Tag Archives: cool finds

The Definitive Guide to Bedbug Sex

by gjrrkjujp Posted on April 10, 2013

Image: Armed Forces Pest Management Board

The last thing you want in your bed is bedbugs. But here is an even grosser thought to handle: bedbugs have sex in your bed.

How do they do it? Turns out, we’re really interested in this. There are a lot of explainers out there. Here are three that will get you up to speed on the bedbug hanky-panky.

Anna Rothschild at NOVA knows you want to know:

As Rothschild explains, male bedbugs have saber-like penises, that they use to stab females in the abdomen. The male releases sperm into the females circulatory system, not into their reproductive tract which is used for outbound eggs only.

Here’s another take on bedbug sex, by the always weird-yet-entertaining Green Porno:

And if you want the real deal, here’s a video of real bedbugs having sex.

Like Rothschild says, good luck sleeping now that you know this might be happening in your bed.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Have Bedbugs Been Vanquished At Last?
Bean Leaves Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite by Using Tiny, Impaling Spikes

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The Definitive Guide to Bedbug Sex

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The Count of Dead Pigs Pulled Out of Chinese Rivers Is Up to 16,000

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on March 25, 2013

Image: Jack Zalium

Earlier this month, locals spotted what would prove to be the first of a plague of dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River in Shanghai, which supplies drinking water to the metropolis. The pig death toll has steadily risin since then—16,000 confirmed at last counting.

But just as officials said they were finishing up with recovering the last of the carcasses, dead ducks joined the swine in polluting China’s rivers. Locals in Sichuan Province spotted around 1,000 of the birds floating down the Nanhe River, the BBC reports.

As for the dead pigs, officials still have not produced an explanation for the animals’ presence. The Huffington Post writes:

Hog farmers have told state media that the dumping of swine carcasses is rising because police have started cracking down on the illicit sale of pork products made from dead, diseased pigs.

Local officials also told Southern Weekly that the city lacks enough facilities to properly dispose of dead pigs.

Though many hog farms are situated upstream of Shanghai, the authorities still haven’t nailed down any culprits. The New York Times explains that authorities do have their eye on the upstream farmers, though: 

Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Shanghai officials said that more than a dozen of the pigs carried ear tags indicating that they were from Jiaxing. The authorities then announced that they had detained a farmer who confessed to throwing his animals into the river.

But in Jiaxing, farmers denied dumping pigs into the river, calling it preposterous and saying that the animals could not possibly have floated all the way to Shanghai.

It’s also possible, the Times writes, that the animals died on their way to Shanghai and that truck drivers decided to dump the bodies in the river. The paper argues, though, that this may actually be a bit of positive environmental news from China:

In May, for example, the police in this hog-producing city arrested four people who had sold dead pigs to slaughterhouses. And in December, a Zhejiang Province court sentenced 17 people to prison sentences, one for life, for processing and selling meat from pigs that had died of various diseases. In less than two years, the group had collected about 77,000 animals.

So, as the authorities have cracked down on people selling diseased or dead pigs, agriculture experts say, it is possible that someone may have decided it was better to dump dead pigs into the river.

Officials insist to locals that the water is still safe to drink and that the city’s pork is fine to eat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Is It Safe to Eat Pork? 
Horse Meat Turned Up in Irish and British Burger Meat 

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The Count of Dead Pigs Pulled Out of Chinese Rivers Is Up to 16,000

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Tracing $1 Bills Across the United States Is a Surprisingly Useful Hobby

by gammak Posted on March 25, 2013

Image: Prince Roy

In 1998, Hank Eskin started a website called WheresGeorge.com, dedicated to tracking dollar bills across the United States. Members of this club are called Georgers. They stamp dollar bills with their website, then search for and track those bills as they travel across the United States.

At NPR, Stan Alcorn caught up with some of these trackers. He writes:

[T]ypical Georgers log in religiously to enter their dollars’ serial numbers and ZIP codes before they stamp and spend them. If one gets entered a second time, the Georger gets an email. That’s called a “hit.”

Robert Rothenberg was sitting at the table in Kabooz’s when he got a hit in New Jersey. He gets a lot of hits, since he’s entered nearly 100,000 bills into the website’s database.

“I have a hit streak going since July of 2010, every day since then. I’m trying to get to 1,000 days, which will be the end of the month,” Rothenberg says.

Now, what started as a quirky hobby has turned into a national bill hunt that’s useful for all sorts of people—like physicists. Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at Northwestern University, writes at his website about meeting a cabinet maker in Vermont who tipped him off to the site:

After the conference I decided to visit Dennis Derryberry, an old friend from college who lives within driving distance to Montreal in the green mountains of Vermont, where he works as a cabinet maker. After a few hours on the highway Dennis and his family welcomed me to their beautiful house in the woods. During this visit Dennis, one of the most witty individuals I have ever met, asked me one evening on his porch while we were having a beer, “So Dirk, what are you working on?” – “I’m interested in the patterns that underly human travel,” I replied, and told him about my efforts to better understand human mobility and our goal of developing more quantitative models for the spread of epidemics. “It’s just amazingly difficult to compile all this data,” I explained. Dennis paused a while and then inquired, “Do you know this website www.wheresgeorge.com?”

From there, Brockmann has used the bills to study how networks move move and change, infectious diseases and all sorts of other things. Eskin, for one, is surprised at both the popularity and the usefulness of his little project. And when Georgers get together, it still feels like a small club. Here’s NPR again:

At Kabooz’s Bar and Grill at New York’s Penn Station, Jennifer Fishinger is covering her table in stacks of ones. There are 500 $1 bills laid out.

At the next table over, David Henry has his stacks of cash in plastic bags. They’re paper-clipped $1 bills in groups of 10.

If only everyone else’s little hobbies could do the same amount for science.

More from Smithsonian.com:

To Save Money, Ask for Pretty, New Dollar Bills
On the Money

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Tracing $1 Bills Across the United States Is a Surprisingly Useful Hobby

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Lockheed Martin Has Crazy-Fast Quantum Computers And Plans on Actually Using Them

by 7GrittonMaine146 Posted on March 22, 2013

Close up of a processor for a D-Wave quantum computer. Photo: D-Wave Systems Inc.

Lockheed Martin, a U.S. aerospace and defense company (and all-around inventor-of-the-future) will be the first company in the world to wrangle quantum computing out of the realm of research and into commercial scale usage, says The New York Times.

Starting from an early quantum computer built by Canadian firm D-Wave that the defense contractor bought a few years ago, Lockheed Martin will ramp up the technology to become “the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business,” says the Times.

Quantum computers are a fledgling, finicky technology that should be able to crunch through complex mathematical equations “millions of times faster” than today’s computers.

Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.

Whether Lockheed Martin’s venture pans out, the move heralds an ongoing shift in the quantum computing world. Just a few days ago, the founders of BlackBerry announced that they are opening up a $100 million research facility focusing on quantum computing.

The Times says that the large-scale application of quantum computers could bring the digit-crunching prowess of the technology to bear on a huge number of important problems:

Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Quantum Computing Now At Least Vaguely Plausible

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Lockheed Martin Has Crazy-Fast Quantum Computers And Plans on Actually Using Them

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Robots Get Their Own Internet

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on March 22, 2013

Meet Robby the Robot, who totally doesn’t look anything like the Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. Photo: RoboEarth

Rapyuta. Remember that name. That is the name of a new shadow internet intended only for robots, designed by the international organization RoboEarth. Rapyuta is a cloud-computing engine, designed to let robots share the things they learn about the world with each other and to offload computational tasks to far more powerful computers allowing them to solve problems more complicated than they ever could on their own. The mind-melding system, says New York Magazine, won’t bring about the end of humanity, because its creators say so.

[Rapyuta] sounds fine in theory — if you trust robots. But for those convinced that providing robots with a common brain will only hasten the arrival of the robot uprising against mankind, then Rapyuta is more like a dark harbinger of the apocalypse. We happen to be one of those people, so we reached out to Dr. Heico Sandee, RoboEarth’s program manager at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, to reassure us that Rapyuta will not lead to our destruction.

“That is indeed an important point to be addressed,” Sandee acknowledged in an-email. But he assured us that robots will use Rapyuta for no such thing.

I mean, just look at this helpful promotional video released by the people at RoboEarth:

“Meet Robby the Robot,” says a soothing female voice. “One morning, Robby decides to try something new. The RoboEarth cloud engine.” “With the RoboEarth cloud engine, Robby can now take on many more tasks around the house instead of only making breakfast.”

But, sure. Just because robots will be able to coordinate and share and think beyond their means doesn’t mean much—they’ll still only really be able to do the tasks that some human, somewhere, programmed them to do.

But wait!

Wired‘s Danger Room reports that the Pentagon’s advanced research projects division is “readying a nearly four-year project to boost artificial intelligence systems by building machines that can teach themselves.”

[T]the agency thinks we can build machines that learn and evolve, using algorithms — “probabilistic programming” — to parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better.

The task is hard, but that’s the goal. Self-educating robots. (Feeding into the global robot consciousness.)

But maybe, says Wired, the worry comes not from robots learning to think and teach and desire for themselves, but rather in what would happen should our robot friends learn to control these new machinae.

[W]ith all the paranoia about machines, we’ve ignored another possibility: Animals learn to control robots and decide it’s their turn to rule the planet. This would be even more dangerous than dolphins evolving opposable thumbs. And the first signs of this coming threat are already starting to appear in laboratories around the world where robots are being driven by birds, trained by moths and controlled by the minds of monkeys.

But even still, says xkcd’s Randall Munroe,  the odds of a successful robot uprising (even with all these advances) are pretty slim (at least given the current state of things).

More from Smithsonian.com:

NASA Uses Interplanetary Internet to Control Robot in Germany
Robot Apocalypse Inches Closer as Machines Learn To Install Solar Panels

Link to article:

Robots Get Their Own Internet

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Eclipses Look Even More Gorgeous From Outer Space

by ghd12australia Posted on March 12, 2013

High in orbit above the Earth, the Solar Dynamics Observatory watches the Sun year-round, providing stunning stellar views that go unbroken except during a few special times each year. Because the SDO stays relatively fixed over one part of the planet in a geosynchronous orbit, the satellite goes through two annual “eclipse seasons.” For a few weeks twice each year, part of SDO’s view each day will be blocked by the Earth. And, three times a year, the Moon will get in the way.

Though a bit of a pain for the scientists trying to study the Sun, these orbital quirks provide some beautiful unintended consequences: gorgeous photos of an eclipse from space. Yesterday, NASA released photos and video of that day’s double whammy, a single day that saw both a terrestrial and lunar eclipse.

Earth passes in front of the Sun, from the perspective of the SDO satellite. Photo: NASA/SDO

One beautiful feature to notice is the apparent fuzziness of the Earthly eclipse. According to NASA, this is because of Earth’s atmosphere. The Moon, for the same reason, appears as a sharp disk.

When Earth blocks the sun, the boundaries of Earth’s shadow appear fuzzy, since SDO can see some light from the sun coming through Earth’s atmosphere. The line of Earth appears almost straight, since Earth — from SDO’s point of view — is so large compared to the sun.

The eclipse caused by the moon looks far different. Since the moon has no atmosphere, its curved shape can be seen clearly, and the line of its shadow is crisp and clean.

The Moon’s silhouette, by contrast, is much crisper. Photo: NASA/SDO

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Solar Eclipse, As Seen From the Surface of Mars

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Eclipses Look Even More Gorgeous From Outer Space

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Life on Earth May Have Been Seeded by Comets

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on March 8, 2013

Image: Michael Karrer

One of the oldest questions on earth is how all this crazy life started. Where did you come from? How about your office plant, or your cat? For a long time, our only working idea was that gods from the heavens had provided the seed of life. We may, at least, have been looking into the correct direction: researchers at UC Berkeley recently added evidence to the idea that life on Earth came from a comet.

The idea goes like this: the so-called “building blocks of life” on this planet are called dipeptides. And the real mystery is where these dipeptides came from. The Berkeley scientists’ research suggests that dipeptides could have formed on interplanetary dust and been carried down to earth on a comet. Berkeley writes:

Chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides – linked pairs of amino acids – that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides), enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for life.

Or, in the paper itself, the authors put it this way:

Our results indicate that the radiation-induced, non-enzymatic formation of proteinogenic dipeptides in interstellar ice analogs is facile. Once synthesized and incorporated into the ”building material” of solar systems, biomolecules at least as complex as dipeptides could have been delivered to habitable planets such as early Earth by meteorites and comets, thus seeding the beginning of life as we know it.

They figured this out by making a mini-comet in the lab. Combining carbon dioxide, ammonia and other chemicals like methane at super cold temperatures (space is pretty cold), they created a tiny comet-like thing. Then they added the lab equivalent of cosmic rays, zapping the mini-comet with electrons. What they saw was that the combination of these high energy electrons and the comet they had built created organic molecules like amino acids and dipeptides.

The idea is that this reaction happened on its own in space, and those dipeptides were carried down to earth on that icy comet. In other words, the necessary blocks of life might really have descended to Earth from the sky.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Origins of Life

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Life on Earth May Have Been Seeded by Comets

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Assembling a Sandwich in Spaaaaaaace!

by ghd12australia Posted on March 6, 2013

Food tray on the shuttle. Image: NASA

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield has been described as “the International Space Station’s ambassador to the internet.” He’s made videos about nail clipping, hand washing, and adapting to weightlessness. Now, he’s showing you how to make a sandwich.

The Canadian Space Agency describes some of the solutions to the challenges presented by eating in space:

Astronauts consume mostly wet and sticky foods such as oatmeal, scrambled eggs, puddings and stews because they stick to an eating utensil long enough for the astronaut to put into their mouth. Foods like bread are rejected because they produce crumbs that can float around; tortillas, on the other hand, are perfect for eating in freefall. Salt and pepper are also consumed, but the salt must be dissolved into water and the pepper suspended in oil.

The CSA also had a contest for Canadian foods to go into space, bringing along things like Les Canardises Duck Rillettes, SeaChange Candied Wild Smoked Salmon, L.B. Maple Treat Maple Syrup Cream Cookies and Turkey Hill Sugarbush Maple Syrup.

In the United States, NASA has a food lab that researchers foods for space consumption. They test things like how many calories astronauts need, and how to actually package and store them. Last year, they tested some new foods for space missions.

But remember, in space, no one can hear you scream for ice cream.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Solar System Lollipops And Other Food That Looks Like Things
Inviting Writing: Lost Cereal, Kool-Aid and Astronaut Food

See the original article here – 

Assembling a Sandwich in Spaaaaaaace!

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From Wyoming to Mexico, A Beautiful Time-Lapse Trip Down the Colorado River

by JohnsieaJensen Posted on March 5, 2013

Drawing rain runoff and snow melt from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River is a dominant source of water for the American southwest, providing fresh water for drinking and farming and hydroelectric power to millions.

In 2011, Will Stauffer-Norris and Zak Podmore spent nearly four months kayaking and portaging and hiking the length of the Colorado River, from the Green River in Wyoming, which feeds into the Colorado, to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. That 113 day journey was crushed into one beautiful three-and-a-half minute time lapse, showcasing the varied landscapes of the southwest, from the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead, the reservoir that feeds the Hoover Dam, to a narrow series of irrigation channels.

The pair used their journey to try to draw attention to the modern state of the Colorado River, which Smithsonian‘s Sarah Zielinski detailed in 2010:

The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the nation’s seventh-longest river, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but there are ominous new twists. The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.

Indeed, in the video, you can see the powerful river’s flows dwindle as water is siphoned off for irrigation or power production as it makes its way downstream.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Colorado River Runs Dry

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From Wyoming to Mexico, A Beautiful Time-Lapse Trip Down the Colorado River

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Why the Internet Loves Lists

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 28, 2013

This person love lists so much she had one tattooed on her. Image: Rob and Stephanie Levy

If you want to make something that does well on the internet, you’ll be doing yourself a favor to put it in list form. The internet cannot get enough lists. But why do we love lists so much? Science has some answers, and The Guardian brings them to you, in list form here.

Here are some of the reasons:

Lists take advantage of a limited attention span

There is an increasingly common view that internet use shortens a person’s attention span. While a lot of this is Greenfield-esque paranoia about new technology, evidence suggests our visual attention is attracted to novelty, and on the internet novelty is always only a click away. There is data to suggest that this is how internet use works, and much of the web is dedicated to exploiting this….

You probably won’t remember all the things on a typical list

A lot of lists are lists of 10, or some multiple thereof, given that the majority of humans have grown up using the decimal system. However, short-term memory, or “working memory” as it’s known to psychologists, has an average capacity of 7 (+/-2). This means you can hold an average of 7 “things” in your short term memory…

Popular things can be listed

Lists are very popular, so logically lists about popular things would be more popular again. Bacon, sexy ladies, funny cats and tweets, all of these regularly end up on lists. You may say this point isn’t scientific in any way, but I include it as evidence for the above point. Which means it is scientific in a very tenuous way.

The Guardian has all ten reasons in their story. But other writers have tackled this question, too. NPR’s Linton Weeks took it on in 2009, and, yes, he listed his answers in a ten point list too. Here are some of them:

Lists bring order to chaos. “People are attracted to lists because we live in an era of overstimulation, especially in terms of information,” says David Wallechinsky, a co-author of the fabulous Book of Lists, first published in 1977 and followed by subsequent editions. “And lists help us in organizing what is otherwise overwhelming.”

Lists can be meaningful. The Steven Spielberg classic Schindler’s List is based on the true story of a German businessman who used a list of names to save more than 1,000 Jews from the concentration camps. It is ranked eighth on the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of 100 top American films of the past 100 years.

Lists relieve stress and focus the mind. “Lists,” sociologist Scott Schaffer told The Oregonian newspaper, “really get to the heart of what it is we need to do to get through another day on this planet.”

The Awl has a list of 127 reasons that we love lists including the following quote:

“To my mind, the difference would be where lists support your quality of life or where they begin to impede your quality of life—where having your list perfected gets in the way of your functioning, or having too many lists. It’s a matter of how you use them. They can give you control in a certain way, but you don’t want them to be the only thing you do to gain control.”

—Dr. Cynthia Green, clinical psychologist and brain health/memory specialist, interview with the author

These lists of why we love lists go on and on. Clearly, we do love them—but too many ways to list all off them.

More from Smithsonian.com:

What Is on Your Life List?
The List: Five Volcanoes to Watch

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Why the Internet Loves Lists

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