The history of physics is the history of modern civilization.
How did humanity go from a tribe governed by superstition to a species on the hunt for the Higgs Boson and the deepest secrets of the cosmos? In The Universe in a Nutshell, theoretical physicist and prolific author Michio Kaku — who has previously helped us unravel the mysteries of time — explores why “the history of physics is the history of modern civilization.” From the Big Bang to E=mc2 to the latest bleeding-edge advances in string theory and quantum mechanics, Kaku offers a concise and accessible history of physics, while shining a light on the discipline’s promise to bring us closer to the secrets of existence.
Almost everything you see in your living room, almost everything you see at a modern hospital, at some point or other, can be traced to a physicist.
Read more and view the video HERE.
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Brain Learns While You Snooze – Science News.
Healthy living into old age can add up to 6 years to your life.
Fairness can evolve by imitating one’s neighbor: physicists.
Lance Armstrong decision is bad news for drugs cheats – life – 30 August 2012 – New Scientist.
Wealthy families obey economics rather than evolution – health – 30 August 2012 – New Scientist.
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The Soviet pavilion as seen from the Nazi Germany pavilion at the International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris, 1937.
Via.
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Software Meant to Fight Crime Is Used to Spy on Dissidents
SAN FRANCISCO — Morgan Marquis-Boire works as a Google engineer and Bill Marczak is earning a Ph.D. in computer science. But this summer, the two men have been moonlighting as detectives, chasing an elusive surveillance tool from Bahrain across five continents.
What they found was the widespread use of sophisticated, off-the-shelf computer espionage software by governments with questionable records on human rights. While the software is supposedly sold for use only in criminal investigations, the two came across evidence that it was being used to target political dissidents.
The software proved to be the stuff of a spy film: it can grab images of computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The two men said they discovered mobile versions of the spyware customized for all major mobile phones.
But what made the software especially sophisticated was how well it avoided detection. Its creators specifically engineered it to elude antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, F-Secure and others.
The software has been identified as FinSpy, one of the more elusive spyware tools sold in the growing market of off-the-shelf computer surveillance technologies that give governments a sophisticated plug-in monitoring operation. Research now links it to servers in more than a dozen countries, including Turkmenistan, Brunei and Bahrain, although no government acknowledges using the software for surveillance purposes.
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Daytona Beach, Florida, circa 1906. “Beach Street, with souvenir shops.”
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Google Translate “Google’s free online language translation service instantly translates text and web pages. This translator supports: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish.”
In 1893, Mrs. Grover Cleveland, Frances Folsom Cleveland, became the first presidential wife to give birth at the White House (girl, Esther). The first child born in the White House, though, was the granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson in 1806: Jefferson’s daughter, Patsy (Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr.) gave birth to a son named for James Madison. – Provided by Reference.com
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HOBO HISTORY
In hobo-land, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He had learned the futility of telic endeavour, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance. Jack London Quite simply, a hobo is a fierce individual who traveled at their leisure, working when they could, ignoring things like railroad tickets, taxes and common social practices such as showering. Generally found in the United States of America, hobos have limited ambition. For some people, a life of aimless, ceaseless wandering is an attractive one. For others, the life of a hobo is a necessary one, left as a last resort due to the national economy. Owing to their aversion to authority figures, hobos are largely undocumented in American history, which has contributed to their elusive character. Unfortunately, in all probability, the number of hobos in America has steadily declined since the Great Depression, owing partly to an increase in prosperity and partly to the decline of freight travel.
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Hot DOG surprise reveals new stage in galaxy evolution – space – 30 August 2012 – New Scientist.
Yikes. Supervolcano found under Hong Kong • The Register.
US energy independence by 2020 is a pipe dream – science-in-society – 30 August 2012 – New Scientist.
Information overload? | e! Science News.
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Bionic Eye Restores Partial Sight to Blind Woman
An Australian woman with severe vision loss is now able to see some shapes, thanks to a bionic “eye” implanted during a simple operation. When the device was turned on a month after the surgery, the patient reported seeing a flash of light for the first time since she lost her sight due to an inherited condition called retinitis pigmentosa. The device, which was inserted next to the retina within her eye, works by stimulating the retina with electrical impulses, which then pass back to the brain to create an image.
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Little Slaughterhouse On The Prairie: The ghoulish tale of the family of serial killers known as the ‘Bloody Benders’
With its gentle drama and quaint childhood adventures, Little House On The Prairie painted a picture of wholesome family life in 19th century Midwest America.Set in the God-fearing town of Independence, Kansas, plotlines rarely ventured beyond the realms of Sunday School and town gossip and real trouble meant somebody being late for dinner.But behind these tales of youthful innocence that brought fame to the town across the world, lurks a ghoulish story of real-life abduction and serial killing that author Laura Ingalls Wilder neglected to mention.Some 17 miles south of Independence, the township of Osage became the scene of a brutal campaign of murder by a family that became known as the Bloody Benders.
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Lennon signing Chapman’s Double Fantasy album a few hours before the shooting while Chapman looks on. 8 December 1980
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DNA Unveils Enigmatic Denisovans
Digit DNAA replica of a partial Denisovan finger bone, placed on its corresponding position on a person’s hand, emphasizes the small size of this ancient find. Scientists have retrieved a comprehensive set of genetic instructions from the actual Denisovan finger fossil. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Genetic data of unprecedented completeness have been pulled from the fossil remains of a young Stone Age woman. The DNA helps illuminate the relationships among her group — ancient Siberians known as Denisovans — Neandertals, and humans.
The Denisovan’s genetic library suggest that she came from a small population that expanded rapidly as it moved south through Asia, says a team led by Matthias Meyer and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Denisovans passed genes to Papua New Guineans but not to Asians, Europeans or South Americans, the researchers report online August 30 in Science. That’s in line with previous evidence that Denisovans contributed to the ancestry of present-day Australian aborigines and Melanesians.
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Thomas Edison Patents Kinetoscope in the US (This day in 1897)
Developed by Edison’s assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, the kinetoscope was a precursor to the modern motion-picture projector. It works through a phenomenon known as “persistence of vision,” in which a sequence of images creates the illusion of motion. Initially, Edison hoped to synchronize the images with sound, but he was unable to achieve this. The kinetoscope was designed to be viewed by one person at a time. Why did Edison supposedly balk at the idea of projecting films before larger audiences?
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Eerie Video Captures Footage Inside Hurricane Isaac’s Eye ? Hurricane Videos | LiveScience.
No more sneezing, allergen free house plants | Science Codex.
Mexico wastewater project uncovers Ice Age bones.
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Electric Glove Helps Police Quell Rioters
Electric glove in the Sept 1935 issue of Popular Science
With protests ramping up this week at the Republican National Convention, Tampa police have been out on city streets in full riot gear. Police outnumber protesters in Tampa 4 to 1 but thankfully there hasn’t been any threat of violence (yet). Should things get hairy, the modern American police officer has many a weapon at his disposal to subdue protesters, perhaps none more controversial than the taser.
Electroshock weapons have become more and more popular in the past decade in police departments across the country. Proponents of electroshock weapons claim that tasers actually save lives by giving police a non-lethal option to subdue citizens. Detractors claim tasers are used excessively and are more lethal than their manufacturers claim.
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Marilyn Monroe
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Bionic eye brings amazed woman some sight – Times Of India.
‘Talking’ brain found better at math – UPI.com.
Rare, elusive marine fish observed – UPI.com.
Einstein’s space ‘ripples’ confirmed – UPI.com.
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NEW SOUTH JOURNALISM: Fact-Checking Feature
I work on and off as a fact-checker at the most accurate magazine in America. I think so, at least. The checker assigned to this piece may come up with a list of competitors for that title—and in that case I’ll say that, having either been fact-checked by or been a fact-checker at most of them, she can count this fact as my own original reporting. My editor will probably agree and, if she pushes it, tell her that anyway “most accurate” is a qualitative evaluation, like “best defensive shortstop,” or “hottest freshman.” He won’t say, though it’ll be implicit, that the whole idea of The Oxford American assigning an essay about fact-checking works better if the guy they got to write it works as part of the best research department in the country—which makes me seem like an authority—and that it’d be a shame to lose the superlative when the magazine in question isn’t even going to be named. Superlatives, if you pay attention, are how magazines make stories seem worth reading, and not even the checkers at the most accurate magazine in America can fight off all the spurious ones.
A few months ago I wouldn’t have believed that anyone outside New York would care seven thousand words-worth about what I do there, but fact-checking has recently become a voguish topic among the New Yorker-reading and NPR-listening set.
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Funeral Company Seeks to Desecrate Site of Nazi Death Camp
The Polish funeral company Styks recently announced plans to construct a commercial crematorium next to the site of the former Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek.
The Anti- Defamation League sent a letter to the mayor of Lublin, located in eastern Poland, calling the proposal “outrageously insensitive,” and urged the city to adopt new planning rules that would ensure that the area around the camp would not be used to build the facility.
“It is difficult to adequately express the pain and insult which will result if this project goes forward,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor from Poland who has visited the site on numerous occasions. “The very idea that a company would consider locating a modern cremation facility adjacent to the sacred ground dedicated to the memory of those who suffered unspeakably and to the more than hundreds of thousands of Jews and others killed within its gates is reprehensible.”
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As Told By The Egg
Studies are suggesting that sperm aren’t completely in control when it comes to fertilization.David M. Phillips/Photo Researchers, Inc.
Whether the chicken or the egg came first doesn’t occupy biologist Luca Jovine’s thoughts too much. Animals have been laying eggs for millions of years, after all. Over time, evolution has reshaped both the eggs and the creatures hatched from them.
Instead, Jovine spends his time unscrambling another egg-related conundrum: How does the egg orchestrate the molecular mating dance that creates all these new individuals?
For a fuller understanding of the ways that egg and sperm tango during the lead-up to fertilization, Jovine is seeking help from the chicken.
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Abandoned Amusement Park Nara Dreamland [65 PICS]
In Japan, an amusement park ripping off Disneyland and Coney Island opened in 1961. By 2006, the theme park closed, it was all but a ghost town. The fun part exists due to Nara Dreamland being left abandoned but not demolished. Enter urban explorers armed with cameras and exploring the Japanese ruins, or haikyo. They took all the danger and adrenaline rush to bring us on an illegal tour via their awesome captures. Yes there is security. Yes it is illegal. Yes it is an abandoned amusement park. We love these pics! [65 Photos]
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Football at a Crossroads: Hall of Famers
CANTON, Ohio — There’s something perfect about an old football player standing in a lobby telling a dinosaur joke. It’s Canton, mid summer, where the greatest men ever to put on a helmet — at least the ones (a) alive and (b) (sort of) mobile — gather in a hotel, and a town, that oddly reflects their bodies: once powerful, now crumbling, still commanding respect. They are all, at this moment, waiting on a bus to take them to a kickoff luncheon. Joe Greene has a fancy camera slung around his neck, looking like the tourists pressed against barriers outside. John Hannah stops to talk, and he describes a cartoon he recently saw: two dinosaurs stand on top of a shrinking island, water rising, rain pouring down, looking at the back of Noah’s ark. One dinosaur turns to the other and, in the lobby of the hotel, the same thing happens: Hannah delivers the cartoon’s punch line to Mean Joe Greene.
“Oh, s—,” he says, “was that today?”
Most days, the old stars are mostly forgotten to history — left behind — but for a few days in July, the ghosts of seasons past reappear in the McKinley Grand, a downtown Canton hotel. The first thing I noticed was a no-frills table for check-in, with dilapidated cardboard boxes holding gift bags. The boxes are divided alphabetically, i.e.:
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Burning Man festival underway as thousands gather in the searing Nevada heat
Burning Man, the annual art, music, experience and everything else festival held in the middle of the Nevada desert is well underway, with more than 60,000 ‘burners’.The theme of this year’s event is ‘Fertility 2.0′ in honor of the female form as well as the artistic creations that come into being on the occasion of Burning Man.This year’s residents of Burning Man will enjoy the fervent community dedicated to self-reliance and self-expression that began 26 years before.Scroll down to watch live feed
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