SpaceX successfully launched its commercial rocket today marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the space station. The Falcon 9 rocket along with the Dragon capsule is loaded with the hopes and dreams of hundreds of students from around the USA.
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), launched June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space ScienceEducation (NCESSE) in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, is an important U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives students across a community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station (ISS)—America’s newest National Laboratory.
The SpaceX Falcon/Dragon ship launch successfully marks a new era in commercial space transportation. It will deliver cargo, for now, and astronauts later, saving money for NASA and the government.
Study shows that Negative Words Shut Down Higher Level Mental Processes.
The brain can unconsciously ‘decide’ to suppress negative information to minimize anxiety or mental discomfort, according to a new study.
Just as psychologists have previously discovered that people who are bilingual and subconsciously access their first language when they are reading in their second language, the latest findings suggest that the brain unconsciously shuts down the same access to a bilingual person’s native language when it encounters a negative word such as war, discomfort, inconvenience and unfortunate.
UK researcher who conducted the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, believe that a specific unconscious brain reaction that blocks negative language inputs from reaching the part of the brain where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes by shutting down access to certain forms of knowledge.
This study also shows that all libertarians are batshit insane wankers who deserve to die.
Experts say that people exhibit greater reaction to emotional words and phrases in their first language, explaining why some bilingual parents choose to speak to their children in their native tongue despite being fluent in the language of the country where they reside.
Researchers also point out that anger, swearing or discussing intimate feelings has more power in a speaker’s native language, and emotional information processing is less powerful in the second language compared to the first language.
tl;dr Being mean to people makes you stupider.
Two Years Later, BP’s Oil Still Wreaks Havoc Along the Gulf Coast
Two years ago today (friday), a Deepwater Horizon oil rig run by BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and released 200 million gallons of oil into the surrounding waters. The oil spill was detrimental to the surrounding ecosystem, economy and communities. The Institute for Southern Studies recently released Troubled Waters, a report on the aftermath of the oil spill and its consequences in the Gulf Coast.
Thinking in foreign language makes decisions more rational
To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.
A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the US and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.
“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.
“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.
Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.
In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.
Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.
To investigate these possibilities, Keysar’s team developed several tests based on scenarios originally proposed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who in 2002 won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work onprospect theory, which describes how people intuitively perceive risk.
In one famous example, Kahneman showed that, given the hypothetical option of saving 200 out of 600 lives, or taking a chance that would either save all 600 lives or none at all, people prefer to save the 200—yet when the problem is framed in terms of losing lives, many more people prefer the all-or-nothing chance rather than accept a guaranteed loss of 400 lives.
People are, in a nutshell, instinctively risk-averse when considering gain and risk-taking when faced with loss, even when the essential decision is the same. It’s a gut-level human predisposition, and if second-language thinking made people think less systematically, Keysar’s team supposed the tendency would be magnified. Conversely, if second-language thinking promoted deliberation, the tendency would be diminished.
Death Valley’s 113°: Hottest April Temperature On Record In U.S.
Nearly every weather station in the Inter-mountain West has broken, tied, or come within 1- 2 °F of their all-time record April heat record since Sunday. Most notably, the 113°F measured at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California on Sunday, April 22 was tied for the hottest April temperature ever recorded in the U.S.
According to wunderground weather historian Christopher C. Burt, the hottest reliable April temperature ever measured in the U.S. was 113°F in Parker, Arizona in 1898. A 113°F reading was also taken at Catarina, Texas in April 1984. A hotter 118°F reading measured at Volcano Springs, CA in April 1898 is considered unreliable, since we don’t know much about the exposure conditions or if the thermometers were even in shelters at remote California desert stations back in the 1880s and 1890s. The previous hottest April day in Death Valley was 111°F. Yesterday, the high temperature in Death Valley “cooled off” to 110°F, merely the third highest April temperature ever measured there. The heat wave peaked Sunday and Monday, and temperatures will be closer to normal for the remainder of the week.
As is often the case when a major Nor’easter is affecting the Eastern U.S., the record-breaking heat is due to a contortion of the jet stream that has created a strong ridge of high pressure over the Western U.S. Wunderground’s extremes page lists 56 stations in the West in the past four days that have tied or broken all-time heat records for the month of April, including:
Phoenix, Arizona: 105°F (previous 105° April temperatures occurred on 4/20/1989 and 4/29/1992)
Las Vegas, Nevada: 99°F (tying old record set 4/30/1981)
Reno, NV: 90° (old record 89° 4/30/1981)
Elko, NV: 87° (old record 86° 4/30/1981). This also beat the previous so-warm-so-early-in-the-season record by 4°
Ely, NV: 84° (old record 82° 4/28/1992)
Winnemucca, NV: 90° (tying old record set 4/30/1981)
Grand Junction, CO: 89° (tying all-time April record also set on 4/29 and 4/30, 1992)Boise, ID (91°) and Salt Lake City (88°) both came within 1°F of their record April max.
Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by GCHQ.
Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by the government’s communications headquarters, GCHQ.
It is believed Turing wrote the papers while at Bletchley Park working on breaking German Enigma codes.
A GCHQ mathematician said the fact that the contents had been restricted “shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject”.
It comes amid celebrations to mark the centenary of Turing’s birth.
The two papers are now available to view at the National Archives at Kew, west London.
GCHQ was able to approximately date the papers because in one example Turing had made reference to Hitler’s age.
(Source: thequantumlife)
Physicist writes a mathematical paper to get out of a traffic ticket
You and I, mere mortals as we are, get a traffic ticket and either accept it or come up with some idiotic sounding excuse like “Uh, I didn’t see that stop sign” or “I didn’t know I was speeding because I was texting”. But physicist Dmitri Krioukov of the University of California San Diego wrote a god damn mathematical paper on why he shouldn’t get a traffic ticket.
When our own (in)actions threaten the planet, we question science, bicker about responsibility, and generally ignore it.
We are, truly, our own worst enemies.”
_
That aliens premise is based on history, psychology, and Will Smith movies.
(via realcleverscience)
Engineered Stem Cells Seek out and Kill HIV in Living Mice
Expanding on previous research providing proof-of-principle that human stem cells can be genetically engineered into HIV-fighting cells, a team of UCLA researchers have now demonstrated that these cells can actually attack HIV-infected cells in a living organism.
Rhinos are being poached "at record rates" for their horns, which could lead to the species' extinction in less than fifteen years.
The number of illegally hunted rhinos this year may reach over 600, surpassing last year’s record high of 448. Conservationists estimate that the world rhino population has plummeted 90% since 1970.
“We’ve certainly reached a tipping point in rhino populations. There is no way that our national populations can sustain the level of poaching,” Pelham Jones, chairman of the South Africa Private Rhino Owners Association, told Reuters on the sidelines of a conservation summit in Nairobi.
Selling the horns is a lucrative business; one horn can be worth $60,000 per kilogram, which is more than the price of gold. The horns are sold on the Asian market as a cure for various ailments including cancer, a claim scientists have dismissed.
In the video here, NBC correspondent Rohit Kachroo describes the killing and decimating of the rhino population as “mass murder.”
Reuters: Surveillance, penalties needed to halt rhino poaching-conservationists
NAIROBI - Better surveillance and stiffer penalties must be imposed to combat rhino poaching in Africa, which if left unchecked could see the species become extinct in the wild by 2025, regional conservation officials said on Tuesday.
The world’s rhino population has declined 90 percent since 1970, conservationists estimate. On the African continent, there are some 20,150 white rhinos that are near threatened and 4,840 black rhinos that are critically endangered.
The Global Post: Rhino poaching: More rhinos are dying than are being born
South Africa’s rhinos are being poached at record rates, their horns trafficked to Asia to be ground up and used in an attempt to treat cancer and other maladies. Western experts say rhino horns — made of keratin, like fingernails — have absolutely no medicinal value.
Yet the endangered animals are being killed in record numbers. More rhinos are dying than are being born.
A record 448 rhinos were killed in 2011, despite a barrage of efforts to stop the poaching. The number has increased steadily since 2008, when 83 of the animals were killed.
We need to deal with this as soon as possible
"There's just no reason to hand the richest industry on Earth a bonus to help them wreck the planet."
[…]
We should be outraged, but there’s a problem: The very word “subsidies” makes American eyes glaze over. It sounds so boring, like something that has everything to do with finance and taxes and accounting, and nothing to do with us. But bring yourself to focus on fossil-fuel subsidies for just a minute, and you will realize just how loony our policy is.
Start this way: You subsidize something you want to encourage, something that might not happen if you didn’t support it financially. Take education. We build schools, pay teachers and give government loans and grants to college kids. Families too have embraced education subsidies, with tuition often being the last big subsidy we give the children we’ve raised. The theory is: Young people don’t know enough yet. We need to give them a hand and a chance when it comes to further learning, so they’ll be a help to society in the future. From that analogy, here are five rules that should be applied to the fossil-fuel industry.
1. Don’t subsidize those who already have plenty of cash on hand.
No one would propose a government program of low-interest loans to send the richest kids in the country to college. We assume that the wealthy will pay full freight. Similarly, we should assume that the fossil-fuel business, the most profitable industry on Earth, should pay its way. What possible reason is there for giving, say, Exxon a tax break? Year after year the company sets records for money-making. Last year it managed to rake in a mere $41 billion in profit, just failing to break its own 2008 all-time mark of $45 billion.
2. Don’t subsidize people forever.
If students need government loans to help them get bachelor’s degrees, that’s sound policy. But if they want loans to get their 11th bachelor of arts, they should pay themselves. We learned how to burn coal 300 years ago. A subsidized fossil-fuel industry is the equivalent of a 19-year-old repeating third grade yet again.
3. Don’t abandon important subsidies just because in one instance they didn’t work out.
The government gave money to a solar power company called Solyndra. The company went belly-up. That stung. But since we’re in the process of figuring out how to perfect solar power and drive down its cost, it still makes sense to subsidize it. Think of it as the equivalent of giving a high-school senior a scholarship to go to college. Most of the time that works out. But a few kids are going to spend four years drinking; consider them human Solyndras. The subsidy wasn’t well spent on those kids, but we don’t shut down the entire college loan program as a result.
4. Don’t subsidize something you want less of.
At this point, the greatest human challenge is to get off fossil fuels. If we don’t do it soon, the climatologists tell us, our prospects as a civilization are grim. So why are we lending a significant helping hand to companies intent on driving us toward disaster? It’s like giving a fellowship to a graduate student who wants to pursue a thesis on “Strategies for Stimulating Doughnut Consumption Among Diabetics.”
5. Don’t give subsidies to people who have given you cash.
Most of the men and women in Congress who vote each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies. In essence, they’ve been given small gifts by outfits to whom they then return large presents, using public money, not their own. Oil Change International estimates that fossil-fuel companies get $59 back for every dollar they spend on donations and lobbying. It’s no different from sending a college financial aid officer a $100 bill in the expectation that he’ll give your daughter a scholarship. That’s bribery. And there’s no chance it will yield the best energy policy or the best student body.
These five rules don’t get at the biggest subsidy we give the fossil-fuel business: the right to pour their waste into the atmosphere for free. But they would be a start, a statement that we no longer will be played for suckers and saps. There’s just no reason to hand the richest industry on Earth a bonus to help them wreck the planet.
MIT researchers predicted the death of capitalism—in 1972.
Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.
Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.
However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint. Prominent economists disagreed with the report’s methodology and conclusions. Yale’s Henry Wallich opposed active intervention, declaring that limiting economic growth too soon would be “consigning billions to permanent poverty.”
Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario. He found the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”
