about 22 billion years. But Danish scientists say an expanding bubble of existential doom could crush the Universe into a tiny ball. And crazily, the odds of this collapse is higher than previously thought.

This theory isn't actually new. But the scientists who conducted the new study say previous calculations were incomplete. Their new, more precise calculations, now show that (1) the universe will probably collapse, and (2) a collapse is even more likely than the old calculations predicted.

To reach this conclusion, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark analyzed three equations that drive the theory, including beta functions (which are used to determine such things as the strength of interactions between light particles and electrons, or Higgs bosons and quarks). But instead of working with one equation at at time, they applied these equations together, revealing a higher probability of a collapse.

Sudden Weight Gain

S

This particularly collapse theory — which predicts a cataclysmic disruption to standard model vacuum stability — is distinct from the old Big Crunch theory. It suggests that there will eventually be a radical shift in the forces of the universe such that every single particle within it will become extremely heavy. Yes — everything. The particles in the Sun, in your body, and in your smartphone. And we're not just talking a little bit heavier; models predict a weight increase on the order of millions of billions times heavier than they are now.

To say that this would have disastrous consequences would be a gross understatement. Owing to tremendous gravitational forces, everything within the Universe would be squeezed into a tiny, hot, and heavy ball. For all practical purposes, it would be the end of the Universe.

Blame it on the Higgs

This phase transition could happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe.

Should the new value create lower energy, and if the bubble is large enough, it will expand outwards in all directions at the speed of light. Everything caught inside this bubble will experience dramatic weight gain and collect into supermassive centers. In turn, these centers will attract each other, and on and on until we get our tiny, hot, and heavy ball of utter uselessness.

It Could Already Be Happening

And here's what's even more crazy: This could be happening as we speak.

"The phase transition will start somewhere in the universe and spread from there," says Jens Frederik Colding Krog, PhD student at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP3) and co-author of an article on the subject that appears in the Journal of High Energy Physics. "Maybe the collapse has already started somewhere in the universe and right now it is eating its way into the rest of the universe. Maybe a collapse is starting right now, right here. Or maybe it will start far away from here in a billion years. We do not know." The comments were made in a recent statement.

Wanted: New Kinds of Particles

Krog says that the whole thing could be canceled if there are other elementary particles out there that we don't know about. Fascinatingly, some cosmologists at CP3 believe that the Higgs particle is not an elementary particle, but rather an amalgam of even smaller particles called techni-quarks. What's more, supersymmetry theory predicts the existence of yet undiscovered particles — like selectrons for electrons, fotinos for photons, and so on. Should this be the case, then the entire collapse model....uh...collapses.

Oh, and for the record, this isn't the first time the Higgs particle has been implicated in universal doom.

Read the entire study at the preprint journal arXiv: "Standard Model Vacuum Stability and Weyl Consistency Conditions".

Images: Adolf Schaller/NASA-MSFC Jens Frederik Colding Krog.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com New calculations suggest the Universe could collapse at any time

This looks 'shopped, but it's actually an optical illusion onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This looks 'shopped, but it's actually an optical illusion

S

For French artist George Rousse, color is clearly important, but space, depth and perspective are everything.

For a little over three decades, Rousse has been creating art out of the crumbling walls, warped ceilings and cracked spandrels of derelict structures and abandoned buildings. To infuse these forgotten places with color is a statement in and of itself – but more impressive still is how Rousse colors his canvass. A typical example of Rousse's work, the painting above can only be seen in this state from a specific point within the building. A step or two in any direction, and the illusion of a cohesive piece pulls apart at the seams.

Rousse's installation, seen from two alternate angles (via)

Here's another of Rousse's pieces, borrowed from the documentary "Georges Rousse Art Project in Miyagi":

Rousse's biography sheds more light on the motivations behind his three-dimensional aesthetic:

In his photographs, Georges Rousse compels us to read architecture as static, images as immobile, then gradually transforms our perception of Space and Reality. The final photographic image perturbs our visual habits and convictions by presenting three kinds of space: the real space, where he makes his installations; an imaginary utopian space, which the artist invents and then carefully builds at his chosen site; and a new space that is visible from only one spot when he clicks the camera shutter, and exists only in the photo.

The convergence of these spaces goes beyond a visual game: Like a hall of mirrors, enigmatic and dizzying, it questions the role of photography as a faithful reproduction of reality; it probes the distances between perception and reality, between imaginary and concrete.

The technical term for this effect is anamorphosis. Anamorphic illusions are some of the best examples of visual trickery out there, but large-scale ones – like Rousse's, or Swiss artist Felice Varini's – are far and away our personal favorites.

[Via design-dautore]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This looks 'shopped, but it's actually an optical illusion

New research on wormholes suggests that these theoretical shortcuts that connect distant points in t onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com New research on wormholes suggests that these theoretical shortcuts that connect distant points in t

S New research on wormholes suggests that these theoretical shortcuts that connect distant points in the universe might be linked with the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement. As Charles Q. Choi writes in LiveScience, this would allow particles to be connected regardless of how far apart they are — a finding that could help scientists explain the universe from its very smallest to its biggest scales.

Top image via Desktop Wallpaper Space.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com New research on wormholes suggests that these theoretical shortcuts that connect distant points in t

Stephen Fry pops a balloon in the world's loudest and quietest rooms onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Stephen Fry pops a balloon in the world's loudest and quietest rooms

And yes, he is unbearably charming doing it. Fun begins around the 23:20 mark.

Anechoic chambers are where sounds go to die. They're bonkers. And while the hemi-anechoic chamber that Fry visits isn't quite as silent as, say, the maddeningly noiseless chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota – which is said to induce hallucinations as a result of sensory deprivation – it's still pretty damn quiet.

ht Erin!

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Stephen Fry pops a balloon in the world's loudest and quietest rooms