The beginning and the end of scientific careers. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The beginning and the end of scientific careers.

The beginning and the end of scientific careers. MySciCareer is a fun, often inspirational repository of science-career origin stories. Elsewhere, MIT postdoc Lenny Teytelman has painted a brutally honest portrait of the state of scientific research, in a farewell blog post that explains why he – and so many others – are leaving academia.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The beginning and the end of scientific careers.

New research suggests geohacking would be a catastrophically bad idea onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com New research suggests geohacking would be a catastrophically bad idea

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In order to get our warming climate under control, some forward thinkers say we should deploy any number of geoengineering schemes. But as the latest computer models show, these efforts would not only be futile — they'd probably result in a complete disaster.

Geoengineering techniques include such things as reflecting sunlight from space, ocean fertilization, making clouds more reflective, pumping deep cold nutrient-rich waters to the surface of oceans, and irrigating vast areas of the north African and Australian deserts to grow millions of trees. But after modeling five different schemes, researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany, concluded that, even when applied on a massive scale, the most that could be expected is a temperature drop of 8%.

But that's not the half of it; the potential side effects would be potentially disastrous. The Guardian reports on the findings:

Ocean upwelling, or the bringing up of deep cold waters, would cool surface water temperatures and reduce sea ice melting, but would unbalance the global heat budget, while adding iron filings or lime would affect the oxygen levels in the oceans. Reflecting the sun's rays into space would alter rainfall patterns and reforesting the deserts could change wind patterns and could even reduce tree growth in other regions.

In addition, say the scientists, two of the five methods considered could not be safely stopped. "We find that, if solar radiation management or ocean upwelling is discontinued then rapid warming occurs. If the other methods are discontinued, less dramatic changes occur. Essentially all of the CO2 that was taken up remains in the ocean."

Even the foresting of deserts on a massive scale could prove disastrous if the irrigation needed to grow the trees were stopped, they say. "The desert regions would eventually return to desert and the carbon that was stored in the plant biomass and soil would slowly be returned to the atmosphere through decay and respiration," says the paper.

Each of the five climate engineering methods considered has advantages and disadvantages but individually they are all limited, say the authors. "If CO2 emissions remain high, the climate engineering methods … should not be solely counted on to prevent warming. Our results suggest that CO2 mitigation seems the most effective way to prevent climate change. Climate engineering does not appear to be an alternative option, although it could be possibly used to complement mitigation," say the authors, who do not look at the ethical, economic, legal, political or technological feasibility of the five methods.

Damn, that's not good news. And neither is the suggestion that once we start geoengineering we won't be able to stop. What makes this all the more depressing is that we appear to lack the political and social will to do anything about climate change.

Read the study at Nature Communications: "Potential climate engineering effectiveness and side effects during a high carbon dioxide-emission scenario."

Image: NASA.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com New research suggests geohacking would be a catastrophically bad idea

​Discover the terrors of space in the comfort of your own home onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​Discover the terrors of space in the comfort of your own home

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Did you blow your chance to watch Gravity in 3D and/or in Imax? You poor bastard. You can't possibly recapture the experience on your home TV (yes, even if you have one of those giant home theaters with stadium seating), but at least you'll get to pause to use the bathroom. Plus Thor, Harry Potter, and more!

• Gravity

These extras, by the way, include a giant making-of documentary, VFX breakdowns, a featurette on space debris, and more.

• Thor: The Dark World

Thor must team up with his brother Loki to battle the dark elf Malekith, and Jane Porter punches a bunch of gods. The Blu-ray coms with the new Mandarin-focused short "All Hail the King," a look at Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and other assorted goodies.

• Harry Potter: Hogwarts Collection

All eight movies on 31 discs, including a bonus disc of three hours of new extras, including featurettes on the kids' stunt doubles, the films' design, an extended version of the "last day on set" doc, and more.

• The Shadow: Collector's Edition

On Blu-ray. Somewhere on Shout Factory's marketing team, a poor executive is thinking, "Couldn't Alec Baldwin have written that letter any other week?!"

• 300 Spartans

The original 1961 film about the battle at Thermopylae, on Blu-ray and given a cover to hopefully trick non-discerning purchasers that they're buying 300.

• Mr. Nobody

Jared Leto is the 118-year-old, last mortal man on Earth because everybody else achieved immortality and left Jared Leto behind. That's got to be somewhat hurtful.

• Love, Election + Chocolate

A new student president vows to get rid of all school clubs that are secretly just ways to slack off, but one student will fight for his right to do nothing. It's an anime, obviously.

• Dallos

The first ever OVA — original video animation — in Japan, directed by Ghost in the Shell's Mamoru Oshii back in 1983, in which a group of moon miners rebel against the authoritarian Earth government. Like a more down-to-Earth Gundam (no pun intended).

• My Dog, The Space Traveler

Some guy's dog is a space traveler.

• Robo Croc

Self-explanatory. I hate this film without having seen it, though, because they so easily could have made RoboFop instead, and that would have been awesome.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​Discover the terrors of space in the comfort of your own home

You are suffering from womb envy onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com You are suffering from womb envy

Growing up in the modern world it's impossible not to have knowledge of the famous Freudian concept of penis envy. Less well-known is the concept of womb envy, and even less well-known than that is the woman who came up with it.

Karen Horney (pronounced horn-nigh) was born in Germany in 1885, a little less than thirty years after Sigmund Freud was born in nearby Austria. By the time she was twenty-one, Freud was a renounced psychologist, and role model for a whole generation of analysts. Horney was determined to be part of that generation. Although she agreed with Freud's belief in the importance of dreams, the unconscious, and the way a person's childhood shapes their adulthood, she diverged sharply from Freud on his analysis of women.

Freud believed that the neuroses of women were caused by biology, coupled with family life. Women grew up with brother and envied them their anatomy. A young girl, according to Freud, feels herself incomplete when she sees her brother's penis, and comes to develop penis envy. Karen Horney believed that Freud neglected men's and women's different places in society when he was analyzing female neuroses. Women weren't desperately pining for a penis they could never attain - other than by acquiring a husband or a son. They envied men their power in society, and Horney saw no reason why women could not or should not attain that power.

It is puzzling, then, that Horney came up with the idea of "womb envy." It seems to undercut her own position, and take psychology back to biology, instead of outwards towards society. Still, it provides a pleasing symmetry when it comes to antiquated psychological notions. "Womb envy" arises, Horney states, when men realize that they are not as in control of their lives as they thought they were. They want a son to carry on their name. They want a family. They're powerless to do that on their own. Achieving their goals depends mostly on the labor, and control, of someone else's body. They envy women's ability to produce the life, and they envy women's ability to be certain of lineage. No mother doubts the maternity of a child. Fathers aren't so lucky.

Of course women can't get babies without men. So for the moment it looks like we're all stuck envying each other.

[Via Karen Horney: Neurotic Needs and Trends, What is Womb Envy?]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com You are suffering from womb envy

​Relive the trauma of the Game of Thrones' Red Wedding all over again! onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​Relive the trauma of the Game of Thrones' Red Wedding all over again!

Kudos to HBO for this marketing campaign for the Game of Thrones season three set, which leads this week's home video releases. There's barely any show footage, just videos of people reacting to the infamous "Red Wedding" sequence in shock which will sell more copies than a regular trailer ever could.

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Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season

With countless featurettes, audio commentaries, deleted and extended scenes, the requisite guide to people, places and events, and so forth. What I'm most excited for, though, is hearing Sansa, Bran and Arya's new version of the opening theme.

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The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Criterion Collection heads back to the Wes Anderson well, thus ensuring they have the money to release another 50 obscure, foreign, important movies. Works for me.

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Dragonball Z: Season 2

Beginning the Namek/Frieza stuff. Remember, this release is on Blu-ray, but has been rec-ropped to fit widescreen TVs. Which is the price you pay if you want an anime series made in the '90s to suddenly become widescreen. Of course, you could just pick up Dragonball Z Kai, which is widescreen, but not the original show. Because the original show was made in the early '90s. When no one did widescreen.

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Darkman: Collector's Edition

Sam Raimi's cult classic superhero movie (as opposed to his non-cult, fairly recent superhero movies) gets a super-special edition from Shout. Even Liam Neeson returns to talk about it in the extras, and he's both proud of it and happy with it! Good stuff!

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Robotics: Notes: Part One

Two Japanese high school kids want to build a robot based on their favorite anime, and receive help help from a sentient AI — but its information doesn't come without a price.

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Beware the Batman: Shadows of Gotham: Season One Part One

Although Cartoon Network still hasn't resumed airing Beware the Batman, you can finally pick up this release of the first 13 episodes, many of which haven't aired yet (...and almost certainly never will.).

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Naruto Shippuden the Movie: Blood Prison

When Naruto is wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit, he gets sent to special ninja prison.

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Hellbenders 3D

Some demons are so powerful that the only way to send them back to hell is to let them possess someone, and then kill that someone. So a group of rogue priests purposefully debauch themselves to ensure that if the need arises, they can be possessed, killed and consigned to hell in order to rid the world of these demons. That sounds AWESOME.

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Battle of the Damned

Dolph Lundgren and robots fight zombies and a very, very small special effects budget.

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Jormungand: The Complete First Series

An international arms dealer and her cold-blooded child soldier travel the world for money and vengeance, which sounds incredibly messed up, even for anime.

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Apocalypse Pompeii

Asylum's Pompeii rip-off. I'm mentioning it solely to comment on the fact that I love how the Pompeii trailers make it appear that Jon Snow is personally going to be fighting the volcano and could, theoretically, win the battle.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​Relive the trauma of the Game of Thrones' Red Wedding all over again!

This chart ought to make the publishing industry very nervous onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This chart ought to make the publishing industry very nervous

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Wool author Hugh Howey has been beating the drum for self-publishing for a long time — but now he claims to have data to back it up. His new report on author earnings contains some startling figures, but none more so than the above chart showing indie authors beating traditional publishers on unit sales.

As Howey himself admits, the data in his new "Author Earnings" report is incomplete at best, because publishers and booksellers (including Amazon) don't release raw book sales figures. You can find out exactly how much a movie made in its opening weekend, and how many people supposedly watched last night's TV shows — but book sale data is secret.

According to Howey, this new data comes from "an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data." The data all appears to be just for Amazon, which means you have to trust Amazon's accuracy on top of the accuracy of crunching the numbers. And there's also the fact that looking at unit sales is possibly misleading — if you sell 1,000 copies of a book at $1 each, you might be getting way more unit sales than an ebook going for $10 each, but the revenue will still be low.

But Howey also includes some charts that claim to break down author income by publishing type, and they show a number of self-published authors making hundreds of thousands, or even over a million, dollars per year.

Howey adds:

What is presented here is but one snapshot of the publishing revolution as it stands today. That revolution isn't over. These reports can be run so long as books are ranked. Our hope is that the future brings more transparency, not less. Other artistic endeavors have far greater data at hand, and practitioners of those arts and those who aspire to follow in their footsteps are able to make better-informed decisions. The expectations of these artists and athletes are couched in realism to a degree that the writing profession does not currently enjoy.

Responding to this report, book critic and regular Guardian contributor Damien G. Walter says what we're really seeing isn't just ebooks cannibalizing print books, but an example of "the principle of digital abundance" — people who wouldn't ever have entered a bookstore are snapping up ebooks on Amazon.

Adds Walter:

Digital books are abundant. They are unlimited. And the economics of abundance simply does not play by the same rules as the economics of scarcity.

The potential readership of ebooks is also abundant. Not unlimited, but in such large numbers it can almost be considered as such. Ebooks sell through smartphones and tablets, computers and the internet. Integrating ebooks in to the digital marketplaces of Amazon, Apple and Google has made them a mass consumer item in a way they simply weren't through bookshops. And the lower prices of ebooks at £1-£3 makes them impulse buys. Pull this together and you have a vastly increased book buying public measured, not in millions, but billions of people. The digital market for ebooks is a massive boomtown. And it's also something of a jungle, that magnifies the commercial pressures of the pre-existing print market.

Genres work as a marketing tool in print because they hook buyers who aren't experts on books. This effect is vastly magnified in ebooks because so much of the expanded audience are only occasional readers. They're people browsing the Amazon store on their iPad and impulse purchasing, not just books but many things. "oh a book about Atlantis for 99p…buy!" And with literally billions of people doing this, it's hardly surprising that a lot of writers as selling a lot of books.

And Walter argues that the new and rapidly changing ebook market will have to increase its quality levels soon, or risk collapsing.

Both Howey's report, and Walter's response, are well worth reading.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This chart ought to make the publishing industry very nervous

Have you ever gotten high on Derbisol? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Have you ever gotten high on Derbisol?

If you have, you are either living in South Korea, or lying, or possibly both. Derbisol is rarely discussed now, but at one point it was supposed to be the drug that caught out the kind of people who lie about taking drugs.

Derbisol is a debatable urban legend. Exactly what it is, and how it's used, is a mystery to most, including the people who are supposed to have used it. It gained fame when it was revealed as a drug that people sometimes add to a list of drugs in surveys to ascertain widespread drug use. After seeing survey after survey of teens that showed that the kids were taking everything they could get their hands on every day of the week, it occurred to researchers that that maybe kids weren't avatars of chemical depravity. Maybe they were just liars.

One research group proposed adding a fictitious drug to the list of real ones, and asked kids if they did that drug. Derbisol (which appears at least now to be an actual drug in Korea), was added, and a few fanciful street names, like DB and Derbs, were made up. In the end, a little over 18 percent of kids said they had used a fictitious drug. That wasn't all they (weren't) doing. The Derbisol group had a much higher rate of reported drug use than the non-Derbisol group for all drugs.

Since then, Derbisol seems to have become a parallel legend. It's got out that it's a fictitious drug, and other fake drugs have subsequently been invented. At the same time, it seems to have gotten a minor street reputation. One teacher wrote about her students taunting her with the necessarily-sketchy details of what Derbisol is and how one did it, which made her dig until a healthcare worker let her in on the secret. It's a clever idea, at least. Perhaps it could be pushed even further. There must of been kids who were lying about some of their experiences with drugs but didn't happen to lie about Derbisol. I wonder how a list of half-real, half-fake drugs would come out.

[Via SSWR, Powerful Classroom Stories From Accomplished Teachers.]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Have you ever gotten high on Derbisol?

A rare and fascinating look at the making of the 1989 Batman movie onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A rare and fascinating look at the making of the 1989 Batman movie

You can keep your Dark Knights and Tumblers. For my money, the best Batman movie is still Tim Burton's 1989 version starring Michael Keaton, and this 30-minute documentary, shot during filming, reminds us all how ground-breaking the movie was.

How contemporary is it? Well, Tim Burton is portrayed as a wild Hollywood iconoclast, which is hilarious now. Also, it's hosted by Robert Wuhl (he played the reporter Know), who was a pretty popular comedian back then. But seeing Keaton and Kim Basinger and Burton talk about this superhero movie as this crazy, enormous, brand-new entity — well, it's a marvelous look back at a great film and a very happy reminder of how far we've come.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A rare and fascinating look at the making of the 1989 Batman movie

A spectacular new impact crater appears on Mars onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A spectacular new impact crater appears on Mars

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NASA's Mars Orbiter has discovered a brand new impact crater on the Martian surface — and it's a beauty.

The crater measures about 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter. The image, snapped by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows a large, rayed blast zone that painted the surface with a pattern of bright and dark tones. Because of the dusty terrain, the fresh crater appears in blue in the enhanced color of the image; NASA says this is due to the removal of the reddish dust in that area.

The impact threw material, or ejecta, as far as 9.3 miles (15 kilometers).

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The new crater is located at 3.7 degrees north latitude, 53.4 degrees east longitude — so set your Martian GPS.

Using before-and-after images, NASA believes the impact must have occurred some time between July 2010 and May 2012. This particular image was captured on November 19, 2013, but was only released to the public today.

Mars is struck by at least 200 celestial objects each year.

[ NASA JPL ]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A spectacular new impact crater appears on Mars

The Best Thing to Happen to Agents of SHIELD onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Best Thing to Happen to Agents of SHIELD

And no, I'm not talking about the shocking event at the end of last night's episode. I'm talking about what transpires in this clip from earlier in "The Tracks." This feels like a decent step forward for a show that has struggled to make people connect with its characters. Spoilers ahead...

At last, we're getting more hints that Agent Coulson may not be the total paragon the show tried to sell us on, in its early installments. The whole theme of the first batch of SHIELD stories was that Coulson was the wise and noble patriarch of this ragtag crew of spies and ubergeeks, in spite of the lingering mystery of his resurrection.

So the hint that Coulson may have flaws, and that his leadership isn't perfect, is pretty welcome. In general, the more actual flaws these people start to display, the easier it is to care about what happens to them.

In the clip above, Grant Ward is raising the possibility that Coulson's fixation with tracking down the mysterious Clairvoyant has gotten "personal," since the Clairvoyant had Coulson captured and tortured for information about Coulson's resurrection.

And we also learn that since Coulson told Skye that when she was a baby, everybody thought she was a dangerous artifact and a whole village and some SHIELD agents died to protect her, Skye has been extra driven and obsessive about trying to prove herself and be helpful, and find Ian Quinn so they can track down the Clairvoyant.

So the episode neatly sets up the possibility that Coulson's vendetta, combined with his decision to share info with Skye, is responsible for her decision to go into a house full of thugs at the end of the episode and get herself shot a couple times.

If Skye does die, then it's on Coulson. Of course, the preview for the very next episode shows the gang tracking down a "cure" for her. Plus it would seem weird for us to have been told "OMG SKYE HAS SUPERPOWERS" in such a blatant way, only to have her randomly die of a gunshot. What do you want to bet her superpower has something to do with getting shot in the stomach and not dying?

But even assuming Skye lives, this is an interesting indictment of Coulson, whose genius is supposed to be motivating (or maybe manipulating) people. The notion that he's gotten either ruthless or sloppy is a fascinating one. The bit at the end of the episode where Grant says he doesn't blame himself, he blames Coulson, is a nice final gutpunch.

And meanwhile, the "Grant sleeping with Melinda" storyline continues to simmer nicely, with Grant finding out that Coulson knows about them. I loved the scene where Grant brings this up with Coulson, who first threatens to send Grant to the icy base where they're keeping the Abomination if his personal attachments get in the way, and then chides Grant for insisting it's just sex but being unable to say the word "sex." Nice stuff.

The rest of the episode is pretty much a by-the-numbers "operation gone wrong" story. They're trying to track down Ian Quinn, who is connected to the Clairvoyant, by following a shipment of super-tech from Cyber-Tech, and they get pwned by the Cyber-Tech goons. The whole thing is told in a quasi-Rashomon style where we see the op from the point of view of almost every person, which adds to the suspense but also feels a bit repetitive.

In the end, the McGuffin turns out to be a cyborg leg for Mike Peterson, who's now well on his way to becoming the cyborg Deathlok, under the direct control of the Clairvoyant. He's either brainwashed or just cowed by the threat of an exploding eyeball, so he follows orders without question — though he seems perturbed at the idea of killing Skye, which luckily isn't in his orders. Nobody except for Skye sees Mike at Ian Quinn's evil compound.

Oh, and since we're talking about things that are working on Agents of SHIELD — principally, characters like Coulson, Ward and May starting to develop real character flaws and complexity — here's one thing that still isn't quite working: the humor. A lot of the humor in last night's episode revolved around the team "going undercover" on the train, including stuff like Simmons coming up with an elaborate backstory about Coulson being her neglectful, sex-worker-visiting banker father. It wasn't terrible, but there weren't any bits that really stuck in my mind as especially funny.

That said, I'm way more invested in these characters than I was a while ago. I even hope Skye makes it in one piece.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Best Thing to Happen to Agents of SHIELD

The military has developed a robotic convoy that doesn't need humans onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The military has developed a robotic convoy that doesn't need humans

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The U.S. Army, working with Lockheed Martin, has successfully demonstrated the ability of fully autonomous convoys to operate in urban environments and under difficult conditions. It's all part of the military's ongoing effort to eliminate soldiers from the equation.

The demonstration took place at Fort Hood, and it's part of the Army and Marine Corp's Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS) program. The successful test marked the completion of the program's Capabilities Advancement Demonstration (CAD). The AMAS system is aimed at augmenting the safety and security of human drivers in a convoy mission, while the purpose of CAD is to completely eliminate the need for soldiers to occupy and/or drive these vehicles in warzones or other hazardous areas.

During the test, various driverless vehicles — like the Army's M915 truck and a Palletized Loading System (PLS) vehicle — had to navigate hazards and obstacles that a real-world convoy would encounter, such as road intersections, oncoming traffic, stalled and passing vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic circles in both urban and rural test areas.

According to Lockheed, the software and hardware driving the system performed "exactly as designed."

To work, the integrated system uses a high performance LIDAR sensor, a second GPS receiver, and additional algorithms. The system comes in the form a kit that can be installed on virtually any military vehicle. Gotta say, that's impressive.

On the Pentagon side of things, the system was developed by the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC). Given that the word "tank" is in the name, you can probably guess where this technology is eventually going.

"We are very pleased with the results of the demonstration, because it adds substantial weight to the Army's determination to get robotic systems into the hands of the warfighter," noted TARDEC technical manager Bernard Theisen in a statement.

Wow, Lockheed is busy bringing the future to a battlefield near you.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The military has developed a robotic convoy that doesn't need humans

​The time Batman fought evil with the power of racism onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​The time Batman fought evil with the power of racism

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Batman's had a pretty spectacular career, but even the Caped Crusader has a few moments he'd like to forget. Chief among them would probably be his first live-action excursion, a serial released in 1943 that featured Bats squaring off against a mad Japanese scientist/horrible stereotype. So if you want to check out the adventures of Racist Batman, this week's home video releases is happy to oblige.

• Gotham City Serials: Batman/Batman & Robin

Two more things about these serials: 1) They're both 15 chapters each, and are more than four hours long. 2) Even the narrator in the first serial is racist. From Wikipedia:

Early narration in the first chapter (minute 9:20-9:30), referencing the U.S. government policy of Japanese American internment to explain the abandoned neighborhood of Daka's headquarters, sets the racial tone for the serial: "This was part of a foreign land, transplanted bodily to America and known as little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs, it has become virtually a ghost street."

Holy crap.

• About Time

The director of Love Actually brings this romantic comedy about a young man who discovers he can travel through time and uses it mostly to hook up with a girl.

• Escape Plan

Braves heroes try to lock up Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a futuristic, inescapable prison before they have a chance to make The Expendables 3.

• The White Queen: Season One

In the 15th century, three ruthless women play the game of thrones during England's "War of the Roses," and they play dirty in this Starz series.

• Justice League: War

Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other DC heroes come together for the first time to battle an interstellar invasion by Darkseid.

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Season Three

Thirteen episodes of ponies ponying around, presumably.

• Hawking

This PBS documentary chronicles the life, the work, and the discoveries of beyond brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking, as told in his own words.

• Fruits Basket: The Complete Series

An extremely charming, bizarrely named shojo anime series about a girl who meets a family whose members all turn into the animals of the Chinese zodiac when touched by a member of the opposite sex.

• The Tick: The Complete Series

Get the complete series of the great, late live-action superhero comedy for less than $10. Truly the world is a poorer place for not having Batmanuel in it. And at least he wasn't racist…

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​The time Batman fought evil with the power of racism

Today, NASA pays homage to its fallen astronauts with an Agency-wide "Day of Remembrance." onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Today, NASA pays homage to its fallen astronauts with an Agency-wide "Day of Remembrance."

"Fire, we've got a fire in here." - Apollo 1

On January 27, 1967 Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee perished after a fire broke out in the craft during a test. Read…

Long-Forgotten Photographs Reveal Challenger Disaster As It Happened

Michael Hindes of West Springfield, MA, was sorting through boxes of his grandparents' old photographs when he happened upon 26 harrowing photos … Read…

Remembering the Crew of Space Shuttle Columbia

Ten years ago today, we lost Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew. Here, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin salutes as NASA Administrator Charles Bolden… Read…

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Today, NASA pays homage to its fallen astronauts with an Agency-wide "Day of Remembrance."

This sound system is so powerful no human could survive hearing it onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This sound system is so powerful no human could survive hearing it

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Tremble at the sight of this huge sound horn inside the Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF). It's an ESA-built device that subjects satellites to the same levels of noise produced by rockets as they take off and fly through the atmosphere.

Located in Noordwijk, Netherlands, and part of ESA's ESTEDC Test Center, it's one of several spaceflight simulation facilities.

One wall of the sound chamber, which stands 36 feet (11 m) wide by 30 feet (9 m) deep and 54 feet (16.4 m) high, is equipped with a set of enormous sound horns. The nitrogen that's shot through the horns can produce a range of noise up to more than 154 decibels — which is as loud as multiple jets taking off.

To ensure safety, LEAF only works when all the doors are closed. The room has steel-reinforced concrete walls to contain the noise. The walls are also coated with an epoxy resin to reflect noise, producing a uniform sound field within the chamber.

[ ESA ]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This sound system is so powerful no human could survive hearing it

Humans have been controlling fire for at least 300,000 years onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Humans have been controlling fire for at least 300,000 years

Archaeologists working at Qusem Cave in Israel have uncovered a 300,000 year-old hearth. It's the earliest evidence of repeated fire building over a continuous period by humans.

Anthropologists estimate that humans first discovered fire about a million years ago. What we don't know, however, is when our ancestors first starting using it on a regular basis, for example, to cook meals. But the discovery of a 300,000 year-old hearth at an archaeological site near Tel Aviv sets the clock to at least that far back in time.

The findings, now published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, show that the hearth was 6.5 feet in diameter at its widest point and used repeatedly over time. In addition to the hearth, the cave in which it was found contained a thick deposit of wood ash at its center. And using infrared spectroscopy, the archaeologists determined that bits of bone and soil that had been heated to very high temperatures were mixed in with the ash.

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Further testing showed a great many micro-strata — a sign that the hearth was used repeatedly over time.

The area also contained large numbers of flint tools that were used for cutting meat and large numbers of burnt animal bones. The layout of the cave also indicated that it was a sort of base camp that a large group of prehistoric humans returned to repeatedly.

"These findings help us to fix an important turning point in the development of human culture — that in which humans first began to regularly use fire both for cooking meat and as a focal point — a sort of campfire — for social gatherings," noted lead archaeologist Ruth Shahack-Gross in a statement. "They also tell us something about the impressive levels of social and cognitive development of humans living some 300,000 years ago."

The researchers theorize that these findings are signs of substantial changes in human behavior and biology that started with the appearance in the region of new forms of culture about 400,000 years ago.

[ Weizmann Institute | Top image: Quest for Fire; inset image: Shahack-Gross et al. ]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Humans have been controlling fire for at least 300,000 years

LIFE unveils unpublished photos of Allied troops fighting in Italy onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com LIFE unveils unpublished photos of Allied troops fighting in Italy

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To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Anzio, LIFE has published a series of previously unseen photos chronicling the gruesome stalemate and lethal violence that characterized the operation.

All images and captions Life/George Silk.

Called Operation Shingle, the attack at Anzio occurred six months after the Allied invasion of Sicily. On January 22, 1944, American and British troops made their amphibious landing at Anzio, a mere 30 miles south of Rome.

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American hospital tents being erected below ground level for protection from enemy shelling.

But the Allies failed to seize the early initiative, resulting in a World War One-like statement that latest for four months — a campaign that saw some of the fiercest, most prolonged fighting in World War II's European theatre.

American Military Policeman Ray E. Kellogg directs traffic in bomb-shattered Anzio.

By the end of it, the Allies suffered over 66,200 casualties (of which 37,000 were noncombat casualties). German figures were comparable.

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American soldiers relax with their mascot, "Axis Sally," which was "liberated" during the battle for control of the Anzio beachhead.

The unpublished photos were taken by LIFE photographer George Silk,

a New Zealand native who covered the war from the North African desert, through Rome, up to Belgian's forests and into Germany itself, spent months with the Allies after they landed at Anzio, chronicling what LIFE magazine at one point characterized as a "slow, maddening, fruitless battle." In late May, the Allies finally managed a breakout assault, supported by artillery and air power; in early June, Allied troops entered Rome virtually unopposed.

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American Military Policeman Ray E. Kellogg directs traffic in bomb-shattered Anzio.

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Sign posted at intersection in the American sector.

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American commanders in underground headquarters, housed in a centuries-old network of catacombs.

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American troops.

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American soldiers sight a mortar from a dugout behind road embankment during the fight.

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Ducking to avoid German fire.

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From photographer George Silk's notes: "William P. Chirolas displays things that men in M Company don't like: Dextrose tablets . . . Barbasol . . . Fleetwood cigarettes . . . processed American cheese . . ."

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Wounded American soldier treated at battalion headquarters while awaiting an ambulance during the fighting.

Smoke rises from the German lines.

Much more at LIFE, including photos of Anzio that did make it into the magazine. And be sure to check out these unpublished color photos of WWII American bomber crews.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com LIFE unveils unpublished photos of Allied troops fighting in Italy

Mesmerizing videos show the individual trails of birds in flight onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Mesmerizing videos show the individual trails of birds in flight

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The group behaviors of birds are fascinating to watch, from the swooping arcs of swallows to the incredible murmurations of starlings. These extruded time videos give a bit more form to those movements, tracing the paths of different birds through the sky.

Rhode Island School of Design professor Dennis Hlynsky's Small Brains on Mass project uses video imaging to show the patterns in various movements of animal groups. He explains his process on his website:

There are no digital additions to the video. They are processed by stacking a sequence of frames and adding the darkest pixels together. The frame at the beginning of the stack is dropped and the next frame in sequence is added to the end of the stack. This process is repeated until the entire video clip is rendered. I do not use time lapse in the traditional sense of the word but offer a glimpse seconds long of the paths these creatures take. I find each "flock" has a form, a rhythm, and pattern to the glyphs they leave as they perambulate.

Hlynsky's videos of starlings are especially spectacular:

But he has also tracked the paths of swallows:

Crows:

Laughing Gulls:

Pigeons:

Black Vultures:

And many more. Hlynsky's videos aren't just limited to birds, either. For example, here he has tracked the frenzied march of ants:

You can see all of his videos, both from his nature series and his other projects, on Vimeo.

Small Brains on Mass [via Colossal]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Mesmerizing videos show the individual trails of birds in flight

Artist embroiders portraits into his own flesh—and then tears them out onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Artist embroiders portraits into his own flesh—and then tears them out

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Some people get portrait tattoos, but artist David Catá has a different way to pay tribute to the people who have marked his life—by marking his hand. He embroiders their faces into the palm of his left hand, and then pulls them out in cringe-inducing fashion.

Catá calls his Under the Skin project an "autobiographical diary." He stitches portraits of family members, friends, teachers, anyone who has been important in his life into his skin. "Their lives are interwoven with mine to build my story," he says on his website. As you can see from his photographs, most of the time he just pierces the topmost layer of skin, but some of those portraits do leave marks.

You can watch Catá remove one of his embroidered portraits, but be warned, the video may make you squirm:

Under the Skin [David Catá via Design Taxi]

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Artist embroiders portraits into his own flesh—and then tears them out

Scientists set a new world record for the longest echo onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists set a new world record for the longest echo

Working in a unique underground fuel depot, acoustic scientists fired a pistol to hear how long the reverb would last. The resulting echo rang on and on and on — completely obliterating the previous record.

One minute and 52 seconds. That's the new standard, shattering the previous one — set in 1970 at the Hamilton Mausoleum in Lanarkshire — by an entire 15 seconds.

The test was conducted at the Inchindown tunnels located in Scotland near Invergordon. The oil tanks were dug into the hillside in the late 1930s to conceal and protect them from enemy attack, namely the Germans who were re-arming at the time. The tank was designed to hold 6.7 million gallons (25.5 million litres) of fuel and has walls 17.7 inches (45 cm) thick. The space is about twice the length of a football field, 30 feet (9 meters) wide and 44 feet (13.5 meters) high.

The shots (which were blanks) were fired by Allan Kilpatrick about a third of the way into one of the massive storage tanks. He works for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) and regularly conducts tours of the historic facility. The reverberations were recorded by microphones a third of the way down at the opposite end.

"Never before had I heard such a rush of echoes and reverberation," he said. "My initial reaction was disbelief — the reverberation times were just too long."

[BBC | Independent | Image: RCAHMS]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists set a new world record for the longest echo

Did a fruit-rich diet kill off the world's largest apes? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Did a fruit-rich diet kill off the world's largest apes?

At 10 feet tall and up to 1,200 pounds, the aptly-named Gigantopithecus blacki were the largest apes the world has ever seen. These beasts went extinct some 100,000 years ago, and surprisingly, they may have been taken down by a diet that was too rich in fruit.

No doubt, these animals were huge. Paleontologists aren't entirely sure what they looked like, or how they moved around, but based on the little fossil evidence they have it's likely Gigantopithecus walked around on all fours like gorillas and chimps.

Recently, Yingqi Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing analyzed 17 newly discovered Gigantopithecus teeth (which is nothing new; more than 1,300 teeth have been recovered since 1935). The samples were discovered in China — the former stomping grounds of Gigantopithecus — and date back around 400,000 years ago.

But looking at the teeth, Zhang noticed something quite odd. New Scientist explains:

Many of the teeth were eroded. This poor dental hygiene hints at a problem with their diet, says Zhang. "There was something wrong before Gigantopithecus's extinction, and I think it comes from the food."

The ape may have had to switch diet as the climate cooled and its preferred food – probably plants like bamboo – became rare. The teeth suggest it turned to less-nutritious fruit rich in enamel-eroding acids, says Zhang.

Yikes, take that fruitarians.

Read the entire study at Quaternary International: "New 400–320 ka Gigantopithecus blacki remains from Hejiang Cave, Chongzuo City, Guangxi, South China."

Image: Natural History Museum

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Did a fruit-rich diet kill off the world's largest apes?