8 Vampires Who Make Bloodsuckers Into Badass Monsters Again onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com 8 Vampires Who Make Bloodsuckers Into Badass Monsters Again

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Too long have vampires been portrayed as heroes, lovers, fops, and/or glitter-covered emotional disasters. We remember a time when vampires were monsters, and the only reason they were trying to get into your teenage daughter's bedroom was to drink their blood and murder them. Here are eight vampires who refuse to be defanged by modern society's infatuation with them.

1) Count Orlok, Nosferatu

Let's begin with the granddaddy of all terrifying vampires, Count Orlok. Created by German director F.W. Murnau when he couldn't get the film rights to Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, Orlok does pretty much everything Dracula does, but while looking like an albino Uruk-Hai from Lord of the Rings, and almost instantly abandoning the pretense that he might just be an eccentric European noble. Once Orlok gets the deed to a house in Wisborg, he just starts killing people, and doesn't stop until he gets so caught up in drinking pretty, pure-hearted Ellen's blood that he forgets to check his watch.

2) Russell Edgington, True Blood

One of the oldest vampires in the series, one of the most powerful, and one of the craziest as well, Russell does not care for humans. Now that doesn't mean he necessarily kills every one he sees, but he's more than willing to disrupt the uneasy peace between the humans and the vampires by killing a TV news reporter while she's live on the air, and basically announcing that vampires will rule them. In fact, Russell is so anti-human he worked with the Nazis in World War II, just to maximize the death. He's spent millennia killing people, to the point of sending out packs of werewolves to decimate whole towns. And he once killed a Celtic king for not giving him a goat. Do not fuck with Russell.

3) Alucard, Hellsing

Alucard is the most powerful being in the Hellsing organization, which is tasked with protecting England from supernatural threats. That means he technically works for the good guys, but do not be confused — Alucard just really enjoys terrorizing and killing people, and his job provides him with the ability to do that. He has the power to turn into anyone and anything, although he is partial to giant hellhounds and massive inky blobs of darkness full of bloodshot eyes and fanged mouths. He's supernaturally good in combat, especially with his two guns, but if he fights you, he doesn't just want to defeat you, he wants to destroy you completely, mentally and physically. Actually, he enjoys it when anybody tries to murder pretty much anybody, including when people try to kill him. It never works, but he always appreciates the effort.

4) Skinner Sweet, American Vampire

The protagonist of Scott Snyder's Vertigo comic, Skinner Sweet is not just the first vampire in America, but the first of a new breed of vampire — one that's stronger and faster than other vampires, and also impervious to sunlight. Before his transformation, Skinner was your run-of-the-mill murderer/outlaw when a vampire's blood fell into his eye when he was trying to escape his own hanging. After being buried for 20 years, he escaped and basically went on a massive murder spree, basically killing everyone who had ever pissed him off while he was alive, and pretty much everyone else he met along the way. Since then, he has been a vampire pimp, injected a pregnant woman's unborn baby with vampire blood, and joined World War II for fun.

5) Severen, Near Dark

In Katheryn Bigelow's 1987 vampire-western hybrid, a pack of vampires comes to a small ranching town and does their business of feeding on the locals and mildly terrorizing them. But Bill Paxton's Severen isn't as worried about feeding as he is about having fun, and what's fun for him is murder, evidenced by this amazing scene where he wanders into a bar and kills everyone in there. Just for kicks. This is not a vampire you want dating your teenage daughter.

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6) Marlowe, 30 Days of Night

We don't know much about Marlowe the vampire, but we do know this — he was so interested in getting his blood-drinking and killing on, he organized a trip — organized a trip — for a group of vampires to visit Barrow, Alaska, just as a month-long night began, in order to have what is essentially a month-long blood buffet. Plenty of vampires like to get their orgy of violence on, but few vampires are as committed as Marlowe is to getting the most murder bang for his murder buck, so to speak.

7) Kurt Barlow, Salem's Lot

Kurt Barlow is a simple vampire with simple needs: essentially, killing anyone he wants. When he moves into the town of Salem's Lot, he sets up shop as an antiques dealer, whose storefront is run by his assistant. This allows Barlow more time to kidnap children and sacrifice them, turn other kids into vampires to wreak havoc on the town, killing people by crushing their heads together, and even turning priests into vampires. All this is in the book, but the 1979 TV miniseries also has Barlow appear as a classic Nosferatu-style vampire, with fangs so enormous he can barely close his mouth. Of course, Barlow hardly needs to be able to close his mouth to drink your blood.

8) Christopher Lee's Dracula

The one, the only. While so many adaptations of Dracula have turned the villainous creature of the night into a tragic figure, a doomed lover, an anti-hero, and whatever, the Hammer Dracula films go the other way and turn Dracula into a demonic killer trying to unleash hell on Earth. Sure, he dresses as well as Bela Lugosi's Dracula, but he's not wandering through town, holding dinner parties, attending the opera, trying to pretend he's normal. Instead, all he cares about is drinking blood and killing those who have crossed him. In Hammer's Dracula movies, Lee stuffed a woman's corpse inside a church bell, tossing a sack with a baby in it to his hungry thralls, and, once he popped back up in the '70s, funding research to create a new, more terrible version of the Bubonic plague. Lee's Dracula is a creature of hate and fury and evil, whose has no humanity in him at all. And he definitely doesn't sparkle.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com 8 Vampires Who Make Bloodsuckers Into Badass Monsters Again

How NASA might have been able to rescue the Columbia crew from orbit onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How NASA might have been able to rescue the Columbia crew from orbit

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On February 1st, 2003, the seven crew members of the Space Shuttle Columbia perished when the shuttle disintegrated upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. But is there a way that NASA could have rescued the crew while the shuttle was still in orbit?

Mere seconds after Columbia's launch on January 16th, 2003, a block of foam from the shuttle's external tank and struck Columbia's left wing, and likely created a 6-to-10-inch diameter hole in the wing. In the wake of the Columbia disaster, a Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) was formed to investigate all aspects of the mission. Their final report included the section "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment," which provides a possible rescue-and-repair scenario for the shuttle and her crew. At Ars Technica, Lee Hutchinson provides a narrative frame for this scenario, suggesting an alternate universe in which NASA launched an ambitious mission to rescue the crew. A rescue mission might have been possible for one key reason: at the time, the shuttle Atlantis was being prepped for its scheduled March launch. But there were a number of issues to consider; for example, ensuring that the astronauts didn't inhale deadly levels of carbon dioxide:

But even before those decisions could be made, NASA had to make another assessment—how long did it have to mount a rescue? In tallying Columbia's supplies, NASA mission planners realized that the most pressing supply issue for the astronauts wasn't running out of something like air or water but accumulating too much of something: carbon dioxide.

Weight is a precious commodity for spacecraft. Every gram of mass that must be boosted up into orbit must be paid for with fuel, and adding fuel adds weight that must also be paid for in more fuel (this spiral of mass-begets-fuel-begets-mass is often referred to as the tyranny of the rocket equation). Rather than carrying up spare "air," spacecraft launch with a mostly fixed volume of internal air, which they recycle by adding back component gasses. The space shuttle carries supplies of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen, which are turned into gas and cycled into the cabin's air to maintain a 78 percent nitrogen/21 percent oxygen mixture, similar to Earth's atmosphere. The crew exhales carbon dioxide, though, and that carbon dioxide must be removed from the air.

To do this, the shuttle's air is filtered through canisters filled with lithium hydroxide (LiOH), which attaches to carbon dioxide molecules to form lithium carbonate crystals (Li2CO3), thus sequestering the toxic carbon dioxide. These canisters are limited-use items, each containing a certain quantity of lithium hydroxide; Columbia was equipped with 69 of them.

How long those 69 canisters would last proved difficult to estimate, though, because there isn't a lot of hard data on how much carbon dioxide the human body can tolerate in microgravity. Standard mission operation rules dictate that the mission be aborted if CO2 levels rise above a partial pressure of 15 mmHg (about two percent of the cabin air's volume), and mission planners believed they could stretch Columbia's LiOH canister supply to cover a total of 30 days of mission time without breaking that CO2 threshold. However, doing so would require the crew to spend 12 hours of each day doing as little as possible—sleeping, resting, and doing everything they could to keep their metabolic rates low.

This plan wasn't on hand at the time the mission went into contingency mode; it was developed in the months following the tragedy. But could it have worked? A STS engineer chimes in in the comments:

I worked on the planning for the STS-125 rescue mission, STS-400. It took 18 months of planning to develop the procedures, modify the tools, test and simulate the GN&C, EVA, and robotics choreography, and prepare all the paperwork to satisfy everyone that it was a safe plan for both orbiters and the crew. The proposed plan in this article would have been even more difficult because there was no opportunity to use the RMS (robotic arm) to grapple Columbia. Columbia wasn't carrying an arm, and Columbia itself did not have a grapple fixture that Atlantis's arm could use. I am extremely dubious that the manual station keeping would be doable even just from a propellant standpoint: STS-400 had the crew transfer requiring two days. (The STS-400 timeline is available online) For Columbia, that would mean manually station-keeping for an entire EVA (6.5 hours), then separating until the next EVA is ready, and performing another rendezvous and station keeping for > 6.5 hours. I don't think there is anywhere near enough RCS fuel to do that.

The only hope that this plan would have ever had would have been if the plan had already been in place prior to Columbia's launch, as there is no way on this Earth that NASA would have approved a flight with untested procedures that could destroy both orbiters. As I said above, the very similar STS-400 flight planning took 18 months; even if the entire NASA work force worked around the clock, that amount of work wasn't going to happen in just a few weeks. Sadly, I can't see a path where this would have actually been feasible.

Be sure to read the entire piece at Ars Technica. It's fascinating to consider the work that would go into such a rescue mission, even if it was not able to help the Columbia crew.

Columbia Memorial photo taken by the US Navy, via Wikimedia Commons.

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia [Ars Technica]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How NASA might have been able to rescue the Columbia crew from orbit

Listen to Godzilla's brand-new roar onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Listen to Godzilla's brand-new roar

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The Godzilla movie has revealed a first official listen to the official roar of their newly rebooted Kaiju. And we have a lot of feelings about the roar.

Empire released this cover (only to subscribers) which showcases the new face of Godzilla. He looks... well, like Godzilla. Moving on, check out the monstrous new roar below. It's one part air raid siren and another part autotuned choir. Did Godzilla eat a church choir? It's spooky and chilling but also kind of weird. What do you think?

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Listen to Godzilla's brand-new roar

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com 10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

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The internet can be a tough place to distinguish fact from fiction. Who has time to fact-check all those beautiful, weird, and sometimes horrifying pictures? Well, we do.

Today we have ten more images you may have seen tossed around on social media recently. And all of them are lying to you.

1) Is this a photo of the Northern Lights in Alaska?

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The real Northern Lights in Alaska are supposed to be absolutely gorgeous. But sadly, that's not what this photo is showing. It's actually a panoramic image of the Orion Nebula, taken from the Hubble telescope.

The image is understandably quite popular on Tumblr and Twitter. But it's a Photoshop mash-up that dates back to at least 2009. DeviantArt member Jeddaka claims to have created the mountains from scratch, though the jury's still out on that one.

Still can't quite spot the artistry of this beautiful fake? Check out Attila Nagy's wonderful GIF explainer below.

Inaccurate photo via @SciencePorn

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2) Is Marlboro actually going to make marijuana cigarettes?

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After both Washington and Colorado legalized recreational marijuana last year, news spread far and wide on social media that the makers of Marlboro wanted to become the nation's first major weed brand. Do Big Tobacco companies like Philip Morris actually want to become Big Weed? No. No they don't.

The source for this particular fake image is a website called Abril Uno, one of those terribly unfunny Onion-wannabes with stories that ultimately gets passed around not because they're funny, but because they're somewhat plausible.

But the Marlboro-marijuana association is an extremely old meme. Similar images have been mocked up on everything from t-shirts to phone cases over the years, even though the cheery cancer-peddlers behind Marlboro have no intention of getting in on the wacky tobacky game.

Inaccurate photo via Abril Uno

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3) Were these women being punished for witchcraft in 1922?

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Contrary to what you may have read on Twitter, these women weren't being punished for witchcraft, the photo isn't from 1922, and they probably weren't even real prisoners.

I emailed Jamie Carstairs, who works on the Historical Photographs of China project at the University of Bristol to ask about the photo. Carstairs described the Twitter caption as "way off the mark."

For starters, the image actually dates back to between 1870 and 1880 and was taken by a man named William Saunders, a British-born photographer who died in 1892. The women probably weren't prisoners at all. Experts in 19th century Chinese photography believe that the women pictured are probably just people on the streets of Shanghai who were posed in that cangue by Saunders.

Castairs directed me to a 1999 paper by Regine Thiriez, who takes a deeper look at the photo and explains why even some reputable photography books from the 1970s had misdated the image as being from 1907. Both the "witchcraft" angle and the later date of 1922 appear to be an internet fabrication.

Inaccurate photo description via @HistoricalPics

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4) Is this really Audrey Hepburn dancing?

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Have you ever noticed someone from a block away and thought you knew them, only to realize when you got closer that it wasn't who you thought it was? That seems to be the case with this supposed picture of Audrey Hepburn that keeps getting passed around on social media.

The photo actually comes from a Russian stock images site. And no, that's not the star of the classic 1957 musical Funny Face. But it is a pretty striking resemblance when you don't have access to a higher resolution image.

Still not convinced? Take a closer look at the woman in the photo.

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Inaccurate photo description via @HistoryInPics

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5) Does this photo show the recent snow in Florida?

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Yes, Florida did get some snow recently. But no, that photo being passed around by climate change deniers wasn't it. This year's snow was a bit less intense in the Sunshine State, as you can see from the Instagram photo on the right. The photo on the left dates back to at least 2010.

And no, snowstorms in the South don't disprove the overwhelming scientific evidence that shows climate change is really happening.

Inaccurate photo description via @massSNAFU, real Florida snow pic via @munchkinnn11

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6) Is this "Sad Putin" after Russia lost to Finland in hockey?

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You may have seen this photo getting passed around yesterday showing a dejected Vladimir Putin after the Russian Olympic hockey team was defeated by Finland 3-1. Russia was bumped from medal contention, so it would be an understandable reaction.

But the photo isn't actually from that game. It's a Getty Images photo that was taken two days earlier when Russia played Slovakia. Amazingly, the Russians actually won that game 1-0. Yet another lesson that we should all be skeptical of just about every image coming out of Sochi right now.

Inaccurate photo description via the @DailyMirror

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7) Is this really a double-decker bus race from 1933?

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No, that's not a real photo of a double-decker bus race in 1933. It's a pre-Photoshop photo montage, despite what sources like Retronaut and @HistoryInPics might claim.

The National Archive of the Netherlands clearly archived the photo in its Flickr account under fakes, photo montages and retouched images. On the right, an actual double decker bus being tested circa 1933 to prove its stability.

Fake photo via Retronaut

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8) Is this a super moon from Sequoia National Park?

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Is this a photo of the "super moon" in Sequoia National Park? No. But even the experts can be fooled when it comes to beautiful fakes of nature.

The Twitter account for the National Parks Conservation Association sadly tweeted this photo from Imgur as if it were real. But as Twitter fakes sleuth @PicPedant points out, it's actually a photo from Europe with a gigantic, glowing "moon" photoshopped in.

Fake photo via Imgur

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9) Is this a photo of Civil War soldiers with a tank?

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Could this really be a color photo of Civil War soldiers posing in front of a tank? Of course not. It's clearly a modern photo of Civil War re-enactors. But that didn't stop one of the web's biggest history Twitter accounts from tweeting it out as real.

Someone recently started an account called @AhistoricalPics, poking fun at the inaccuracies of accounts like @HistoryInPics and @HistoryInPix. The parody account tweets out obviously false facts, and silly photoshopped creations. But amazingly, the folks behind @HistoryInPix didn't get the joke. They took that obviously mislabeled photo from the parody account and presented it as real.

Confederate General Benjamin Franklin must be rolling over in his grave.

Inaccurate photo via @HistoryinPix by way of the parody account @AhistoricalPics

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10) Was this a place for disposing of ugly children?

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That's not very nice, is it? No, that cruel photo of an "ugly child" making the rounds isn't real. It's a poorly rendered photoshop. Well, at least the sign is. The original photo can be found at the Getty Images and clearly shows that the sign actually reads: "Please Keep Off The Grass."

Admittedly, it's still not clear why that young girl is stuck in a trash bin. But we can hope that it's just a momentarily posed joke by a weirdo photographer in 1928. The past was pretty weird on its own. One wonders why so many people keep trying to make it even weirder.

Fake photo via @History_Pics

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For more viral fakes check out Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose (FAKE!), JFK cuddling with Marilyn Monroe (FAKE!), and Nikola Tesla lounging on the beach (SPOILER ALERT: FAKE!).

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com 10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Acne is the first bacteria found to have hopped from humans to plants onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Acne is the first bacteria found to have hopped from humans to plants

Humans aren't the only living things that play host to the bacteria that causes acne. A team of researchers believe that our ancestors passed the microbe to grapevines thousands of years ago, the first known bacterial transfer from human to crop.

In a letter published in the latest issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution, a team of researchers based at the Research and Innovation Center – Fondazione Edmund Mach in Italy announced that they had discovered Propionibacterium acnes, the pathogen that acne in humans, in the bark, xylem fibers, and pith tissue of Vitis vinifera L., the domestic grapevine. They believe that this represents a "unique example of horizontal interkingdom transfer of a human opportunistic pathogen...to a crop plant."

Does that mean that grapevines have to deal with pimples? No, grapevines haven't suffered negative effects from Propionibacterium acnes, and the researchers suggest that the pathogen may prove somehow beneficial to the plant as part of its microbiome. Based on genetic analyses, the researchers believe that the transfer of bacteria from humans to grapevines occurred relatively recently in the plant's history, likely during the Neolithic era when grapevines were domesticated.

The researchers classified this grapevine strain of Propionibacterium acnes as Propionibacterium acnes Type Zappa (P. zappa for short), after the late musician Frank Zappa—because an unusual discovery deserves an unusual namesake.

Photo by tribp.

Interkingdom transfer of the acne causing agent, Propionibacterium acnes, from human to grapevine [Molecular Biology and Evolution via LiveScience]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Acne is the first bacteria found to have hopped from humans to plants

A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste

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It seems fitting that the man whose company produced tons of e-waste should be immortalized in this way. San Francisco collage artist Jason Mecier built this incredible portrait of Apple founder Steve Jobs out of 20 pounds of discarded phones, memory sticks, boards, and more.

Apple products like iPhones and iPods make up an enormous amount of the toxic e-waste piles that are growing all across the world. Mecier's portrait reminds us of this, while also recycling some of that waste into a beautiful thing.

Over at the Bold Italic, Jennifer Maerz writes:

Look closely and you can see bits of cell phones, iPods, headphones, Macintosh keyboards, CD-Rs, batteries, mice, memory sticks, and other upcycled trash from Apple. It took Mecier 40 hours to put these pieces together. But as with everything Mecier creates, the real thrill is in watching junky elements combine to create a colorful portrait of an icon.

Read more at the Bold Italic

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste

Why did this non-existent town show up on maps of New York? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why did this non-existent town show up on maps of New York?

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Up until the 1990s, many maps of New York situated the tiny town of Agloe just north of Roscoe in the Catskill Mountains. The problem? Agloe, New York, was almost entirely fictitious, although it briefly existed on paper.

So how does a made-up town end up on a map? Simple: a mapmaker put it there. In this case, the mapmaker was the General Drafting Company, founded by Otto G. Lindberg. The company wanted to ensure that other mapmakers weren't simply copying their work, so they invented the fictional town of Agloe, placing it at an intersection along New York State Route 206. The name "Agloe" is an anagram of Lindberg's initials combined with those of his assistant, Ernest Alpers. The idea was that, if Agloe appeared on someone else's map, then the General Drafting Company would know that the map had been copied from one of their own. The town appeared on Esso road maps, using the General Drafting Company's data.

When Agloe later appeared on a Rand McNally map of New York, Esso charged Rand McNally with copying their maps. However, it turned out that Rand McNally had received the name and location of the town not from Esso's maps but from the Delaware County administration. It turned out that someone had built a general store at the Agloe intersection and, based on the name of the "town" on the Esso map, the owner named it the Agloe General Store. That was enough for the administration to register the town on paper.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

It was the Agloe General Store that brought Agloe into quasi-existence, and after it went out of business, the "town" eventually faded from maps. You can still, however, find its (unmarked) location on Google Maps.

Mapmakers aren't the only ones who have laid these copyright traps. The Rural Telephone Service Company included fictitious entries in its phone book to catch copiers and discovered their fake listings in a phone book published by Feist Publications. That case made it to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that factual information alone could not be copyrighted.

Agloe, the Paper Town Stronger than Fiction [Big Think]

Agloe, New York [Museum of Hoaxes]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why did this non-existent town show up on maps of New York?

Donal Logue joins Gotham as Det. Harvey Bullock onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Donal Logue joins Gotham as Det. Harvey Bullock

And here's the best casting news for Fox's Batman-less Batman show so far: the extremely talented Donal Logue will play Detective Harvey Bullock, joining Ben McKenzie as Jim Gordon, and all these people. I don't know if it'll make up for a 12-year-old Bruce Wayne, as some rumors report, but it's a start.

Here Bullock's official character description for the show:

"Jim Gordon's partner and mentor, the rough-around-the-edges Detective Harvey Bullock plays loose with police procedure, but he gets results … and he does it with old-school, forceful panache.

Logue has played countless "rough-around-the-edges" cops in his career, so I imagine he'll fit into the rather role nicely.

[Via Comic Book Resources]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Donal Logue joins Gotham as Det. Harvey Bullock

Rodarte's Fall-Winter Collection Is Star Wars-Themed onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Rodarte's Fall-Winter Collection Is Star Wars-Themed

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In maybe the best thing to happen at Fashion Week so far, Rodarte's show just closed with gowns printed with images of Yoda, Luke Skywalker, C-3PO and the Death Star.

(Sorry, Opening Ceremony's chocolate wall, you are no longer the most fun/bloggable thing this season has yielded.)

As one would expect, the emergence of the Star Wars-printed dresses prompted a social media flurry:

Pero buenooo @OfficialRodarte Aquí sí me han ganado! (¿has visto?? @marioximenez) #starwars http://ift.tt/1h8ADHK

— Laia Cenea (@laiacenea) February 11, 2014

Oh my god, @OfficialRodarte 's DEATH STAR dress. All about Sci-fi fashion. http://ift.tt/1iXZef0

— Veronica Gledhill (@fallingsequins) February 11, 2014

And here's photo proof. The force is strong with this one... http://ift.tt/1iXZef5

— refinery29 (@Refinery29) February 11, 2014

Rodarte flirts with Star Wars - bravo girls !! @officialrodarte #nyfw #rodarte http://ift.tt/1h8AF2m

— Vs. Magazine (@vsmag) February 11, 2014

Stay tuned; we will have the compleat show in all its glorie, photographed on an actual camera, later today — in the meantime, let us ponder: WHICH CELEBRITY WILL GET TO WEAR THE YODA DRESS TO THE OSCARS?

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Rodarte's Fall-Winter Collection Is Star Wars-Themed

The io9 Book Club is in session! Let's talk about The n-Body Problem onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The io9 Book Club is in session! Let's talk about The n-Body Problem

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Welcome to the monthly meeting of the io9 Book Club. In January, we read Tony Burgess' The n-Body Problem. Jump into comments to get started talking about it!

For those unfamiliar with the io9 book club, here's how it works: You read the book. We create a special book club post on io9 when the meeting is in session. That would be the post you're reading. Then everybody talks about the book in comments for a few days, starting right now.

Burgess will be here to talk to you about the book on Friday, Feb. 14 — I'll put up a post with a call for questions for him on that day. So, what did you think of The n-Body Problem?

Want to get started on our next book?

In February, we'll be reading Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking, the first book in her Hollows series. The next book in that series is coming out soon, so this is your chance to dive in with the first one! We'll meet on March 11 to discuss it!

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The io9 Book Club is in session! Let's talk about The n-Body Problem

Watch as this massive wave sends hundreds of spectators scrambling onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Watch as this massive wave sends hundreds of spectators scrambling

Massive waves have been absolutely battering the Spanish coastline this winter. The latest incident happened at San Lorenzo beach when an absolutely ginormous wave breached a seawall, engulfing the shore — and the many spectators who gathered to watch.

Skip ahead to the 0:35 mark to see the action.

On a similar note, a woman dancing on a beach in Spain severely underestimated the strength and speed of this incoming wave:

And last week, a man was swept to his death during storms in northern Spain:

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Watch as this massive wave sends hundreds of spectators scrambling

Amazing Footage: The Spaceship User Interfaces of Star Wars onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Amazing Footage: The Spaceship User Interfaces of Star Wars

Noel Rubin designed the user interfaces for Star Wars Episodes 1 and 3, and now he's put together a sizzle reel, showing just how awesome the computer screens on those ships really looked.

"This reel features my own personal favorite shot takes and not George's," Rubin tells io9. "It's extremely rare to see. Plus, there are close-ups of the UI elements. Don't worry, Jar Jar isn't in the video."

Totally incredible.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Amazing Footage: The Spaceship User Interfaces of Star Wars

Yet another reason to be grateful that pubic grooming is on the outs onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Yet another reason to be grateful that pubic grooming is on the outs

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If de facto trend-barometer American Apparel is any indication, the bush is, indeed, back. That's excellent news for American genitals. Analyses of American emergency room data indicate genital injuries related to pubic grooming had increased sixfold between 2002 and 2010. Things were getting out of hand.

Top photo by dullhunk via flickr

Americans, it seemed, could not be trusted with their privates. Researchers led by UC San Francisco urologist Benjamin Breyer described the unmitigated rise in injuries related to public grooming in a December 2012 issue of the journal Urology:

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The number of incidents increased approximately linearly during the study period, with more than one-third of actual injuries occurring in 2009–2010. The estimated increase was 274 cases annually (95% CI 110–384, P = .001). Although the number of incidents was similar for both sexes during each year, an estimated 1765 (95% CI 717–2813; actual 49) female injuries occurred in 2010. This represents a nearly sixfold increase, or an increase of 346 cases annually (95% CI 149–544, P = .001) since 2002.

The study went on to conclude that those members of the U.S. population at greatest risk of injury were women, aged 19 to 28. Indeed, the researchers note that "the demographics of patients with GU injuries [Ed. Note: See the chart for injuries by age and gender categories here] from grooming products largely parallel observations about cultural changes and grooming practices in the United States." Interestingly, the 19-28 age range cited by Breyer and his team as "most susceptible" happens to overlap rather cleanly with American Apparel's target market of 20 to 35-year-olds. Could pube-grooming's fall from grace really start right at the tippy top of the fashionable cool-kid pile?

Breyer and his colleagues ultimately advise urologists, ED and urgent care providers to consider advising patitnts on safe depilatory techniques. "For example," the researchers write, "hair clippers might be a superior tool [to non electric razors], because they accomplish hair removal in a quick and economic fashion but pose less risk of microscopic lacerations or abrasions to the skin."

Or you could hop on this new, natural trend and abstain from pubic grooming altogether. After all, the only way to avoid cutting your genitals with a razor is to avoid introducing the two in the first place! Though here's a downside: There is evidence that suggests a return of natural pubic hair could lead to an increased incidence of pubic lice. You can't win them all, people.

More pubic-trimming-induced genital injury stats than you can shake an electric trimmer at are available, free of charge,in Urology.

[Via New Republic]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Yet another reason to be grateful that pubic grooming is on the outs

The heartbreaking feud between Edward Teller and J Robert Oppenheimer onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The heartbreaking feud between Edward Teller and J Robert Oppenheimer

There have been plenty of feuds in science. Usually they're petty. Nearly always, they're depressing. This one is more depressing than most. It resulted in two different scientists being expelled - in different ways - from the scientific community.

During World War II, Edward Teller and J Robert Oppenheimer worked together on the development of the atomic bomb. A decade later, one was in self-imposed exile on an island, and the other was materially successful but cast out of academic society.

During their work on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was in the senior position. Although it was the first major project he'd managed, he was probably accustomed to being at the top of any group. Born both rich and smart, he cultivated the qualities of hard work and passionate interest, and his work in physics was always exemplary. Teller had had, comparatively, a harder time of it. Although he'd been born into a prosperous family, he'd fled the anti-Semitism in Hungary, only to find it rising up in Germany. He left Germany for England, and England for America - eventually becoming an American citizen.

Although the two men didn't seem to personally clash during the project, as soon as it became clear a fission bomb which split the atom was possible, Teller lost interest. He transferred his interest to a bomb involving the fusion of atoms. Eventually, Teller became so distracted by his research on the hydrogen bomb that Oppenheimer cut him loose from the core team, though not from the overall project, to pursue his own interests.

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After the end of the war, Teller remained focused on the fusion bomb, which could be made bigger and more powerful. Oppenheimer wanted to take the concept of nuclear bombs and make them smaller. He wanted to use them as weapons against invading armies. We know now that Oppenheimer's suggestion would not have been practical. Smaller bombs would help little in the wars that followed World War II, but would have been ecological disasters. Still, at the time, they were a real possibility. Scientists spent much of the fifties through the seventies looking at small nuclear bombs as tools for construction or energy production. Either making the bomb huge or miniaturizing it were possibilities - it was only a matter of which model would get the most support. Oppenheimer and Teller were competing, actively, for the same resources from the same government. Then Oppenheimer got word that he was a suspected communist, and the Atomic Energy Commission had suspended his security clearance. Oppenheimer asked for a security hearing, and, there, Teller testified.

When asked about Oppenheimer's actions and affiliations, Teller stated, "In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act – I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted – in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more." This could be interpreted multiple ways. Either Teller was making the blandest possible accusation of collaboration with foreign communists, or he was explaining, in the most suspicious possible way, that Oppenheimer and he disagreed on matters of military strategy. In the end though, he testified that he believed that Oppenheimer should not be given security clearance.

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Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. He left the United States for the Virgin Islands, and left nuclear research to take part in the anti-proliferation movement. Teller stayed in the scientific community for quite some time, but his unofficial reputation never recovered. Some biographers refer to his treatment by other scientists as yet another "exile."

The post-war communist paranoia left its stain on a lot of people, but arguably Teller bears too large a proportion of it. Although it's not possible to defend his words, his testimony most likely wasn't what got Oppenheimer kicked out of the AEC. Oppenheimer had been a casual attender of communist meetings - then again so had many academics in the 1930s. More serious was the fact that Oppenheimer had been approached by someone who broached the subject of moving secrets to the USSR. He'd kept it secret for months, and then lied about it. When Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, drilled the scientists about possible security leaks, Oppenheimer claimed that three different scientists had been contacted by a Soviet agent. Under more pressure he admitted that, to his knowledge, only he had been contacted. The "agent" was a French literature professor at UC Berkeley. Thinking that, if he admitted that he alone had been contacted the communist would be quickly found, Oppenheimer adlibbed a story.

Oppenheimer lived only a little over a decade longer, and was shut out of his chosen field of work. Teller, on the other hand, had a long career in his chosen field. In the end, it is Teller who wears the horns when it comes to this particular feud. (It didn't help that he went on to a few more feuds, including trying to blame a heart attack on Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader, and their protests of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island.) A few words, which may very well have been useless, and two reputations were damaged.

[Via PBS, PBS, American Scientist.]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The heartbreaking feud between Edward Teller and J Robert Oppenheimer

It's so smoggy in Beijing, the only way to see the sunrise is on a screen. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com It's so smoggy in Beijing, the only way to see the sunrise is on a screen.

It's so smoggy in Beijing, the only way to see the sunrise is on a screen. An LED screen that displays advertisements in Tiananmen Square broadcast the sunrise yesterday, treating residents to the only view of the sun they'd see all day.

New York Times correspondent Edward Wong tweeted the scene:

[via Salon]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com It's so smoggy in Beijing, the only way to see the sunrise is on a screen.

This worm-inspired glue can mend broken hearts onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This worm-inspired glue can mend broken hearts

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Inspired by nature, medical scientists have developed a flexible and biocompatible light-activated glue that works on wet tissue. And remarkably, it's as strong as traditional sutures.

The beating heart is a tough place to try sticking things together. When surgeons need to get in there to fix something that has gone amiss, their options for sealing incisions are mostly limited to stitches or liquid adhesives.

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Image: A sandcastle worm (Phragmatopoma californica) in the laboratory of Russell Stewart, University of Utah, making a tube out of sand (yellow) and beads of zirconium oxide (white). Courtesy Fred Hayes/University of Utah/Wikipedia.

But each of those comes with its own problems when a doctor is attempting to repair the cardiac wall or blood vessels, places that constantly stretch and contract while also being slick with blood.

By their very nature, stitches damage the tissue they pierce. They don't create an immediate and total seal against leaking fluids. They're also challenging for doctors and can take quite a bit of time to complete. Liquid adhesives, meanwhile, offer limited sticking power or can be toxic. One of the most widely used liquids, cyanoacrylate, is the acrylic resin that gives Super Glue its stick.

Now, researchers are reporting success finding the next generation of material to bind tissue together—a liquid adhesive inspired by nature. In preclinical trials, the glue even worked in the highly dynamic and slippery environment of the beating heart.

"This adhesive platform addresses all of the drawbacks of previous systems in that it works in the presence of blood and moving structures," said Dr. Pedro del Nido, the chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Children's Hospital and one of the senior authors of a study published in Science Translational Medicine on Jan. 8. "It should provide the physician with a completely new, much simpler technology and a new paradigm for tissue reconstruction to improve the quality of life of patients following surgical procedures."

In their paper, the team said they looked to animals that have mastered adhesion for their inspiration. Among those they investigated for cardiac applications were the secretions made by insects to keep their feet from sliding on smooth surfaces and the glue produced by slugs to hold fast to watery substrates.

They settled on trying a synthetic adhesive called poly(glycerol sebacate acrylate) (PGSA), which was inspired by sandcastle worm secretions and is elastic and transparent. These reef-building marine worms collect building materials floating in seawater and glue them together to make their homes. Other researchers have found that the creature's sticky protein-based secretion sets in 30 seconds in cold, salty water.

PGSA has an advantage over its natural predecessor—when ultraviolet light is applied to the synthetic adhesive, it sets and cures in five seconds. PGSA is also composed of ingredients that naturally occur in the human body, meaning they can be broken down harmlessly over time, the authors say.

The combination of material and UV, which they call a hydrophobic light-activated adhesive (HLAA), "was not easily washed out from a tissue surface and retained its adhesive strength during prolonged contact with blood," they wrote in their paper. "Once activated, the HLAA provided stronger adhesion than standard sealants such as fibrin, even in a highly dynamic environment."

They tried the glue on large blood vessels under high blood pressure and cardiac walls in rats and pigs, which stood in to replicate common human surgical procedures like repairing cut blood vessels and heart wall defects. They used the material as both a stand-alone suture and also to glue on a repair patch in areas commonly needing surgery.

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Image: The application of glue to a vessel defect. Image courtesy of Randal McKenzie.

"This study demonstrated that the adhesive was strong enough to hold tissue and patches onto the heart equivalent to suturing," said Dr. Nora Lang, a Boston Children's Hospital cardiac surgeon who also authored the study. "Also, the adhesive patch is biodegradable and biocompatible, so nothing foreign or toxic stays in the bodies of these patients."

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Image: The waterproof, light-activated glue developed by Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital and MIT researchers can successfully secure biodegradable patches to seal holes in a beating heart. Courtesy Karp Laboratory.

They say their HLAA could be used to diminish the invasiveness of surgeries, reduce time needed to complete operations and improve surgical outcomes. Biomedical engineer Jeffrey Karp, a senior study author who works at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital said the advance could find good use among the most fragile of patients—babies born with broken hearts.

"About 40,000 babies are born with congenital heart defects in the United States annually, and those that require treatment are plagued with multiple surgeries to deliver or replace non-degradable implants that do not grow with young patients," he said.

This article comes courtesy of the Txchnologist, GE's blog about innovation in science and technology.

Top image: CLIPAREA l Custom media/Shutterstock.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This worm-inspired glue can mend broken hearts

On summer evenings, lakes become opportunities to spy on your friends onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com On summer evenings, lakes become opportunities to spy on your friends

Ever been out on a lake and heard the whispers of someone far away on shore? A quirk of atmosphere and a quirk of physics work together to turn the body of water into a telephone.

Imagine you are driving in a car down a long, open stretch of plain. You keep moving and moving in a straight line, until suddenly, the tires on the left side of your car are moving faster than the tires on the right side of your car. That means the right side drags, while the left side zooms ahead. You start to turn to the right. If you were on a road, you'd be in trouble. Since you're on a plain, the car drifts right, right, right, until you describe a kind of arc, like a rainbow, and start driving back the way you came.

Now imagine you're a sound wave.

That might be a harder to do, but the basic motion is the same. When a sound wave travels from cold air to warm air, the side that hits the warmer air goes faster than the side in the cool air. As that side accelerates, it curves the path of the overall wave until it forms an arc and comes back down to Earth.

Where does this happen? It could happen nearly anywhere, but it's generally most noticeable on still lakes on summer evenings. As the sun goes down the lake gives up its heat, and the warm air rises high into the atmosphere. Cold air gathers underneath, and so sound coming up from the lake, or from the shore, will hit that warm air and curve back. There are no buildings or trees above a lake to interfere with the sound, and it's quiet out on the water. People rowing on the lake will sometimes hit the spot where the sound come back down, and will be able to clearly hear conversations that are taking place a long way away. The lake forms a kind of huge, impractical telephone, transporting sound from one specific place to another.

[Via Good Vibrations]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com On summer evenings, lakes become opportunities to spy on your friends

First Look at The Simpsons LEGO House is insanely detailed onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com First Look at The Simpsons LEGO House is insanely detailed

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We've been patiently waiting for more news about The Simpsons LEGO home, complete with nosey-doodly-doo neighbor Ned Flanders. And now, it's really real! Behold the first piece of what we hope will become a complete LEGO Springfield.

Carlos S over at Eurobricks, posted this image of The Simpsons LEGO packaging, without any indication of where it was taken. So we don't know if this is an early prototype or if this is exactly what the LEGO Simpsons home will look like. But so far, SO GOOD. Please make a LEGO Moe's next!

Folks are estimating that this box of animated LEGO pals could cost up to $150 (or more), which is A LOT, but still kiiiiiiind of worth it. And if you look carefully you can see that the house EXPANDS, so it may unfold like a doll house with individual LEGO rooms. Rad.

UPDATE: Now with a back shot!

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[via Neatorama]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com First Look at The Simpsons LEGO House is insanely detailed

What Harry Potter book covers look like all over the world onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What Harry Potter book covers look like all over the world

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Different translations and editions of the Harry Potter books receive different covers, which means that each volume has been treated to a variety of artistic styles, from grand paintings to cartoons to works that focus on a single magical object.

redditor AtlaKorra collected 20 different sets of Harry Potter covers, highlighting the differences between the various American and British editions, as well as those from Russia, Japan, China, Finland, and the world over.

Harry Potter Book Covers and Harry Potter Book Covers Part 2 [reddit via Laughing Squid]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What Harry Potter book covers look like all over the world