It’s a metal form that—when inserted into an opening and turned—draws back a bolt or latch. But the metal key is marked for extinction. Electronic access controls—keycards, keypads, biometric scanners, and the like—are already common in hotels, office buildings, and cars, and they’re gaining ground. What will we lose when the metal key, a form that has endured for centuries, disappears? And what will we gain?
It’s one of those illustrated slideshow-esque articles, but still worth it. Read it!
This looks a lot like a dragon licking up a ball of fire. And even though it’s actually a solar flare on the sun, taken yesterday, I vastly prefer my version:
All credit for this picture goes to: NASA/GSFC/SDO. Click the picture to see a hi-rez version.
If you’re still wondering, physics is actually working on answering the question from whence we came. From an article in the LA Times:
As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of “something” (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and “nothing” (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.
What’s actually happening in the brain, though, isn’t completely clear. Faith isn’t easy to categorize or study. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, has conducted several brain-imaging studies of people in moments of extreme devotion. The limbic system, the center for our emotions, begins to show much higher activity, while the frontal lobes, which might ordinarily calm people, start to shut down. “In extreme cases, that can lead to hallucinations, where someone might believe they’re seeing the face of God or hearing voices,” Newberg says. “Your frontal lobe isn’t there to say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.’ And the person winds up engaging in behaviors that are not their norm.”
So the inevitable happened and Christopher Hitchens succumbed to pneumonia yesterday. Vanity Fair, for which he wrote – tirelessly even while cancer ate away at him – announced his death:
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
For everyone who is not familiar with his ways, I recommend watching this fine video:
It’s sad to see, as we’re constantly moving towards an age of un-enlightenment, an eloquent, unrelenting and witty voice like Hitchens’ silenced forever. RIP Christopher Hitchens.
In a procedure meant to simulate a badger attack on a hive, the bees were shaken for one minute in a benchtop machine used to vigorously mix chemicals. If anything would put bees in bad mood, this would be it. Next, both shaken and unshaken bees were tested on five mixtures of hexanol and octanone at different concentrations. Unsurprisingly, both groups were more likely to advance their mouths to octanol heavy mixtures (which predicted sugar) than hexanol heavy mixtures (which predicted quinine). Interestingly though, the shaken bees were more reluctant to advance toward the mixtures than their unshaken counterparts. In an analogue of the classic half-empty vs. half-full scenario, in which an equal mixture of hexanol and octanone was presented, control bees gave the concoction the benefit of the doubt. They advanced their mouths in anticipation of food on more than half of trials. Shaken bees, on the other hand, were far more likely to recoil. The stress of shaking had turned them into pessimists who interpreted the ambiguous odor as half-threatening, rather than half-appetizing.
Since it seems to be film week (or month) here anyway, here’s something for you if you’re into film and science. It’s about the 1979 film The Champ, its rise to become the saddest movie in the world and about the study of negative emotions like sadness in general:
The story of how a mediocre movie became a good tool for scientists dates back to 1988, when Robert Levenson, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his graduate student, James Gross, started soliciting movie recommendations from colleagues, film critics, video store employees and movie buffs. They were trying to identify short film clips that could reliably elicit a strong emotional response in laboratory settings.
Read it, then come back here and watch the part of the film that’s so sad. Beware though, it may actually make you sad:
Chance is, you’ve heard of the Voynich manuscript before: a book that was found by book collector Wilfried Woynich in 1912. It is written, by hand, in an unknown language, and according to a letter that – if Voynich is to be believed – accompanied the book, it dates back to some time in the Middle Ages. To date, nobody has come up with a satisfying explanation about who might have been the author, what language it is written in and what the hell its purpose is. Theories are plentiful, but not a single one is really conclusive.
It’s an interesting story and the Skeptical Inquirerhas a great piece on the whole thing (it’s a couple of months old and the translation of a German article that’s even older, but hey, it’s about a book people have been pondering over for a 100 years, so that won’t make much of a difference):
However, the language of the manuscript does not correspond to any European language because the Voynich has no two-letter words or words with more than ten characters. Moreover, it is curious that some words are repeated successively up to five times. The distribution of the letters within each word also does not answer known language patterns. Looking at the text as a whole, far fewer recurring words turn up than would be expected. Such arguments reveal with a high probability that-against all appearance to the contrary-we are not dealing with a simple substitution of letters. There also is no clear evidence that other simple encryption methods were used.
I’m not exactly a specialist on Darwin, so I can’t be sure whether it’s common knowledge anyway, but the man suffered from chronic vomiting. According to an article in the WSJ, there’s now yet another possible diagnose, adding to the 40-odd ones that are already out there:
Now, a new interpretation of his symptoms may have revealed the causes of Darwin’s condition. Research presented last week suggests that he suffered from three distinct ailments: cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS), which generally starts in childhood; Chagas’ disease, a parasitic illness contracted during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, and Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria now known to cause peptic ulcers.
The new diagnoses come in the wake of an annual conference by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which has been looking at ailments of historical figures since 1985, trying to figure out what it was that made them miserable like that.
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