%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fthesalt%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2F491104093%2Fberkeleys-soda-tax-appears-to-cut-consumption-of-sugary-drinks%3Futm_medium%3DRSS%26utm_campaign%3Dresearchnews&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Berkeley's Soda Tax Appears To Cut Consumption Of Sugary Drinks
According to a new study, the nation's first soda tax succeeded in cutting consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. But there's uncertainty about whether the effect will be permanent.
science
1471998131000
pin-gifs
%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/140104238387058685/ My contribution to t My contribution to the 9 squares project, checkout the full panel… pin-gifs
%feed http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond/~3/rksi7Csro0o/new-mars-discovery-network-of-ancient-fossil-rivers-points-to-a-once-warm-wet-planet.html New Mars Discovery: Network of Ancient Fossil Rivers --"Points to a Once Warm, Wet Planet"
Extensive systems of fossilized riverbeds have been discovered on an ancient region of the Martian surface, supporting the idea that the now cold and dry Red Planet had a warm and wet climate about 4 billion years ago. The University College London research identified over 17,000 kilometers of former river channels on a northern plain called Arabia Terra, providing further evidence of water once flowing on Mars.
"Climate models of early Mars predict rain in Arabia Terra and until now there was little geological evidence on the surface to support this theory. This led some to believe that Mars was never warm and wet but was a largely frozen planet, covered in ice-sheets and glaciers. We've now found evidence of extensive river systems in the area which supports the idea that Mars was warm and wet, providing a more favorable environment for life than a cold, dry planet," explained lead author, Joel Davis (UCL Earth Sciences).
Since the 1970s, scientists have identified valleys and channels on Mars which they think were carved out and eroded by rain and surface runoff, just like on Earth. Similar structures had not been seen on Arabia Terra until the team analysed high resolution imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft.
The new study examined images covering an area roughly the size of Brazil at a much higher resolution than was previously possible - 6 meters per pixel compared to 100 meters per pixel. While a few valleys were identified, the team revealed the existence of many systems of fossilized riverbeds which are visible as inverted channels spread across the Arabia Terra plain (below).
The inverted channels are similar to those found elsewhere on Mars and Earth. They are made of sand and gravel deposited by a river and when the river becomes dry, the channels are left upstanding as the surrounding material erodes. On Earth, inverted channels often occur in dry, desert environments like Oman, Egypt, or Utah, where erosion rates are low - in most other environments, the channels are worn away before they can become inverted.
"The networks of inverted channels in Arabia Terra are about 30m high and up to 1-2km wide, so we think they are probably the remains of giant rivers that flowed billions of years ago. Arabia Terra was essentially one massive flood plain bordering the highlands and lowlands of Mars. We think the rivers were active 3.9-3.7 billion years ago, but gradually dried up before being rapidly buried and protected for billions of years, potentially preserving any ancient biological material that might have been present," added Joel Davis.
"These ancient Martian flood plains would be great places to explore to search for evidence of past life. In fact, one of these inverted channels called Aram Dorsum is a candidate landing site for the European Space Agency's ExoMars Rover mission, which will launch in 2020," said Dr Matthew Balme, Senior Lecturer at The Open University and co-author of the study.
The Daily Galaxy via University College London
astronomy
1471996596000
astronomy
%feed http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond/~3/RhKieSKtPE4/our-solar-system-is-in-a-unique-part-in-the-universe-just-right-for-life.html Our Solar System "Is in a Unique Place in the Universe -- Just Right for Life"
Our solar system is in a unique area of the universe that's conducive to life, says John Webb and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales, who have carried out intensive study that threatens to turn the world of theoretical physics upside down.
The team studied the fine structure in the spectral lines of the light from distant quasars from data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile with stunning results that showed that one of the constants of nature --the Alpha appears to be different in different parts of the cosmos, supporting the theory that our solar system is in a part of the universe that is "just right" for life, which negates Einstein's equivalence principle, which states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
The "magic number," known as Alpha or the fine-structure constant, appears to vary throughout the Universe, concluded the team from the University of New South Wales, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge.
"What they found threatens to turn the world of theoretical physics upside down," said theorectical physicist, Paul Davies of Arizona State in an article in Cosmos this past January. "On the face of it, α has slightly different values in different parts of the Universe, implying that the fine structure constant is not a constant at all, but varies over cosmological distances and times."
"This finding in 2015 was a real surprise to everyone," said John Webb of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The change in the constant appears to have an orientation, creating a "preferred direction", or axis, across the cosmos, an idea that was dismissed more than 100 years ago with the creation of Einstein's special theory of relativity.
“After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the Universe,” said Webb.
“The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely “local by-laws”, it might be that whilst our observable part of the Universe favors the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it.
“If our results are correct, clearly we shall need new physical theories to satisfactorily describe them.”
The researchers' conclusions are based on new measurements taken with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, along with their previous measurements from the world's largest optical telescopes at the Keck Observatory, in Hawaii.
The core finding of the new study is the fine structure constant (alpha). This number determines the strength of interactions between light and matter. A decade ago, Webb used observations from the Keck telescope in Hawaii to analyze the light from distant galaxies called quasars. The data suggested that the value of alpha was very slightly smaller when the quasar light was emitted 12 billion years ago than it appears in laboratories on Earth today.
Webb's colleague Julian King, also of the University of New South Wales, has analyzed data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile (below), which looks at a different region of the sky. The VLT data suggests that the value of alpha elsewhere in the Universe is very slightly bigger than on Earth.
The difference in both cases is around a millionth of the value alpha has in our region of space, and suggests that alpha varies in space rather than time. "I'd quietly hoped we'd simply find the same thing that Keck found," King says. "This was a real shock."
King says that after combining the two sets of measurements, the new result "struck" them: "The Keck telescopes and the VLT are in different hemispheres; they look in different directions through the Universe. Looking to the north with Keck we see, on average, a smaller alpha in distant galaxies, but when looking south with the VLT we see a larger alpha.
"It varies by only a tiny amount - about one part in 100,000 - over most of the observable Universe, but it's possible that much larger variations could occur beyond our observable horizon."
Michael Murphy, of Swinburne University of Technology, says the discovery will force scientists to rethink their understanding of Nature's laws.
"The fine structure constant, and other fundamental constants, are absolutely central to our current theory of physics. If they really do vary, we'll need a better, deeper theory," Dr. Murphy says.
While a "varying constant" would shake our understanding of the world around us, Dr. Murphy notes: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What we're finding is extraordinary, no doubt about that.
"It's one of the biggest questions of modern science - are the laws of physics the same everywhere in the Universe and throughout its entire history? We're determined to answer this burning question one way or the other."
The team's analysis of around 300 measurements of alpha in light coming from various points in the sky suggests the variation is not random but structured, like a bar magnet. The Universe seems to have a large alpha on one side and a smaller alpha on the other.
This "dipole" alignment nearly matches that of a stream of galaxies mysteriously moving towards the edge of the Universe. It does not, however, line up with another unexplained dipole, dubbed the axis of evil, in the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Earth sits somewhere in the middle of the extremes for alpha. If correct, the result would explain why alpha seems to have the finely tuned value that allows chemistry and thus biology to occur. Grow alpha by 4 per cent, for instance, and the stars would be unable to produce carbon, making our biochemistry impossible.
If the interpretation of the light is correct, it is "a huge deal", agrees Craig Hogan, head of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Illinois. But like Cowie, he told New Scientist that he suspects there is an error somewhere in the analysis. "I think the result is not real," he says.
Michael Murphy of Swinburne University in Australia, a co-author of the paper, says that the evidence for changing constants is piling up. "We just report what we find, and no one has been able to explain away these results in a decade of trying," Murphy told New Scientist. "The fundamental constants being constant is an assumption. We're here to test physics, not to assume it."
NASA successfully launched the RockSat-X education payload on a Terrier-Improved Malemute suborbital sounding rocket at 7:33:30 a.m. EDT Aug. 17 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Students from eight community colleges and universities from across the United States participated in the RockSat-X project.The payload carrying the experiments flew to an altitude of 95 miles. Data was received from most of the student experiments. However, the payload was not recovered as planned. NASA will investigate the anomaly.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA's mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA's accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency's mission.
%feed http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond/~3/aTzycLuFEUU/-gravitational-wave-discovery-is-going-to-be-central-to-humans-exploration-of-the-universe-for-centu.html Gravitational-Wave Discovery --"Is Going to be Central to Human's Exploration of the Universe for Centuries"
"We really are opening up a whole new way of observing the universe, a way that is going to be central to the human race's exploration of the universe around us, not just for years or decades, but for centuries into the future," said Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
In an extensive interview published online this week, the winners of the 2016 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics discuss their 40-year effort to detect gravitational waves, the elusive ripples in the fabric of space-time that Albert Einstein so boldly predicted. The discussion, with physicists Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss, covers the challenges of eavesdropping on gravitational waves, why their discovery has captured the world's imagination, and what the future holds for astronomy.
Thorne, Weiss and Ronald Drever co-founded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, known as LIGO. Last year, for the first time, the LIGO experiment registered the signal generated by the collision of two black holes, confirming a central prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. A second detection was announced this past June, ushering in a new era of astronomical exploration.
"The first thing [Einstein] would ask about is probably the technology..." said Rainer Weiss, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which operates the twin detectors. "Einstein would be interested in the rest of it, but mainly, 'How did you do it?'"
At the announcement of the epic discovery this February 2016, Thorne said: "With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest: the quest to explore the warped side of the universe—objects and phenomena that are made from warped spacetime. Colliding black holes and gravitational waves are our first beautiful examples," The image below is Kip Thorne's amazing view of this newly revealed dark side of the universe.
In June 2009, Thorne resigned his Feynman Professorship (becoming the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus) in order to ramp up a new career in writing, movies, and continued scientific research. His most recent major movie project was Interstellar. Thorne was the film's science advisor and an executive producer. His principal current research is an exploration of the nonlinear dynamical behaviors of curved spacetime, using computer simulations and analytical calculations.
Thorne's research has focused on gravitation physics and astrophysics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes and gravitational waves. In the late 1960's and early 70's he laid the foundations for the theory of pulsations of relativistic stars and the gravitational waves they emit. During the 70's and 80's he developed mathematical formalism by which astrophysicists analyze the generation of gravitational waves and worked closely with Vladimir Braginsky, Ronald Drever and Rainer Weiss on developing new technical ideas and plans for gravitational wave detection.
Thorne is a co-founder (with Weiss and Drever) of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project and he chaired the steering committee that led LIGO in its earliest years (1984--87). In the 1980s, 90s and 2000s he and his research group have provided theoretical support for LIGO, including identifying gravitational wave sources that LIGO should target, laying foundations for data analysis techniques by which their waves are being sought, designing the baffles to control scattered light in the LIGO beam tubes, and --- in collaboration with Vladimir Braginsky's (Moscow Russia) research group --- inventing quantum-nondemolition designs for advanced gravity-wave detectors.
"We had thought the first signal would be some little small thing poking up out of the noise and we'd have to work really hard to understand what it was," Nergis Mavalvala the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and the Associate Department Head of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). "But in fact, the signal we got is a very clean and beautiful event. It tells us that the binary black holes were located about 1.5 billion light years away. They whirled around each other at nearly the speed of light before a collision that was so powerful, it converted approximately three times the mass of the Sun into gravitational wave energy—in just a few tenths of a second!"
"This means that the stars are no longer silent," says Matthew Evans is an Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT as well as a member of MKI. His work centers on gravitational wave detector science, The frequencies of gravitational waves that LIGO is designed to detect are actually in the human audible range. So when we're working on LIGO, we often take its output and put it on a speaker and just listen to it. For this binary black hole system, it made a distinctive, rising "whoooop!" sound. It's not that we just look up and see anymore, like we always have—we actually can listen to the universe now. It's a whole new sense, and humanity did not have this sense until LIGO was built."
"We often whistled to demonstrate what we thought these smashing black holes might sound like, and it turns out if you play the piano or a keyboard, you can also make a similar sound," said Rainer Weiss is a Professor of Physics, Emeritus at MIT, among the first to explore the kind of instrumentation necessary to detect gravitational waves and proposed the LIGO project with two colleagues in the 1980s. "Do you know what a glissando is? It's when you run your fingers very quickly across the keys. If you started at the bottom of a keyboard and went all the way to the middle C and then hold that note for a little bit—that's what this black hole signal happened to be. "I keep telling people I'd love to be able to see Einstein's face right now."
The existence of gravitational waves was first demonstrated in the 1970s and 80s by Joseph Taylor, Jr., and colleagues. Taylor and Russell Hulse discovered in 1974 a binary system composed of a pulsar in orbit around a neutron star. Taylor and Joel M. Weisberg in 1982 found that the orbit of the pulsar was slowly shrinking over time because of the release of energy in the form of gravitational waves. For discovering the pulsar and showing that it would make possible this particular gravitational wave measurement, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993.
The Daily Galaxy via Caltech, MIT, Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, and Space Research
Image credit: LIGO detects gravitational waves from merging black holes, LIGO, NSF, Aurore Simonet; Kip Thorne, Interstellar
astronomy
1471996585000
astronomy
%feed http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond/~3/P9rhTWDYg9U/join-startalks-neil-degrasse-tyson-to-explore-the-epic-discovery-of-gravitational-waves-listen.html Join StarTalk's Neil deGrasse Tyson to Explore the Epic Discovery of Gravitational Waves (LISTEN)
On February 11, 2016 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory reported that it had discovered gravitational waves, heralding a new field of scientific study. Just a few months later, host Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Eugene Mirman took to the stage at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ to explore that discovery with the help of LIGO astrophysicist Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, cosmologist and StarTalk All-Stars host Dr. Janna Levin, and comedian and returning StarTalk Live! guest Michael Showalter.
In Part One, you'll learn exactly how LIGO is able to measure a wave motion 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom which began 1.3 billion light years away from Earth, and why it's critical to have two different facilities, one in Louisiana and one in Washington, working in tandem. You'll also find out why it took the LIGO team half a century and a billion dollars to discover something Einstein predicted nearly 100 years before, how unexpected the discovery was, and why it took them so long to make the announcement, when they'd actually recorded the event on September 14, 2015.
In Part Two, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, cosmologist Janna Levin, LIGO astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala, and comedian Michael Showalter move from the specifics of how LIGO works to the broader questions of what it can teach us about our universe. You'll explore what kind of events create gravitational waves, like supernovas or the motions of orbiting neutron stars, and just how much energy was actually released when those two black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago. Find out how sensitive a detector would need to be to detect waves from the Big Bang, and why, to detect more subtle signals, we need to move our detectors into space with LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Discover how LIGO lets us detect bare black holes for the first time, rather than just deducing where they are by seeing the destruction of a star they're shredding. Plus, Neil and company grapple with universal expansion, quantum physics, black holes, the speed of light, the origin of spacetime, the death of our Sun, the collision of the Milky Way with the Andromeda Galaxy, and much more.
%feed https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/why-we-need-darkness-light-pollution-stars Fear of the light: why we need darkness | Amanda Petrusich
Light pollution conceals true darkness from 80% of Europe and North America. What do we lose when we can no longer see the stars?
Every civilisation we know of has devised a system scientific, religious, what have you to make sense of the night sky. The mystery of what's up there, where it came from, and what it means has been inherited and puzzled over for generations. Those questions may be the most human ones we have.
Due to pervasive light pollution glare from excessive, misaimed and unshielded night lighting 80% of Europe and North America no longer experiences real darkness. For anyone living near a major metropolis, a satellite image of the Milky Way seems abstract: we understand it to be a document of something true, but our understanding is purely theoretical. In 1994, after a predawn earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about “the strange sky”. What those callers were seeing were stars.
Under class 6 or 7 night skies, a person can wander outside, open a newspaper, and read the headlines
By 1890, more than 175,000 electric streetlights had been installed in the US; there are now somewhere around 26m
It's not just darkness we fear, it's the vastness and loneliness of the universe
Astronomy is, in one way or another, central to every foundational philosophy we know
%feed http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond/~3/UdKAU63mGU0/infant-monster-star-discovered-in-milky-way-thirty-times-the-size-of-our-sun.html Monster Infant Star Discovered in Milky Way --"Thirty Times the Size of Our Sun"
Astronomers have identified a young star, located almost 11,000 light years away, which could help us understand how the most massive stars in the Universe are formed. This young star, already more than 30 times the mass of our Sun, is still in the process of gathering material from its parent molecular cloud, and may be even more massive when it finally reaches adulthood.
The researchers, led by a team at the University of Cambridge, have identified a key stage in the birth of a very massive star, and found that these stars form in a similar way to much smaller stars like our Sun from a rotating disc of gas and dust. The results will be presented this week at the Star Formation 2016 conference at the University of Exeter, and are reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In our galaxy, massive young stars those with a mass at least eight times greater than the Sun are much more difficult to study than smaller stars. This is because they live fast and die young, making them rare among the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and on average, they are much further away.
“An average star like our Sun is formed over a few million years, whereas massive stars are formed orders of magnitude faster — around 100,000 years,” said Dr John Ilee from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the study's lead author. “These massive stars also burn through their fuel much more quickly, so they have shorter overall lifespans, making them harder to catch when they are infants.”
The protostar that Ilee and his colleagues identified resides in an infrared dark cloud - a very cold and dense region of space which makes for an ideal stellar nursery. However, this rich star-forming region is difficult to observe using conventional telescopes, since the young stars are surrounded by a thick, opaque cloud of gas and dust. But by using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii and the Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, both of which use relatively long wavelengths of light to observe the sky, the researchers were able to ‘see' through the cloud and into the stellar nursery itself.
By measuring the amount of radiation emitted by cold dust near the star, and by using unique fingerprints of various different molecules in the gas, the researchers were able to determine the presence of a ‘Keplerian' disc - one which rotates more quickly at its centre than at its edge.
“This type of rotation is also seen in the Solar System - the inner planets rotate around the Sun more quickly than the outer planets,” said Ilee. “It's exciting to find such a disc around a massive young star, because it suggests that massive stars form in a similar way to lower mass stars, like our Sun.”
The initial phases of this work were part of an undergraduate summer research project at the University of St Andrews, funded by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). The undergraduate carrying out the work, Pooneh Nazari, said, “My project involved an initial exploration of the observations, and writing a piece of software to ‘weigh' the central star. I'm very grateful to the RAS for providing me with funding for the summer project — I'd encourage anyone interested in academic research to try one!”
From these observations, the team measured the mass of the protostar to be over 30 times the mass of the Sun. In addition, the disc surrounding the young star was also calculated to be relatively massive, between two and three times the mass of our Sun. Dr Duncan Forgan, also from St Andrews and lead author of a companion paper, said, “Our theoretical calculations suggest that the disc could in fact be hiding even more mass under layers of gas and dust. The disc may even be so massive that it can break up under its own gravity, forming a series of less massive companion protostars.”
The next step for the researchers will be to observe the region with the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), located in Chile. This powerful instrument will allow any potential companions to be seen, and allow researchers to learn more about this intriguing young heavyweight in our galaxy.
Rho Cassiopeiae (Rho Cas) shown at the top of the page belongs to an unusual class of stars, a yellow hypergiant of which only seven have been found in the Milky Way. Despite being located some 10,000 light-years (ly) away, the star is visible to the naked eye because it is over 500,000 times more luminous than Sol. With surface temperatures between 3,500 and 7,000 °K, yellow hypergiants appear to be stars that are at a very evolved stage of their life and may be close to exploding as supernovae.
The Daily Galaxy via RAS and University of Cambridge
astronomy
1471996321000
cogdis
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.google.com%2Fnews%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26fd%3DR%26ct2%3Dus%26usg%3DAFQjCNGe6Xi_J8-dCUhYyO12HlVNStRYzQ%26clid%3Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%26ei%3D2N28V9j_O4Ob1AaauqNo%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fseekingalpha.com%2Farticle%2F4001670-cognitive-dissonance-bull-market&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Cognitive Dissonance And The Bull Market - Seeking Alpha
Cognitive Dissonance And The Bull Market Seeking Alpha One of the real hazards to clients' financial well-being is the career risk that they impose on their advisors; clients are subject to episodes of cognitive dissonance that cause problems. An example of this occurs when clients insist on taking maximum ...
cogdis
1471996318000
cogdis
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.mashable.com%2F%7Er%2FMashable%2F%7E3%2Fg15CPRf2D74%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Marijuana makes lab rats lazy, says study out to harsh your buzz
Researchers from the University of British Columbia have discovered some truth in the theory that marijuana makes you lazy — at least if you're a rat.
In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neurosciene, they found that THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, made the creatures less likely to try cognitively demanding tasks.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F08%2F160823125358.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Warbler genomes look to be 99.97 percent alike New research shows that, genetically speaking, blue-winged and golden-winged warblers are almost identical. Scientists behind the research say the main differences between the two species are in feather color and pattern, in some cases just a simple matter of dominant or recessive pairings of gene variants, or alleles. gaia
1471996248000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F08%2F160823083557.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 The cave bear: A vegan gone extinct Scientists have studied the feeding habits of the extinct Cave Bear. Based on the isotope composition in the collagen of the bears' bones, they were able to show that the large mammals subsisted on a purely vegan diet. The team proposes that it was this inflexible diet that led to the Cave Bear's extinction approximately 25,000 years ago. gaia
1471996246000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F08%2F160823083315.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Reef castaways: Can coral make it across Darwin's 'impassable' barrier? An international team of researchers have shown that vulnerable coral populations in the eastern tropical Pacific have been completely isolated from the rest of the Pacific Ocean for at least the past two decades. gaia
1471996202000
technology
%feed http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/24/north-koreas-home-spun-version-of-netflix-is-called-wait-for-it-manbang/ North Korea's home-spun version of Netflix is called… wait for it… ‘Manbang' Last week, multiple outlets reported the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) is set to get its own home-spun version of Netflix. Today, we know the name. Are you ready for it? Manbang. The name of North Korea's version of Netflix is Manbang, which means “everything” in Korean — and something else entirely in English-speaking countries. The service is, however, a major development for the notoriously closed society. Manbang will reportedly use a Roku-like box to access state-controlled intranet through IPTV protocol. Programming options are obviously limited and each device will only be allowed to access five television channels. The channels are mostly documentaries…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/08/23/facebook-messenger-now-allows-you-to-connect-without-connecting/ Facebook Messenger now allows you to connect without connecting Facebook is testing a new feature for its popular ‘Messenger' platform. The feature, confirmed by BuzzFeed News today, allows you to connect with others from within the app without actually adding them to your friend list on Facebook itself. In essence, the feature allows Messenger users to connect with each other on the app, as if they were already friends, but without actually adding them as friends on Facebook proper. Facebook already allows this, although in a modified format. When non-friends message, you're met with a message request that allows you to read and accept or ignore any future correspondence. If…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/08/23/apple-still-isnt-acknowledging-its-growing-touch-disease-problem/ Apple still isn't acknowledging its growing ‘touch disease' problem iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users are suffering from a manufacturing issue that presents itself as a gray flickering bar at the top of the screen and an unresponsive — or less responsive — touchscreen. Affectionately known as ‘touch disease,' it's a persistent problem that Apple seems fully aware of, but not all that willing to do anything about.Although detailed by a handful of third-party repair specialists — like iFixit — and dozens (if not hundreds) of complaints on its own support forum the problem persists. The problem seems to stem from the flawed controller chip soldered to the logic board…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/08/23/ever-wonder-what-facebook-knows-about-you-heres-how-to-find-out/ Ever wonder what Facebook knows about you? Here's how to find out Facebook is scary-good at targeting ads. To provide this level of targeting to advertisers, Facebook has to pull from a staggering amount of data that each of us post to the social network without really thinking much about. Our political leanings, the technology we use and even our location (and whether we live near family) are all fair game for creating these dossiers on each and every Facebook user. In essence, Facebook is trying to shove each of us into a number of boxes that accurately portray who we are, and what we might be interested in. This is what those…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2016/08/23/the-worlds-top-autonomous-vehicle-tech-firms-are-teaming-up-to-create-the-ultimate-self-driving-system/ The world's top autonomous vehicle tech firms are teaming up to create the ultimate self-driving system Delphi and Mobileye, two heavy hitters in the world of autonomous vehicle technology, have announced that they are partnering to jointly develop a self-driving system that automakers will be able to integrate into their cars starting 2019. For those who came in late: Delphi is one of the auto industry's biggest parts suppliers. In 2014, it showed off an Audi SQ5 fitted with a self-driving system developed in-house, that allowed the vehicle to successfully navigate through 3,000 miles on its own. It also began testing a self-driving cab service in Singapore this month. Mobileye, which specializes in computer vision, mapping…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/08/23/instagrams-stories-are-better-than-snapchat-but-im-still-not-using-it/ Instagram's ‘Stories' are better than Snapchat, but I'm still not using it Contrary to many of its users, I wasn't immediately turned off by Instagram stealing a feature from Snapchat. The execution was better, the admission that it borrowed heavily from Snapchat was refreshing and the timing couldn't have been better (right before the Olympics). I'm actually disappointed it didn't happen months earlier. While Snapchat continues to innovate, we must remember that this is technology and new features aren't new for long. Stories, released way back in 2013 was no longer new. Largely untouched by Snapchat, it was a feature that was too good to let sit idle for that long. It needed exactly what…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/08/23/zuckerberg-starts-making-good-promise-donate-99-facebook-stock-charity/ Zuckerberg starts making good on promise to donate 99% of his Facebook stock to charity In December last year, Facebook CEO and new father Mark Zuckerberg penned a heartfelt letter to his newborn baby girl, Max. As part of an on-going initiative with his wife, Priscilla Chan, the two pledged to donate 99 percent of their current Facebook shares — around $45 billion in total — to charity. We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to advance this mission. We know this is a small contribution compared to all the resources and talents of those already working on these issues. But we want to do what we…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/23/japan-may-craft-olympic-medals-old-smartphones/ Japan may craft its Olympic medals from old smartphones Japan could be using the 2020 Olympics to make a statement about sustainability. According to a report from Asian publication, Nikkei, Olympic organizers are considering using recycled electronics to forge the iconic bronze, silver and rose gold medals for the 2020 games. While hypothetically feasible to craft the medals from old smartphones, Japan is already recycling most of this material — to create more electronics. It could still happen though. The Olympic planning committee is asking companies to put their collective heads together and come up with an idea or two about how to collect electronic waste. The hope is that each citizen gets to…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/22/nasa-details-broadcast-plans-for-upcoming-spacewalk-and-spacex-dragon-iss-departure/ NASA details broadcast plans for upcoming spacewalk and SpaceX ‘Dragon' ISS departure If you have even a passing interest in NASA, you should know about two upcoming events set to air in the coming days. First, NASA will cover the departure of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the International Space Station on August 26. The Dragon spacecraft arrived at the station on July 20 to deliver 5,000 pounds of supplies, experiments and equipment. Part of the payload were the parts necessary to create an additional docking port for future missions. On July 20, you can watch NASA TV's coverage of the dragon departure beginning at 5:45 am EDT. The craft will detach from…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/08/22/a-few-simple-modifications-can-turn-a-game-boy-into-a-drone-controller/ A few simple modifications can turn a Game Boy into a drone controller It's time to dig out the Game Boy classic. Dust it off, pop in some fresh batteries and use it the way the 1989 handheld was supposed to be used — to pilot a drone. With a few simple modifications, Gautier Hattenberger of the French Civil Aviation University (ENAC), managed to breathe new life into his classic handheld by using it to pilot an ARDrone2 from Parrot. After finding an old Game Boy at his parents' house, Hattenberger immediately thought: “can I fly a drone with this?” Turns out, he could. Using a GameLink — an accessory originally created to facilitate…
%feed http://www.designboom.com/art/john-yuyi-social-media-tattoos-08-23-2016/ john yuyi tattoos social media symbols to snapshot our online infatuations
the images emphasize our obsession with social media by affixing digital symbols to the human body as temporary tattoos.
%feed https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/aug/23/beyond-the-beatles-peter-blakes-pop-art-on-paper-in-pictures Beyond the Beatles: Peter Blake's pop art on paper in pictures
Peter Blake didn't stop at designing the Sgt Pepper cover, as this exhibition of rare and limited-edition works by the godfather of British pop art shows
%feed http://www.designboom.com/art/teamlab-resonating-spheres-trees-light-festival-tadasu-no-mori-shimogamo-shrine-kyoto-08-22-2016/ teamlab brilliantly illuminates an ancient shrine in kyoto and its surrounding primeval forest
two light installations animate the dense woodland surrounding shimogamo shrine in a mesmerizing display of color.
Hyperloop Explained: How Elon Musk's Futuristic Transit System Works…
pin-art
1471993947000
pin-art
%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629353690/ China Actually Built
China Actually Built That Crazy Traffic-Straddling Bus
pin-art
1471993945000
pin-art
%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629353686/ The Model S P100D wi
The Model S P100D with Ludicrous mode is the third fastest accelerating…
pin-art
1471993942000
pin-art
%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629353687/ The Model S P100D wi
The Model S P100D with Ludicrous mode is the third fastest accelerating…
pin-art
1471993938000
pin-art
%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629348649/ Effortlessly track w
Effortlessly track what's important to you in life or business
pin-art
1471993185000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Duk%2526usg%253DAFQjCNGGINFTffj4_1LiMcHZwKMs6FBskA%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779187741224%2526ei%253DH8a8V8iOHdf3zAbB1baoCA%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fmashable.com%252F2016%252F08%252F23%252Frobot-communication-study%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: New study points to how we may work with robots in the future - Mashable
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.mashable.com%252F%7Er%252FMashable%252F%7E3%252FgoRqO5obVbk%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Humans may prefer expressive robots to competent ones, study finds
Humans may prefer to work with robots that can communicate and express emotions, even if that means they're less efficient, according to a new study from University College London and the University of Bristol.
Researchers tested how people reacted when robots messed up a given task. They had participants work with three different versions (A, B and C) of the same robot, BERT2. Each would bring the humans ingredients to make an omelet: BERT A never erred, but BERT B and C both dropped an egg at some point.
Only BERT C could communicate with the humans and say "I'm sorry." It would also be visibly dismayed at the mistake, with an exaggerated look of sadness displayed on its face. BERT C would then show that it was going to try a different approach to the task, thereby rectifying the mistake. Read more...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.gawker.com%252F%7Er%252Flifehacker%252Fvip%252F%7E3%252FLze766_loY8%252Ftodays-best-deals-12-tumbler-puma-gear-cuisinart-gr-1785638858%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Today's Best Deals: $12 Tumbler, PUMA Gear, Cuisinart Griddler, and More
Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don't forget to sign up for our email newsletter.
If you're sick of renting carpet washers every time you spot a new stain, you can buy your own for just $96. The Hoover Power Scrub Deluxe has a squeaky-clean 4.4 star review average from nearly 6,000 customers, and this all-time low price is only available today as part of a Gold Box deal.
Vizio's 2016 M-series TVs include basically every feature you could possibly want, including 4K resolution, Dolby Vision HDR (the good one), Google Cast, local dimming, and even a tablet remote. Do I have your attention? The 55" model is on sale for just $619 right now, or nearly $200 less than usual. I know this came out of nowhere, but it's one of the best TV deals I've ever seen, and I wouldn't expect it to last.
Nose hair is a problem a lot of people have but, for some reason, few people take care of. For a limited time, score thisPanasonic nose hair trimmer for just $10, and you can be one of those people doing something about it. Harambe didn't die so you could look like The Missing Link.
The Razer BlackWidow Ultimate is one of the most popular mechanical gaming keyboards out there, and you can pick one up for $90 today, which is one of the best deals we've seen. For that price, you're getting five lighting options, mechanical switches rated to 80,000,000 keystrokes, and fully programmable keys.
Humble Indie Bundle 17 brings with it Super Time Force Ultra, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and Galak-7, along with four other games, some extras, and more to come.
If you like to do your own oil changes, or aren't afraid to tinker on the underside of your car, these inexpensive RhinoRamps are the quickest way to elevate your car. Obviously, they won't help you for tire changes, and they won't give you a ton of clearance, but for quick, basic maintenance, they should get the job done.
If you want a secondary TV for your bedroom, kitchen, or garage, you could do a lot worse than this 32” TCL. Yeah, it's only 720p and 60Hz, but it has Roku's streaming platform built right in, and it's only $150 today, an all-time low. It's not going to be your primary TV, but it's perfectly adequate for certain rooms and situations.
Huawei Watch, $125 off + $100 gift card on select models. Promo code SMARTW
If you've been waiting for a deal on Huawei's excellent-but-expensive Android Wear smart watch, B&H is taking $100 off select models, plus an extra $25 with promo code SMARTW, plus an extra $100 gift card for good measure (on certain models only).
If you've had your eye trained on the svelte new Xbox One S, you can get a 1TB Madden bundle for its standard $350 MSRP (with no tax for most), plus a $50 eBay gift card for good measure. That doesn't really hold a candle to the deals we've seen on the old Xbox One, but it's not bad if you need the new hotness.
$68 would be a pretty great price for the Griddler on its own, but the waffle iron plates usually sell for $25-$35 by themselves, so this bundle represents a pretty massive discount.
I've probably seen more USB battery packs than 99.9% of people living on this Earth, but I've never seen one like the ZeroLemon ToughJuice before. You get 30,000mAh of juice, five (!) USB ports, including a Quick Charge 2.0 port and a USB-C port, and a ruggedized exterior.
It's niche, and at $70 (with code JUXKCZZ4), it's not exactly cheap, but it truly stands apart in a world of commodity USB battery packs.
Everyone knows about Roombas, but did you know iRobot made a robotic mop as well? The iRobot Braava Jet has three different modes: Wet mopping, damp sweeping and dry sweeping, and can select the proper one automatically depending on which cleaning pad you attach. You can put it to work on your floors for just $169 today, the best price Amazon's ever listed.
Want wireless streaming and handsfree calling in your older car? This $13 dongle receives the Bluetooth signal from your phone, and transmits it to the FM radio station of your choice.
We've seen several deals on Bluetooth car kits in the past, but most require that your car include an AUX jack, whereas this only needs a working FM radio.
Note: The description of the product confusingly contains references to AUX cables, but that's optional. You can use this completely wirelessly, if you so choose.
What's that noise the car's making? It's all the crap rolling around in your trunk. This $24 pop-up organizer will keep everything in its place, and it even comes with a free bonus car cooler, as well as a reflective warning triangle for roadside emergencies.
Today you can grab a Fitbit Aria smart scale on eBay for just $67, the best price we've ever seen for a non-refurb. It only really makes sense to buy this scale if you own (and regularly use) a Fitbit, but if you do, the Aria sync your weight, BMI, and body fat % to the Fitbit app to track your goals and progress over time.
Playing With Power: Nintendo NES Classics promises to be an enlightening retrospective on your favorite classic video games. The book will feature overviews of 17 NES titles, interviews and commentary from Nintendo employees, hand-drawn maps, and more goodies when it's released in November
But let's be honest here, the real reason to buy it is the NES cartridge slip case.
Here's 20% off various chocolates and candies because....Halloween is about two months away? Trump is running for President? Your favorite blog is shutting down? Anyway, enjoy.
We see lots of deals these days on the original Philips Hue starter kit, but the second generation set includes a Siri-compatible bridge and brighter bulbs (800 lumens vs. 600), and you can save $20 on it today, with a $50 Best Buy gift card thrown in for good measure. That's easily the best deal we've seen to date.
There's almost always a $40 PlayStation Plus deal available through some eBay seller or another, but today, they're all suspiciously missing. We don't know if it's related to the price hike, but you could wait a few days to see if another one pops up. If not, I think it's safe to assume that those days are over.
Between shedding fur on your seats and a seemingly biological need to jump into the front seat while you're passing an 18-wheeler on the freeway, it's no secret that a lot of dogs don't do particularly well in the car. Personally, I put my dog in a collapsible fabric kennel in the backseat, but if you want your pooch to have a little more freedom, this backseat dog cover looks like a perfect solution.
The cover hooks into the headrests on both the front and back seats, creating a kind of loosely enclosed room that will keep your dog safely in the backseat, and her fur a layer removed from your upholstery.
Just when you thought you'd seen it all in the USB battery pack world, this 5,000mAh battery from RAVPower includes a Qi charging pad to power up your phone wirelessly. Sure, that's a little bit of a gimmick, but it does mean you don't have to carry an extra charging cable, and unlike most battery packs, this one can serve a purpose when you aren't traveling.
If you need a little extra push to get out and go for a run, Amazon will sell you a pair of Mizuno Wave Sayonara 3 running shoes for just $45 today. These shoes typically sell for about $60-$70 around the web, and you even get to pick your favorite color; just click through to the product pages to find the color selector.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don't forget to sign up for our email newsletter. We want your feedback.
robots
1471993176000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Farticles%252Ftechnology%252Ffuture_tense%252F2016%252F08%252Fin_copyright_law_computers_and_robots_don_t_count.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Computers and Robots Don't Count
Copyright has a weird relationship with computers. Sometimes it completely freaks out about them; sometimes it pretends it can't see them at all. The contrast tells us a lot about copyright—and even more about how we relate to new technologies.
Start with the freakout. One thing that computers are good for is making copies—lots of copies. Drag your music folder from your hard drive to your backup Dropbox and congratulations: You've just duplicated thousands of copyrighted songs. If you look up the section of the Copyright Act that sets out what counts as infringement, the very first Thou Shalt Not is “reproduce the copyrighted work.” In theory, Congress could have added some language saying that putting your music in your Dropbox that no one else can access isn't infringement. In practice, well, it's Congress.
Congressional inaction has meant that the problem of explaining why the internet isn't just an infringement machine in need of a good unplugging has been kicked over the courts. (Yes, the courts staffed by judges who call Dropbox “the Dropbox” and “iDrop.”) And in the process of keeping computers legal, the judges who make copyright law have developed some surprisingly broad rules shielding automatically made copies from liability.
Take, for example, the 2009 case A.V. v. iParadigms, in which high schools compelled students to submit their term papers to Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection site. First it compares papers to those already in its database, looking for suspicious similarities; then it stores the paper to compare to future submissions. Four students sued, arguing that these stored copies infringed their copyrights in their papers.
The court disagreed, because of course you shouldn't be able to use copyright to keep your teachers from finding out whether you cheated on your homework. But its reasoning is fascinating. Turnitin, the court held, made a “transformative” use of the papers because its use was “completely unrelated to expressive content.” Turnitin's computers might have copied the papers, but they didn't really read them. The court added, “The archived student works are stored as digital code, and employees of [Turnitin] do not read or review the archived works.”
Courts use similar logic in case after case: It's not infringement if computers “read or review” the new copies, only if people do. Google famously scanned millions of books. Completely legal, fourcourtshaveagreed, because it's not as though Google is turning the complete books over to people. “Google Books ... is not a tool to be used to read books,” wrote one judge. In another strand of the litigation, the parties at one point proposed a settlement that would have allowed “non-consumptive” digital humanities research on the scanned books, defined as “research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more Books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays substantial portions of a Book to understand the intellectual content presented within the Book.” This was fine, in the view of the author and publisher representatives who negotiated the proposed settlement. Computers can do what they want with books as long as no one actually “understand[s]” its “intellectual content.”
This attitude—computers don't count—isn't new, either. A century ago, the cutting edge in artistic robotics was the player piano. The Supreme Court heard a player-piano case in 1908 and held that the paper rolls “read” by the player pianos weren't infringing. The rolls, Justice William Day reasoned, “[c]onvey[] no meaning, then, to the eye of even an expert musician.” Instead, they “form a part of a machine. ... They are a mechanical invention made for the sole purpose of performing tunes mechanically upon a musical instrument.” The anthropocentrism is unmistakable. I've cataloged many different settings where copyright law finds ways to overlook copying as long as no humans are in the loop.
On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. Copyright is designed to encourage human creativity for human audiences. If a book falls in a forest and no one reads it, does it make an infringement? It seems like the only sensible answer is “No harm, no foul.” On the other hand, there's something strange about a rule that tells technologists just to turn the robots loose. It encourages uses that don't have much to do with human aesthetics while discouraging uses that do.
This hands-off approach to robotic readership stands in sharp contrast to copyright's surprisingly obsessive fretting about robotic authorship. We're at the dawn of a golden age of algorithmic authorship. Twitter bots like Olivia Taters and Hottest Startups, simple as they are, are capable of amazing poetry. From Push Button Bertha to Microsoft Songsmith, computer-generated music ranges from beautiful to banal. Special-effects artists and video-game programmers use procedural content generation to make vast imaginary worlds far beyond what any one person could hope to draw or design. And of course spambots and telemarketing robots (and counter-robots) are getting eerily good at mimicking human expression.
If all you knew about copyright was the way it treats computer-generated copies, you might think it would similarly look the other way and ignore computer-generated creativity. But no! No two plays of a video game are the same; the computer produces a new and different sequence of sights and sounds every time through. Copyright doesn't care; video games are still copyrightable. Now, of course they are; it would be ridiculous if you could just completely rip off games, and case after case holds that you can't.
But even as copyright law goes on recognizing copyright in computer-generated works, it can't help obsessively worrying about them with the same kind of nervous energy it gives to monkey selfies and for the same reason: What if there's no author? What if a creative work just popped into existence, without being clearly traceable to the artistic vision of a specific human? What then, buddy?
The funny thing is that just as the player piano roll shows that mechanical copying long predates computers, so does algorithmic creativity. You know what's a device for making art according to rigidly specified algorithmic rules? A spirograph. You know what else is? A Musikalisches Würfelspiel (sometimes apocryphally named for Mozart): a game in which you roll dice to select measures of music to string together into a minuet. Computers are faster and fancier but for the most part not fundamentally different. There's no need to futz around with speculating on whether your iPhone is a copyright-owning “author” of a Temple Run maze, any more than a spirograph is the author of a hypotrochoid drawing. Typically either the programmer or the user or both are authors, and that's good enough.
There will be harder cases of what Bruce Boyden calls “emergent works” that arise out of unpredictable algorithmic interactions. Where neither the programmer nor the user can reasonable foresee what a computer will do, the case for calling either of them an author is weak; they lack the kind of artistic vision copyright is supposed to promote and reward. But what's interesting and tricky about these emergent works is not that they come from computers but that they're unpredictable by anyone involved in their creation.
In an age of police killbots, worrying about whether Bender owns a copyright in his dream about killing all humans may seem a little beside the point. But copyright provides a useful window for thinking about hot-button issues in law and technology, ironically because the stakes are so much lower. There are low-tech precedents for new high-tech puzzles, if we care to see them.
The key is not to treat “computers” or “robots” or “drones” or other new kinds of technologies as unified phenomena we have to figure out all at once but instead to look at the different kinds of ways they operate and can be used. The Dallas bomb robot was under direct police control at all times; it was a tool for safely delivering lethal force from a distance in the same way that a sniper rifle is. The most important issue it raised was the security of its communications channel—because the last thing you want when you strap a pound of C-4 to a robot is for someone else to hijack the controls. That's a very different kind of problem than worrying about delegating life-or-death decisions to algorithms with a limited human presence in the loop. Lumping them together as “lethal robots” obscures more than it reveals; it makes it harder to identify which robots are dangerous and how and harder to figure out what to do about them.
The same is true for copyright, for privacy, for civil rights, and for the dozens of other pressing public policy problems surrounding new technologies. You learn more about augmented reality by thinking about Pokémon Go than vice versa. Technology policy is complicated because the world is complicated.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Fblogs%252Fbrowbeat%252F2016%252F08%252F22%252Fmr_robot_and_why_television_twists_aren_t_surprising.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don't Work Anymore
Spoilers ahead for Wednesday night's episode of Mr. Robot.
Well, what do you know? It turns out Elliot, the hacker hero of Mr. Robot, wasn't decompressing away from the internet at his mother's house while attending individual and group therapy and getting to know a half-kindly, half-menacing street criminal named Ray (Craig Robinson). He was actually in prison the whole time! His “mother” is a prison guard. Ray is a fellow inmate who apparently is running some kind of Tor-routed website that lets him deal in drugs, prostitution, and weapons from behind bars.
This is the big twist of Season 2, apparently. The big twist of Season 1 was a variation of the one in Fight Club: The title character (Christian Slater), the crazy-badass visionary renegade who “recruits” Elliot, turned out to be a figment of the hero's imagination, a stylized mental re-creation of his father, a computer salesman who died of leukemia caused by toxic leaks at a plant owned by Evil Corp.
Can we expect a twist, or “twist,” along these lines in every season of Mr. Robot? Because, if so, I might have to stop watching—not because it's devoid of other merits (it's brilliantly directed, photographed, edited, and scored and has a superlative cast), but the insistence on building perceptual tricks like these into the narrative diminishes the show's real and far more substantive virtues.
Series creator Sam Esmail, who wrote or co-wrote most of the episodes and directed all of Season 2, has gone on record repeatedly to say that he's not trying to fool anyone by doing this kind of thing. There are just enough clues dropped from the very beginning so that alert, film-history-conscious viewers have no trouble figuring out each season's structural sleight of hand. That's all true and fair. He's working in a tradition that also includes films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, A Beautiful Mind, and, in its own way, The Usual Suspects: You get pretty deep into the film and realize that what you thought was one thing was actually another thing.
I didn't outright predict that the character of Mr. Robot was going to turn out to be a Tyler Durdenstyle hallucination, but I was worrying about it all the way up to the episode where Esmail finally showed his cards—dreading it, really, because the show was so good at constructing a partially subjective universe shaped by Elliot's sardonic narration and star Rami Malek's introverted yet expressive acting, which I still think constitutes the best ongoing performance by a lead actor in a serialized drama. In Season 2, I didn't think Elliot's “detox” might turn out to be a fantastic construction, à la Mr. Robot himself, because it just seemed like too much of an M. Night Shyamalan thing to do, and since Esmail had done that once, drawing more criticism than praise, why would he do it again immediately? (My colleague Abraham Riesman figured it out right away, and as I read his evidence for Elliot's latest fantasy, I felt my heart sink, because if he turned out to be right, it would diminish my respect for a show that's so original and unpredictable in so many other ways.)
I should probably ‘fess up here and admit that I don't watch Mr. Robot, or any other TV series, to test my knowledge of TV tropes and say, “I called it!” whenever I successfully predict where a show's plot might be headed. That particular viewing approach doesn't interest me. I know there's a pretty sizable contingent of people who watch films and TV series mainly to see if they can successfully guess what will happen next—Reddit is a virtual mecca for this sort of viewer—but I've never encouraged that impulse, because it seems to me that it rewards screenwriters who are thinking about their plots and characters on the most superficial level, constructing a puzzle for others to solve and to feel good about having solved; this also encourages some writers to cheat a bit, withholding evidence that might tip their hand early, or just obscuring details and piling twist upon twist and reversal upon reversal until none of the characters make sense anymore as anything but figures in a nonsensical dream.
I'm not saying Esmail is doing that: He dropped enough hints in both seasons that you could figure things out early if you were so inclined. He even salted the dialogue and the scenes themselves with what feel in retrospect like winks or shrugs. After Elliot figured out that Mr. Robot was a hallucination of his dead dad and Darlene was actually his sister, the show played an acoustic version of Fight Club's closing-credits theme, the Pixies' “Where Is My Mind?” In last week's episode, Elliot seems to half-sheepishly apologize to his unseen “friend”—the TV viewer—for the prison twist. “I know what you're thinking. And no, I didn't lie to you. All of this really happened.”
In an interview with my friend Alan Sepinwall, Esmail said that these sorts of techniques are not intended to outsmart anyone but to reflect the hero's “ability to reprogram his life: E Corp was turned into Evil Corp. When we thought about him being in prison, what would be that coping mechanism, this came to mind. The other approach was his relationship to us—to his ‘friend'—and how we left him at the end of the first season. He basically didn't trust us anymore, he felt we were keeping things from him. So we wanted to develop that relationship as well. That was the one approach of, ‘This is what Elliot would do in this situation, to cope with being in prison,' and then the other of keeping it from us because he felt betrayed by us from the first season.”
Fair enough, but that still leaves us with another question, not about Elliot but about Mr. Robot as a work of popular storytelling: Do twists or tricks like these add to the story or detract from it? I'd argue that, in this case, they detract.
What makes Mr. Robot so innovative, audacious, and delightful aren't the narrative overlays of “Is this person real?” or “Is this situation real?” It's the detail and conviction with which Esmail and his actors build this mesmerizing alternate universe, which is essentially our world unfolding along what Abed on Community would call “the darkest timeline.”
Experts have hailed the show as the most accurate portrayal of computer programming, hacking, and the fine points of cybersecurity that TV has ever seen, and it's so good at weaving this crucial material into the characters' lives that you don't need to be an expert yourself to grasp what's going on. The show's mastery of tone—sardonic and satirical but ominous—is just as unusual. Its distrust of both capitalism and the possibility of revolution and reform are unheard of on commercial television, and its alternately idealistic and despairing worldview is so sincere and distressed that you can't just hit it with the usual complaints of hypocrisy (“If it's so anti-Establishment, what's it doing on commercial TV, eh?”) and walk away thinking you've delegitimized Esmail as a political storyteller. The show is at least as good at world-building as Game of Thrones—every episode brings more tidbits about the economic and political effects of the 5/9 hack and makes sure you understand the motivation for, say, blackmailing Evil Corp and then forcing its CFO (Brian Stokes Mitchell) to burn the ransom money in a public park, where the act will be captured on camera phones and uploaded to social media, furthering the idea that the corporation literally has money to burn and that fsociety isn't in this to enrich themselves.
But all this is diminished by the games Esmail plays in presenting Elliot's view of the world. What's the point, ultimately? Why do it at all? And if you're going to do it, why not ‘fess up immediately and let the narrative tension come from juxtaposing reality and “reality” in ways that illuminate the hero's internal struggles? The show seems to be hedging its bets here, arranging the material in a way that suggests we're going to be gobsmacked and mind-effed at some point, while simultaneously building enough signals into the story that if viewers complain that they figured out the twist right away, it's because it was never meant to be a twist. Bear in mind that I'm not saying Esmail shouldn't make the show he wants to make and is making—only that Mr. Robot is devoting an inordinate amount of energy to an aspect of storytelling that's vastly less interesting than the things the tricks are meant to enhance and support.
I wouldn't mind seeing a moratorium on this kind of screenwriting for that very reason: It just never works anymore.
The twist movies of the late 1990s occurred during the last possible cultural moment when a storyteller could do something like that and not have millions of people instantly take to the internet to figure out what was “really” going on. You might figure it out on your own and share your evidence with your friends on a chat board or in the comments section of a blog post, but the phenomenon of literally millions of viewers simultaneously joining forces to stay one step ahead of a storyteller was still about five to 10 years away (depending on which social-media platform you think did more damage to a screenwriter's ability to keep a secret, Facebook or Twitter).
The funny thing is, you often find yourself appreciating the substance of a story more once you've gotten past the adrenaline rush of “What's going on?” and “What's really going on?” and are able to concentrate on the details of characterization, performance, and storytelling. As one personal example of this phenomenon, I offer The Sixth Sense: I accidentally found out the twist before I saw the film when my eye randomly fell on a particular paragraph of an Entertainment Weekly story with a spoiler warning at the top. But I still loved the movie because it painted such a haunting (in every sense) portrait of the human mind's capacity for denial and delusion. At its heart, the film is not merely about a man who had no idea he was dead but a man who refused to accept his fate and was going through the motions of an old life that no longer existed. Most people who saw it for the first time were probably preoccupied with guessing the twist, and if they guessed it early, they might have decided the film was a waste of their time: You promised you were going to be smarter than me, movie, but it turned out I was smarter than you, so I'm disappointed.
Seventeen years on, there are Facebook and Reddit and Twitter threads, video essays and blog posts dedicated to figuring out every last twist and trick that storytellers naïvely hope they're holding in reserve. For some reason—perhaps the social-media-age rush to jump ahead to the next thing—this kind of viewing has become endemic. Whether the topic of discussion is the meaning of the ending of Inception or The Sopranos or the lineage of Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it's guaranteed that somebody (or somebodies) will eventually guess the correct answer or, worse, insist that they've “solved” a work that was meant to be ambiguous and unresolved. The end result of this kind of discussion diverts attention from the deeper values of storytelling and re-centers interest on the hook, or on what viewers mistakenly believe is the hook, of any given tale. Art becomes a math problem, or a gift-wrapped present whose identity can be deduced by shaking the box a little.
Mr. Robot is encouraging this kind of reductive approach to engagement with art, however accidentally. And it's a shame, because the rest of the show is so rich with imagination and meaning that it could probably rivet us if it dropped the gimmicks entirely and just concentrated on doing what it already claims to be doing: telling the story of Elliot and the cruel world that he's trying to destroy and remake. As I've said of other series, including Mad Men, this show is smarter than the people who think they are smarter than the show. But it's not easy to make that case when Esmail is pulling another variation of “it was all a dream.”
%feed http://insider.si.edu/2016/08/linn-meyers-view-time-lapse/ Linn Meyers “Our View From Here” Time-lapse
Linn Meyers (American, b. Washington, D.C., 1968; lives and works in Washington, D.C.) created her largest work, “Our View From Here,” at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, on view May 12, 2016May 14, 2017.
This time-lapse highlights the process behind the site-specific wall drawing, which stretches the entire circumference of the inner-circle galleries on the museum's second level, more than 400 linear feet. Meyers creates her works by hand-drawing thousands of closely spaced, rippling lines, each nested beside the one that came before it. Drawing alone for long hours each day with a type of marker often used by graffiti writers, she welcomes the imperfections that are a natural part of working without templates or taped lines. The resulting patterns flow and pulse with energy.
“Consider that when the average theatrical run of a film was three days, that Sunrise would not only command a princely sum of $2.00 a ticket, but run for over 28 weeks at the Times Square Theater in New York City. Because of its incredible popularity the original advertising paper on this film was used extensively traveling through the several rungs of distributorship until the ragged remnants were finally discarded. This is the first poster we have offered on the title and the only copy of this unique window card that we have seen. ” Heritage Auctions where this 14″ x 22″ window card sold for $19,120 in 2008.
culture
1471990859000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2F2101954-secrets-of-how-primates-can-live-at-extreme-altitude-revealed%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Secrets of how primates can live at extreme altitude revealed Gene selection explains how some species of snub-nosed monkeys have adapted to the challenging conditions of their habitat up to 4600 metres above sea level gaia
1471990659000
images
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2F500px.com%2Fphoto%2F169184425%2Fthe-90s-had-model-squads-too-by-vladyslav-ga&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 The ‘90s had model squads too by Vladyslav Ga
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2F500px.com%2Fphoto%2F169043015%2Fyellow-dory-at-low-tide-by-steve-morrison&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Yellow Dory at Low Tide by Steve Morrison
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNEMZrAR2NVBwQSGDWWVfRQ2y4Hu6Q%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526ei%253D3LS8V6jsHczNzAbIjIZQ%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.vdare.com%252Fposts%252Fautomation-makes-immigration-obsolete-new-warehouse-robot-is-introduced%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete: New Warehouse Robot Is Introduced - VDARE.com
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete: New Warehouse Robot Is Introduced VDARE.com Soon, yours could viably be the first human hands to touch what you've just bought online. “Drones have a lot of potential to further connect our vast network of stores, distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and transportation fleet,” Walmart has ...
robots
1471990604000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.mashable.com%252F%7Er%252FMashable%252F%7E3%252FC2g7fTu2ReE%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: 8 features Siri should have that would help our dating lives
Tech is such a huge part of dating in 2016 we meet mates on dating apps, we have endless forms of social media for researching and stalking our crushes, and bae is available 24/7 via text.
Sure, Siri's just a robot living in your phone. Maybe she's jealous that you can experience love and she can't.
But like we said, she's a robot. She isn't supposed to have emotions. It's time for Siri to get over her jealousy of the human connection and help us our with our dating lives.
Here are eight things we wish Siri could do that would help us become romance wizards: Read more...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.mashable.com%252F%7Er%252FMashable%252F%7E3%252FCH0R8H-yEo8%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: James Corden performs 'Nothing Compares 2 U' with Coldplay and kills it
Though James Corden's late night segment "Carpool Karaoke" puts the Late Late Show host's vocal skills on display, Corden is rarely (if ever) the center of musical attention. Not so at Coldplay's Sunday night show in Los Angeles.
Chris Martin brought Corden on stage — dressed as a long lost fifth Coldplay member — to pay tribute to Prince with a surprisingly great cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U." It's a delight to behold, and a convincing argument for Corden's very own solo "Carpool Karaoke" segment.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.mashable.com%252F%7Er%252FMashable%252F%7E3%252FJchre-AHzME%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: China's Xpider robot is inspired by the magic of Pixar films
When the robots come for our weak human flesh during the Singularity, let's hope they're at least as cute as the Xpider, a robot being developed by a small team in Beijing.
The developers, who were originally inspired by the cyclops character, Mike, from Monsters, Inc., created a tiny spider-like machine that can walk, recognize objects and detect and record faces via its camera eye.
The team used 3D-printed components and Intel Edison and Curie modules, which were both designed to make it easier for open source device creators to quickly develop innovative prototypes and products.
Weighing just 150 grams, the robot isn't available just yet, but the team is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon, which means the Xpider might be commercially available in the near future. Read more...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNEg9HOY3Lqki2bqiAlueqbcQBi3nw%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779187711387%2526ei%253D27S8V4DtL6aXzAa194PwAg%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%252Fsciencetech%252Farticle-3754891%252FRobots-CRIMINALS-Police-not-able-stop-AI-breaking-law-warn-experts.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: US study suggest robots could soon become criminals - Daily Mail
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNFllYxn7lkmvaYm835vJGnR8-KeLg%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779187613208%2526ei%253D27S8V4DtL6aXzAa194PwAg%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.smh.com.au%252Fbusiness%252Fthe-economy%252Fartificial-intelligence-to-help-prepare-tax-returns-report-20160822-gqykq6.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Artificial intelligence to help prepare tax returns: report - The Sydney Morning Herald
Artificial intelligence to help prepare tax returns: report The Sydney Morning Herald "Cloud robotics allows computers to draw on massive databases in the cloud for the learning experience. Deep learning is a form of artificial intelligence that uses complex algorithms to try to mimic the human brain through the recognition of patterns ...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fdigg.com%252Fvideo%252Fsushi-robot%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: This Robot Puts Together Some Mediocre Looking Sushi, But We're Still Impressed The fish looks pre-cut and we're not sure why ketchup is involved. It's gimmicky, sure, but if we were at a restaurant where this was a thing we would be wide eyed and squealing with joy. robots
1471990464000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNF1JH93Krxj_2jPZtZ_QkZlKwVNTQ%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779187440865%2526ei%253D27S8V4DtL6aXzAa194PwAg%2526url%253Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.finextra.com%252Fnewsarticle%252F29338%252Fcommbank-hires-chip-the-robot-for-ai-push%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: CommBank hires Chip the robot for AI push - Finextra - Finextra (press release)
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNHmT7wQyR_TOdpniBDJHytPQd1JKQ%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526ei%253D27S8V9idMrKuzAaj0KzIAw%2526url%253Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.yahoo.com%252Ftv%252Fsam-esmail-rami-malek-mr-213551956.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Sam Esmail & Rami Malek On 'Mr. Robot': Season 2 “About The Hangover Of Revolution” – AwardsLine - Yahoo News
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNF1Fd8OQkTYIapE7jrLjHZ7ulJwuQ%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779186926618%2526ei%253D27S8V9idMrKuzAaj0KzIAw%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fdeadline.com%252F2016%252F08%252Fmr-robot-rami-malek-sam-esmail-season-2-plans-emmy-interview-1201803141%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: 'Mr. Robot' Season 2 Interview With Rami Malek & Sam Esmail ... - Deadline
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fdigg.com%252Fvideo%252Frobot-stairs%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: A Tiny Humanoid Robot Slowly Figuring Out Stairs We know the robot overlords will come for us eventually. But judging from how long it takes this little guy to descend a few steps, we should be okay for the time being if we camp out in basements. robots
1471990454000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNGtAVJnVgPgqyTjySLcUECAKIrkXA%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779187302956%2526ei%253D3LS8V6jsHczNzAbIjIZQ%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.businessinsider.com%252Fthe-rise-of-automation-in-banking-and-finance-2016-8%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: This is what might happen when robots take over banking - Business Insider
This is what might happen when robots take over banking Business Insider David Reilly, CTO at Bank of America, believes that automation will "change how we insure property, loan money, invest money, deliver technology, write research reports, and what professionals in financial services do every day." For example, an ...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fdigg.com%252Fvideo%252Ffoosball-playing-robot%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: You're Nowhere Near As Good At Foosball As This Robot Swiss University students built this killer rig that can analyze any foosball game and plot its opponents demise. It's so good, that soon researchers plan on just have the robot play against itself. robots
1471988131000
cogdis
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fmarijuana-rats-lazy-thc-researchers&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Researchers find lab rats on marijuana just can't be bothered
THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, makes rats less willing to exert cognitive effort lazy but, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man
The main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana makes lab rats lazy, according to University of British Columbia researchers.
The new research, published on Tuesday in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, looked at the effects of both THC the drug's main active ingredient and the non-psychoactive compound cannabidiol, or CBD, on the male lab rats' willingness to exert cognitive effort.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.google.com%2Fnews%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26fd%3DR%26ct2%3Dus%26usg%3DAFQjCNE7C5v8hjp-Bkj2tPAkGY00f3ISpQ%26clid%3Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%26cid%3D52779187789010%26ei%3D-L28V6inNI_IzAbz8LDYAg%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Freason.com%2Fblog%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fthis-week-in-cognitive-dissonance&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 This Week In Cognitive Dissonance - Reason (blog)
This Week In Cognitive Dissonance Reason (blog) Item #1: A story in today's New York Times, headlined "After Shake-Up by Trump, Clinton Camp Keeps Wary Eye on 'Conspiracy Theories.'" Here's the lede: ABCIt took just a few hours, after Donald J. Trump announced a major staff shake-up last week, for ...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.google.com%2Fnews%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26fd%3DR%26ct2%3Dus%26usg%3DAFQjCNHR0TaMqcQgopcIB2yph0BBhKHfNw%26clid%3Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%26cid%3D52779185882007%26ei%3D-L28V6inNI_IzAbz8LDYAg%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Fomran-daqneesh-the-poster-child-for-cognitive-dissonance-64231&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Omran Daqneesh: the poster child for cognitive dissonance - The Conversation AU
Omran Daqneesh: the poster child for cognitive dissonance The Conversation AU But as we sit speechless in front of our plasma screens in our air-conditioned lounge rooms, how are we supposed to deal with the acute cognitive dissonance Omran's image induces unless we're equipped with the steely resolve of a great world leader, ...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fwaterford_man%2F29080618832%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 The London Eye at Sunset
Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016, in the background the River Thames and buildings in the City of London. IMG1017
images
1471986665000
images
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F90645302%40N07%2F28552206404%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 London sunset
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fbrad-friedman-and-desi-doyen%2Fgreen-news-report---augus_b_11665806.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 'Green News Report' - August 23, 2016 The Green News Report is also available via...
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Media criticized for their slow response to Louisiana flood disaster; Louisiana flooding could accelerate spread of the Zika virus; PLUS: A tale of two Arctics -- Native American tribe forced to move, while luxury cruises are just getting started... All that and more in today's Green News Report!
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): 'Climate change is water change' - why the Colorado River system is headed for major trouble; A Deal With The Devil? Russia Kicks Up Arctic Oil Drilling; High-Price Ethanol Credits Add to Refiners' Woes; China's drive to clean up its coal power, one plant at a time; Widening 80 Mile Crack Threatens One Of Antarctica's Biggest Ice Shelves; Ohio Residents Clash With State and County Government in Fight to Ban Fracking via the Ballot... PLUS: Most Cities Too Hot to Host Summer Olympics by 2085... and much, MUCH more! ...
'Green News Report' is heard on many fine radio stations around the country. For additional info on stories we covered today, plus today's 'Green News Extra', please click right here to listen!
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
gaia
1471986378000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fbrad-friedman-and-desi-doyen%2Fgreen-news-report---augus_b_11665806.html&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Brad Friedman and Desi Doyen: 'Green News Report' - August 23, 2016 The Green News Report is also available via...
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Media criticized for their slow response to Louisiana flood disaster; Lou...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fmelinda-gates%2Fcomputers-are-for-girls-too_b_11665944.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dscience%26ir%3DScience&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Computers Are For Girls, Too I remember three things about my first computer science class in college. First, improbably, the professor was named Ramm, as in "random access memory." Second, the class was about processors, and I only had a vague idea what a processor was. Third, it was the last computer science class for most of my female classmates, who quickly decided they'd rather major in something else.
I never would have guessed that my time as a computer science student would turn out to be pretty much the high water mark for women in the field. The percentage of computer science majors who are women has gone down from 37 percent in 1984 to just 18 percent today. In other words, on average my daughters are half as likely to major in computer science as I was 30 years ago.
My daughters are half as likely to major in computer science as I was 30 years ago.
But the young women in this video are defying these odds -- they're pursuing careers in computer science and dismantling stereotypes about the field. I love hearing them talk about the sense of empowerment and joy that coding brings them. Kimberly got a standing ovation from her high school English classmates when she demonstrated a book review app she made. Kayla is preserving and sharing the rich history of her community with an app that customizes multimedia walking tours. Courtney helped design the landing legs on a rocket when she interned at SpaceX!
The gross underrepresentation of women in computer science is not just a problem for the girls who are left out. It's a problem for all of us, because we're not benefitting from the creativity girls have to offer. There's a mountain of research showing that diversity makes for better companies and better products -- that we're more innovative when we work in teams with different kinds of people -- yet the gender diversity in tech has been getting worse for decades.
One reason why is that somewhere along the way, society decided that computers are for boys. Or, as Aishwarya says, "guys in hoodies." And this toxic stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, virtually guaranteeing that computer science is indeed a male-dominated field.
First, since girls aren't supposed to be into computers, they aren't exposed to computer science when they're young, and even if they are, they often aren't encouraged to pursue their interests in the field. That helps explain why only 22 percent of the high school students who take the AP computer science exam today are girls. Kayla didn't know she wanted to be a computer scientist until she'd already started a totally different career, in library science. It was only when she started training staff to use the library's software that she realized she might be interested in making software herself, so she went back to college for a second time to be a computer scientist. Kimberly had never heard of computer science until she saw it was one of the classes she could take at her local community college.
The gross underrepresentation of women in computer science is... a problem for all of us.
The idea that computers are for boys doesn't just keep girls out of the field, though. It also drives women out. A host of implicit biases affect the way tech companies recruit, train, and promote--and make it easier for men to get ahead.
Luckily, there are great organizations like the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), whose mission is to increase the number of girls and women in tech. NCWIT and groups like it aim to make it easier for girls to discover that they love computers--and make it easier for women who love computer science to make a career in it. Eventually, as more and more girls choose this path, it won't seem like computer science is just for boys.
Aishwarya, Courtney, Kayla, and Kimberly all talk about the excitement of using code to turn an idea into a piece of software that can change the world, of creating something important from nothing. Let me tell you, it is a terrific feeling. Kayla says it makes her feel like "superwoman." I hope everyone gets the opportunity to feel that way.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
science
1471985089000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.engadget.com%252F2016%252F08%252F19%252Ftiny-robot-caterpillar%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Tiny robot caterpillar can move objects ten times its size Soft robots aren't easy to make, since they require a completely different set of components from their rigid counterparts. It's even tougher to scale down the parts they typically use for locomotion. A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics... robots
1471985087000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Fblogs%252Ffuture_tense%252F2016%252F08%252F19%252Fbrain_corp_is_developing_artificial_intelligence_enabled_cleaning_machines.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Cleaning Machines Might be the Future, if the Unions Allow it
In September, San Diego robotics startup Brain Corporation will introduce artificial intelligence software that allows giant commercial floor-cleaning machines to navigate autonomously. The follow-up offering it wants to develop may be even more forward-looking: A training and certification program for janitors to operate the machines.
The program, still in early stages of planning, is aimed at helping janitors maximize efficiency and establishing standards and best practices for the use of robots in janitorial work, according to Brain Corporation. The company says it is not aware any other such training program exists.
There's additional incentive for Brain Corp. to offer training options. Buzz around artificial intelligence and robotics technologies has caused concerns about jobs being automated out of existence. It's prudent for Brain Corp. to frame its machine as non-threatening in the eyes of organized labor groups.
“Getting unions on board is essential,” says Brain Corp. vice president of marketing Phil Duffy. “The second you try and cut the union reps out, it's doomed to fail.” The company is not currently speaking with unions directly, however. Instead, customers that contract with union workers are relaying to Brain Corp. how unions may react to the technology and what practices they prefer.
Brain Corp., which started as a research and development contractor for Qualcomm in 2009, installs intelligent systems on existing machines. Its first “autonomy as a service” product is navigation software known as EMMA, for “Enabling Mobile Machine Automation.” Brain Corp plans to expand into automation modules for other devices including additional floor care machines, mobile medical equipment, and industrial forklift trucks.
The EMMA brain module is installed during manufacturing on products built by the startup's manufacturing partners. EMMA will first be in International Cleaning Equipment's RS26 floor scrubber. In addition to guiding movement of the machine, EMMA is designed to learn when to turn the scrubber on and off. Improvements in perception and navigation by EMMA are distributed to all machines that use the module.
CEO Eugene Izhikevich says teaching robots enabled with Brain Corp's AI technology “is like teaching an animal or teaching a child by giving instructions, but very instinctive, very intuitive.” Because it's so intuitive, those training the machines do not necessarily need engineering backgrounds, he says.
In the case of robotics technology geared toward commercial cleaning jobs, Brain Corp. would be wise to try to appeal to two million-member union Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents employees in a variety of labor fields, including janitorial services.
Andrew Stern, former president of SEIU, says the cost of disruption to a business from a union opposing the implementation of automation technology could outweigh benefits such as cost savings. Janitorial services, while critical to maintenance of buildings such as hospitals and apartment buildings, amount to only a small portion of overall operating costs, so possible savings from automation could be fractional, he says.
Stern says there are some U.S. markets where SEIU doesn't have much of a presence. Malls and warehouses in these regions may be ideal places to try out automated floor scrubbers and other robotic equipment without concern for union reaction.
SEIU declined to comment for this story.
Stern notes that Brain Corp. also can benefit from partnering with unions like SEIU because they have training facilities and practices in place that would help with scaling a training program.
While unions tend to be hesitant about automation, they are eager for training programs that can help advance their members' skills, says Daniel Wagner, the director of education, standards, and training for the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA), which reviews and validates training programs. ISSA has been in communication with Brain Corp. about a potential partnership.
“There is always the possibility that we could ask Brain to develop a program for ISSA to administer and manage, but we are not at that point yet,” Wagner says.
In a statement, Brain Corp. said it is also testing its technology at its development partner sites. The trials “will ultimately enable us to develop the best program for integration with the janitorial industry. We plan to launch the training program by mid-2017.”
In September, San Diego robotics startup Brain Corporation will introduce artificial intelligence software that allows giant commercial floor-cleaning machines to navigate autonomously. The follow-up offering it wants to develop may be even more forward-looking: A training and certification program for janitors to operate the machines.
The program, still in early stages of planning, is aimed at helping janitors maximize efficiency and establishing standards and best practices for the use of robots in janitorial work, according to Brain Corporation. The company says it is not aware any other such training program exists.
There's additional incentive for Brain Corp. to offer training options. Buzz around artificial intelligence and robotics technologies has caused concerns about jobs being automated out of existence. It's prudent for Brain Corp. to frame its machine as non-threatening in the eyes of organized labor groups.
"Getting unions on board is essential," says Brain Corp. vice president of marketing Phil Duffy. "The second you try and cut the union reps out, it's doomed to fail." The company is not currently speaking with unions directly, however. Instead, customers that contract with union workers are relaying to Brain Corp. how unions may react to the technology and what practices they prefer.
Brain Corp., which started as a research and development contractor for Qualcomm in 2009, installs intelligent systems on existing machines. Its first "autonomy as a service" product is navigation software known as EMMA, for "Enabling Mobile Machine Automation." Brain Corp plans to expand into automation modules for other devices including additional floor care machines, mobile medical equipment, and industrial forklift trucks.
The EMMA brain module is installed during manufacturing on products built by the startup's manufacturing partners. EMMA will first be in International Cleaning Equipment's RS26 floor scrubber. In addition to guiding movement of the machine, EMMA is designed to learn when to turn the scrubber on and off. Improvements in perception and navigation by EMMA are distributed to all machines that use the module.
CEO Eugene Izhikevich says teaching robots enabled with Brain Corp's AI technology "is like teaching an animal or teaching a child by giving instructions, but very instinctive, very intuitive." Because it's so intuitive, those training the machines do not necessarily need engineering backgrounds, he says.
Developing a training program
In the case of robotics technology geared toward commercial cleaning jobs, Brain Corp. would be wise to try to appeal to two million-member union Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents employees in a variety of labor fields, including janitorial services.
Andrew Stern, former president of SEIU, says the cost of disruption to a business from a union opposing the implementation of automation technology could outweigh benefits such as cost savings. Janitorial services, while critical to maintenance of buildings such as hospitals and apartment buildings, amount to only a small portion of overall operating costs, so possible savings from automation could be fractional, he says.
Stern says there are some U.S. markets where SEIU doesn't have much of a presence. Malls and warehouses in these regions may be ideal places to try out automated floor scrubbers and other robotic equipment without concern for union reaction.
SEIU declined to comment for this story.
Stern notes that Brain Corp. also can benefit from partnering with unions like SEIU because they have training facilities and practices in place that would help with scaling a training program.
While unions tend to be hesitant about automation, they are eager for training programs that can help advance their members' skills, says Daniel Wagner, the director of education, standards, and training for the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA), which reviews and validates training programs. ISSA has been in communication with Brain Corp. about a potential partnership.
"There is always the possibility that we could ask Brain to develop a program for ISSA to administer and manage, but we are not at that point yet," Wagner says.
In a statement, Brain Corp. said it is also testing its technology at its development partner sites. The trials "will ultimately enable us to develop the best program for integration with the janitorial industry. We plan to launch the training program by mid-2017."
In September, San Diego robotics startup Brain Corporation will introduce artificial intelligence software that allows giant commercial floor-cleaning machines to navigate autonomously. The follow-up offering it wants to develop may be even more forward-looking: A training and certification program for janitors to operate the machines.
The program, still in early stages of planning, is aimed at helping janitors maximize efficiency and establishing standards and best practices for the use of robots in janitorial work, according to Brain Corporation. The company says it is not aware any other such training program exists.
There's additional incentive for Brain Corp. to offer training options. Buzz around artificial intelligence and robotics technologies has caused concerns about jobs being automated out of existence. It's prudent for Brain Corp. to frame its machine as non-threatening in the eyes of organized labor groups.
"Getting unions on board is essential," says Brain Corp. vice president of marketing Phil Duffy. "The second you try and cut the union reps out, it's doomed to fail." The company is not currently speaking with unions directly, however. Instead, customers that contract with union workers are relaying to Brain Corp. how unions may react to the technology and what practices they prefer.
Brain Corp., which started as a research and development contractor for Qualcomm in 2009, installs intelligent systems on existing machines. Its first "autonomy as a service" product is navigation software known as EMMA, for "Enabling Mobile Machine Automation." Brain Corp plans to expand into automation modules for other devices including additional floor care machines, mobile medical equipment, and industrial forklift trucks.
The EMMA brain module is installed during manufacturing on products built by the startup's manufacturing partners. EMMA will first be in International Cleaning Equipment's RS26 floor scrubber. In addition to guiding movement of the machine, EMMA is designed to learn when to turn the scrubber on and off. Improvements in perception and navigation by EMMA are distributed to all machines that use the module.
CEO Eugene Izhikevich says teaching robots enabled with Brain Corp's AI technology "is like teaching an animal or teaching a child by giving instructions, but very instinctive, very intuitive." Because it's so intuitive, those training the machines do not necessarily need engineering backgrounds, he says.
Developing a training program
In the case of robotics technology geared toward commercial cleaning jobs, Brain Corp. would be wise to try to appeal to two million-member union Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents employees in a variety of labor fields, including janitorial services.
Andrew Stern, former president of SEIU, says the cost of disruption to a business from a union opposing the implementation of automation technology could outweigh benefits such as cost savings. Janitorial services, while critical to maintenance of buildings such as hospitals and apartment buildings, amount to only a small portion of overall operating costs, so possible savings from automation could be fractional, he says.
Stern says there are some U.S. markets where SEIU doesn't have much of a presence. Malls and warehouses in these regions may be ideal places to try out automated floor scrubbers and other robotic equipment without concern for union reaction.
SEIU declined to comment for this story.
Stern notes that Brain Corp. also can benefit from partnering with unions like SEIU because they have training facilities and practices in place that would help with scaling a training program.
While unions tend to be hesitant about automation, they are eager for training programs that can help advance their members' skills, says Daniel Wagner, the director of education, standards, and training for the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA), which reviews and validates training programs. ISSA has been in communication with Brain Corp. about a potential partnership.
"There is always the possibility that we could ask Brain to develop a program for ISSA to administer and manage, but we are not at that point yet," Wagner says.
In a statement, Brain Corp. said it is also testing its technology at its development partner sites. The trials "will ultimately enable us to develop the best program for integration with the janitorial industry. We plan to launch the training program by mid-2017."
In September, San Diego robotics startup Brain Corporation will introduce artificial intelligence software that allows giant commercial floor-cleaning machines to navigate autonomously. The follow-up offering it wants to develop may be even more forward-looking: A training and certification program for janitors to operate the machines.
The program, still in early stages of planning, is aimed at helping janitors maximize efficiency and establishing standards and best practices for the use of robots in janitorial work, according to Brain Corporation. The company says it is not aware any other such training program exists.
There's additional incentive for Brain Corp. to offer training options. Buzz around artificial intelligence and robotics technologies has caused concerns about jobs being automated out of existence. It's prudent for Brain Corp. to frame its machine as non-threatening in the eyes of organized labor groups.
"Getting unions on board is essential," says Brain Corp. vice president of marketing Phil Duffy. "The second you try and cut the union reps out, it's doomed to fail." The company is not currently speaking with unions directly, however. Instead, customers that contract with union workers are relaying to Brain Corp. how unions may react to the technology and what practices they prefer.
Brain Corp., which started as a research and development contractor for Qualcomm in 2009, installs intelligent systems on existing machines. Its first "autonomy as a service" product is navigation software known as EMMA, for "Enabling Mobile Machine Automation." Brain Corp plans to expand into automation modules for other devices including additional floor care machines, mobile medical equipment, and industrial forklift trucks.
The EMMA brain module is installed during manufacturing on products built by the startup's manufacturing partners. EMMA will first be in International Cleaning Equipment's RS26 floor scrubber. In addition to guiding movement of the machine, EMMA is designed to learn when to turn the scrubber on and off. Improvements in perception and navigation by EMMA are distributed to all machines that use the module.
CEO Eugene Izhikevich says teaching robots enabled with Brain Corp's AI technology "is like teaching an animal or teaching a child by giving instructions, but very instinctive, very intuitive." Because it's so intuitive, those training the machines do not necessarily need engineering backgrounds, he says.
Developing a training program
In the case of robotics technology geared toward commercial cleaning jobs, Brain Corp. would be wise to try to appeal to two million-member union Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents employees in a variety of labor fields, including janitorial services.
Andrew Stern, former president of SEIU, says the cost of disruption to a business from a union opposing the implementation of automation technology could outweigh benefits such as cost savings. Janitorial services, while critical to maintenance of buildings such as hospitals and apartment buildings, amount to only a small portion of overall operating costs, so possible savings from automation could be fractional, he says.
Stern says there are some U.S. markets where SEIU doesn't have much of a presence. Malls and warehouses in these regions may be ideal places to try out automated floor scrubbers and other robotic equipment without concern for union reaction.
SEIU declined to comment for this story.
Stern notes that Brain Corp. also can benefit from partnering with unions like SEIU because they have training facilities and practices in place that would help with scaling a training program.
While unions tend to be hesitant about automation, they are eager for training programs that can help advance their members' skills, says Daniel Wagner, the director of education, standards, and training for the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA), which reviews and validates training programs. ISSA has been in communication with Brain Corp. about a potential partnership.
"There is always the possibility that we could ask Brain to develop a program for ISSA to administer and manage, but we are not at that point yet," Wagner says.
In a statement, Brain Corp. said it is also testing its technology at its development partner sites. The trials "will ultimately enable us to develop the best program for integration with the janitorial industry. We plan to launch the training program by mid-2017."
robots
1471985082000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeedproxy.google.com%252F%7Er%252FOpenCulture%252F%7E3%252FNdugsMIr72E%252Fread-the-original-32-page-program-for-fritz-langs-metropolis-1927.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)
One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang's Metropolis took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang's visual language resonated strongly in later decades. The film's rather stunning alchemical-electric transference of a woman's physical traits onto the body of a destructive android—the so-called Maschinenmensch—for example, began a very long trend of female robots in film and television, most of them as dangerous and inscrutable as Lang's. And yet, for all its many imitators, Metropolis continues to deliver surprises. Here, we bring you a new find: a 32-page program distributed at the film's 1927 premier in London and recently re-discovered.
In addition to underwriting almost one hundred years of science fiction film and television tropes, Metropolis has had a very long life in other ways: Inspiring an all-star soundtrack produced by Giorgio Moroder in 1984,with Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant, and a Kraftwerk album. In 2001, a reconstructed version received a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, and UNESCO's Memory of the World Register added it to their roster. 2002 saw the release of an exceptional Metropolis-inspired anime with the same title. And in 2010 an almost fully restored print of the long-incomplete film—recut from footage found in Argentina in 2008—appeared, adding a little more sophistication and coherence to the simplistic story line.
Even at the film's initial reception, without any missing footage, critics did not warm to its story. For all its intense visual futurism, it has always seemed like a very quaint, naïve tale, struck through with earnest religiosity and inexplicable archaisms. Contemporary reviewers found its narrative of generational and class conflict unconvincing. H.G. Wells—“something of an authority on science fiction”—pronounced it “the silliest film” full of “every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” Few were kinder when it came to the story, and despite its overt religious themes, many saw it as Communist propaganda.
Viewed after subsequent events in 20th century Germany, many of the film's scenes appear “disturbingly prescient,” writes the Unaffiliated Critic, such as the vision of a huge industrial machine as Moloch, in which “bald, underfed humans are led in chains to a furnace.” Lang and his wife Thea von Harbau—who wrote the novel, then screenplay—were of course commenting on industrialization, labor conditions, and poverty in Weimar Germany. Metropolis‘s “clear message of classism,” as io9 writes, comes through most clearly in its arresting imagery, like that horrifying, monstrous furnace and the “looming symbol of wealth in the Tower of Babel.”
The visual effects and spectacular set pieces have worked their magic on almost everyone (Wells excluded) who has seen Metropolis. And they remain, for all its silliness, the primary reason for the movie's cultural prevalence. Wired calls it “probably the most influential sci-fi movie in history,” remarking that “a single movie poster from the original release sold for $690,000 seven years ago, and is expected to fetch even more at an auction later this year.”
We now have another artifact from the movie's premiere, this 32-page program, appropriately called “Metropolis” Magazine, that offers a rich feast for audiences, and text at times more interesting than the film's script. (You can view the program in full here.) One imagines had they possessed backlit smart phones, those early moviegoers might have found themselves struggling not to browse their programs while the film screened. But, of course, Metropolis's visual excesses would hold their attention as they still do ours. Its scenes of a futuristic city have always enthralled viewers, filmmakers, and (most) critics, such that Roger Ebert could write of “vast futuristic cities” as a staple of some of the best science fiction in his review of the 21st-century animated Metropolis—“visions… goofy and yet at the same time exhilarating.”
The program really is an astonishing document, a treasure for fans of the film and for scholars. Full of production stills, behind-the-scenes articles and photos, technical minutiae, short columns by the actors, a bio of Thea von Harbau, the “authoress,” excerpts from her novel and screenplay placed side-by-side, and a short article by her. There's a page called “Figures that Speak” that tallies the production costs and cast and crew numbers (including very crude drawings and numbers of “Negroes” and “Chinese”). Lang himself weighs in, laconically, with a breezy introduction followed by a classic silent-era line: “if I cannot succeed in finding expression on the picture, I certainly cannot find it in speech.” Film history agrees, Lang found his expression “on the picture.”
“Only three surviving copies of this program are known to exist,” writes Wired, and one of them, from which these pages come, has gone on sale at the Peter Harrington rare book shop for 2,750 pounds ($4,244)—which seems rather low, given what an original Metropolis poster went for. But markets are fickle, and whatever its current or future price, ”Metropolis” Magazine is invaluable to cineastes. See all 32 pages of the program at Peter Harrington's website.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Farticles%252Farts%252Fmovies%252F2016%252F08%252Fmorris_from_america_reviewed.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Morris From America
“We're the only two brothers in Heidelberg, man,” Curtis Gentry (Craig Robinson) reminds his 13-year-old son Morris (Markees Christmas) in writer-director Chad Hartigan's Morris From America. “We've gotta stick together, you know what I'm saying?” Morris From America is a foul-mouthed, but gentle-souled, coming-of-age comedy that follows the Gentrys' struggle to stick together as father and son—even as they adjust to their strange new lives as conspicuously black American expatriates in a provincial German town where the prevailing skin tone is not just white but marzipan-pig pink.
Curtis and Morris, we soon realize, are also mourning a beloved wife and mother who's referred to only obliquely, as if any more concrete evocation of her (a photo, a flashback) would be too much for even the camera to bear. The audience never learns precisely what sequence of events landed the Bronx-born Curtis—a former soccer player who now works on the coaching staff of a less-than-successful German team—and his shy, chubby son in this unlikely place. But this very absence of information works on the film's behalf, leaving the viewer as disoriented as the two shell-shocked protagonists.
Hartigan is at his most adept and original in the scenes involving this fractured two-person family, embodied to perfection by Robinson and then16-year-old newcomer Markees Christmas, a nonprofessional the director first spotted in a series of homemade comedy videos on YouTube, causing him to rewrite his script-in-progress around a character based on the boy.
A second plot, in which Morris falls head over heels for the 15-year-old school beauty, Katrin (Lina Keller), and subjects himself to a series of humiliations in an attempt to impress her, felt more overfamiliar from other teen coming-of-age movies. For example, the sporadic appearance of the blonde and beatific Keller (a ringer for a teenage Julie Delpy) in backlit, super-slo-mo fantasy sequences brought to mind the camera-as-horny-teenager move in such high-school classics as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Risky Business. In fact, Hartigan (whose last film was 2013's This Is Martin Bonner) has spoken of his love for the 1998 romantic comedy Can't Hardly Wait, a movie that takes two decades of high-school movie clichés and whirs them merrily in a blender before serving them up sweeter than they already were.
Morris From America is both more nuanced and less sunny in its view of interteen relations. The interest that Katrin and, most especially, her bullying pack of pals take in Morris is initially motivated by the kind of racism-via-exoticization often experienced by blacks in Europe. Morris is constantly asked by his new schoolmates to demonstrate his authenticity: placed on the spot to prove his worth as a rapper, a player, or a gangster rather than as the quiet, awkward, secretly lonely 13-year-old kid he really is.
Gradually, Morris and Katrin develop something like a real friendship, maybe even—or is that only in Morris' dreams?—something more. The look of the fantasy-like party scenes is bold and jubilant, with the young characters (sometimes high on drugs, sometimes not) picked out in silhouette against backgrounds of pulsing color. But however lively the filmmaking got, whenever Craig Robinson wasn't around some part of me was just waiting for him to come back.
Robinson, best known as a comic sidekick in movies like Hot Tub Time Machine and Pineapple Express, and for TV roles on The Office and Mr. Robot, hasn't been given many big-screen chances to showcase his dramatic gifts, which come as this slight but easy-to-love movie's richest and most rewarding surprise. In one scene, the embattled Curtis tries to draw out his sullen son during a long car ride by telling a tale from his early courtship of Morris' mother. The speech that follows is a tour de force and serious acting challenge: the kind of lengthy parental soliloquy, delivered to a dead-silent and inexpressive audience, that requires both an ironclad ego and a healthy sense of one's own inherent ridiculousness.
Robinson invests that moment, and everything he does as this conflicted but loving dad, with so much brain and heart you find yourself hoping there are scripts with meaty dramatic parts stacking up even now on the comedian's front porch. I wish there were more films every year like Morris From America, the kind that surprise you by revealing a hidden side of something—an actor, a genre, a situation—you thought you had figured out.
robots
1471985077000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.engadget.com%252F2016%252F08%252F19%252Fbasic-income-ai%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: How will you survive when the robots take your job? The robots are coming, and they're taking our jobs. Or that's the concern, anyway. A recent Oxford University study surmises that over the next two decades, about 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being made obsolete thanks to automation. This i... robots
1471985074000
robots
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNFKzHf7YYhb4HaCwgU9eWAygOfJ8Q%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526ei%253DiZy3V4CCKYqM1AaFho_oCg%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.roboticstomorrow.com%252Fnews%252F2016%252F08%252F19%252Fwith-human-emotion-recognition-ai-mjis-communication-robot-tapia-can-now-understand-your-emotion%252F8644%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: With Human Emotion Recognition AI, MJI's Communication Robot Tapia Can Now Understand Your Emotion - Robotics Tomorrow (press release)
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Dus%2526usg%253DAFQjCNFVy78FY50rQYZyO45oUGhvQ-Fw7A%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526ei%253DiZy3V4GCKYuN1Ab8nrPADA%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.brand-e.biz%252Frobots-pick-up-on-emotions-using-artificial-intelligence_37875.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Robot and I - brand-e.biz
Robot and I brand-e.biz AI robotics Those robots are slowly turning emotional on us, writes Steve Mullins. Take Olly, the maker of which claims will develop a unique personality through the interactions users have with it. That's because Olly is powered by 'nuanced ...
robots
1471983756000
cogdis
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherboard.vice.com%2Fen_uk%2Fread%2F-why-eye-exams-are-the-future-of-alzheimers-screening-retina&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Why Eye Exams Are the Future of Alzheimer's Screening
Getting screened for Alzheimer's disease could soon mean taking a trip to the eye doctor. Decreased retinal thickness, the presence of abnormal proteins, and changes in how the retinal blood vessels respond to light all appear to be signs of neurodegenerative disease, according to researchers who spoke at the recent Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC 2016) in Toronto.
All of these could be detected with non-invasive eye exams, which would represent a huge leap forward for patients and Alzheimer's researchers alike.
Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia, and it's irreversible. It affects an estimated 5 million Americans, and the numbers are growing. But right now, there's no perfect way to diagnose it: Doctors perform memory tests on their patients, or take a detailed family history, which means the disease sometimes isn't caught until it's progressed. A definitive diagnosis generally can't be done until after the patient's death, when clusters of abnormal proteins called amyloid plaques (a hallmark of the disease) can be found in brain tissue samples.
Earlier detection would mean that patients and their families could plan ahead, and that researchers could better study the disease. Improved screening methods would enable doctors to identify who's at risk, maybe even before their symptoms start to show.
The eyes are attracting attention as a portal to what's happening in the brain. At a session at the AAIC 2016, researchers focused on the retina, which sits in the back of the eye and is made up of nerve tissue. The eyes are like windows into the brain, said Melanie Campbell, professor of optometry and vision science at the University of Waterloo. She told Motherboard in an interview that amyloid plaques can appear in the back of the eyes on the retina.
It's possible amyloids leak into the vitreous fluid of the eye from the cerebrospinal fluid, Campbell said. Researchers also hypothesize that amyloid proteins are synthesized by neural cells within the eye, a similar process to what happens in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, appearing in both the retina and the vitreous fluid.
Image: The University of Waterloo
Right now, in the lab, amyloids can be detected on retinas using rather complicated and expensive eye-imaging techniques. But Campbell and colleagues developed a prototype device that does the job more easily and cheaply. This new technology, called polarimetry, uses polarized light.
“It turns out amyloids show up very clearly under polarized light,” she said.
Image: The University of Waterloo
She presented results of a series of proof-of-concept scans done on human and canine retinas. The scans were conducted on a series of cadaver retinas from the Eye Bank of Canada (20 from people who had Alzheimer's, and 22 controls), as well on living and postmortem canine retinas.
The researchers found that amyloid deposits were not only easy to detect with this new technology, but it was relatively easy to count them, and to measure their size—something other imaging techniques can't do. The next step will be testing the device clinically on patients with Alzheimer's disease, Campbell said. However, the presence of amyloids isn't a guaranteed way to diagnose it; they show risk so this would be for screening.
Image: The University of Waterloo
Another clue of the disease is thin retinal nerve fiber layers (RNFL). In fact, the thinner RNFLs are, the poorer the cognition levels of subjects, according to Fang Ko, clinical associate professor of ophthalmology, Florida State University and Moorfields Eye Hospital in the UK, who also spoke at the conference.
Here, researchers used data from the UK Biobank, which included medical and health details of 500,000 volunteers aged between 40 to 69 years from across England. Of these, 67,000 underwent eye exams, which included retinal imaging. Many were ultimately excluded (including those with diabetes or other conditions that affect the retina), leaving about 32,000 subjects. They completed four different cognitive tests. Of those, a total of 1,251 participants went on to repeat the cognitive tests after three years.
Image: Fang Ko et al
Researchers found that people with thinner RNFLs performed worse on each of the cognitive tests than those whose RNFLs were thicker. And those who started the study with thinner RNFL had greater cognitive decline at the three year follow-up than those who had thicker ones.
It may be possible to use thin RNFL as a predictor of cognitive decline, she said, but it isn't a surefire method: diseases like glaucoma can also affect its thickness, so once again, this could be a useful tool for screening rather than diagnosis.
A third technique, using a flickering light exam of the retinal blood vessels, could also help screen for Alzheimer's, according to Konstantin Kotliar, a biomedical engineer at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences in Germany.
In healthy eyes, a flickering light shone on the retina causes immediate dilation of both retinal arteries and veins. “In people with Alzheimer's disease, retinal arteries and veins have a delayed reaction to a flickering light test,” he said. But, they undergo greater dilation than in people without the disease. (Diminished and sometimes delayed dilation is also seen in eye diseases like glaucoma, he said.)
At the conference, Kotliar presented a study (unpublished as of yet) measuring and comparing retinal vessel reactions to flickering light in patients aged 60 to 79. Fifteen had mild-to-moderate dementia due to Alzheimer's; 24 had mild cognitive impairment, also from Alzheimer's, and 15 were healthy controls with no cognitive impairment. Retinal artery and vein reactions to 20-second-long flicker stimulation were measured.
Both arteries and veins dilated more in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's than in controls. Also, the start of dilation in the retinal arteries took longer in people with Alzheimer's than in controls—though the delay wasn't as pronounced in the veins. How the retinal vessels behaved in Alzheimer's patients was a surprise, and this might contribute to another screening test, he said.
Finding new ways to screen for Alzheimer's has never been more important: with the number of patients expected to balloon in years to come, so finding new ways to detect it will crucial.
cogdis
1471983750000
cogdis
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slate.com%2Fblogs%2Fbrowbeat%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2Fkanye_west_s_poem_about_mcdonald_s_french_fries_a_close_reading.html&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 On the Poetics—and Elusive Subtext—of Kanye West's Poem About French Fries
Who knew that Kanye West's feelings about McDonald's French fries were so complicated they could only be expressed in verse? Over the weekend, West published a poem in Frank Ocean's zine Boys Don't Cry, which came out in conjunction with Ocean's new album, Blonde. The magazine is 360 pages long, flush with interviews and photography and poetry, but West's stanzas are what push it to the edge of sanity. They are great, in their way. They go like this:
McDonalds Man McDonalds Man The french fries had a plan The french fries had a plan The salad bar and the ketchup made a band Cus the french fries had a plan The french fries had a plan
McDonalds Man McDonalds I know them french fries have a plan I know them french fries have a plan The cheeseburger and the shakes formed a band To overthrow the french fries plan I always knew them french fries was evil man Smelling all good and shit I don't trust no food that smells that good man I don't trust it I just can't
McDonalds Man McDonalds Man McDonalds, damn Them french fries look good tho I knew the Diet Coke was jealous of the fries I knew the McNuggets was jealous of the fries Even the McRib was jealous of the fries I could see it through his artificial meat eyes And he only be there some of the time Everybody was jealous of them french fries Except for that one special guy That smooth apple pie
This is some artfully artless jibber-jabber, with irregular rhymes and no consistent meter I could figure out (despite a strong rhythm helped by repetition). The lines are end-stopped—no enjambment—so you don't get the feeling of thoughts twisting, turning, or gathering steam (though in reading the piece aromatic steam is never far from your mind).
The speaker's observations announce themselves in the same flatly gleaming monochrome as a McDonald's logo. Few clauses, no real argument. Unlike the fries, this guy doesn't appear to have a plan. But that declarative simplicity belies a frightening instability.
The speaker himself fails to show up as a character until the middle of the poem—why the secrecy, and then the egoistic interruption? This West mouthpiece is dealing in certainties: “I know” the French fries are planning something, he says, and “I knew” other menu items envied the fries. But how does he know? Did the taters tell him? That would be problematic, because the “evil” golden spuds smell too delicious to “trust.” We already suspect our speaker may not have the firmest grasp on reality. (Since when does McDonald's have a “salad bar”?) Could it be that the speaker is, in fact, jealous of the fries and projecting that onto the McNuggets? And why is he constitutionally incapable of trusting something that smells good? (“I just can't.”)
Toward the end, the speaker seems so bedeviled by his simultaneous attraction to and skepticism of the fries (they “look good tho,” he reminds us wistfully) that he loses the thread. He must retreat into Zen mantras: “McDonalds Man,” he mumbles, “McDonalds Man.” But is the speaker the same person or someone different entirely from this titular “McDonalds Man,” who in the body of the poem registers less as a mysterious entity than as an interjection: “McDonald's, man”?
The real coup in this mystifying work of surrealist darkness is the ninth-inning entrance of its two most vivid and enigmatic characters. “Even” the McRib, who appears and disappears according to a logic the other foodstuffs cannot understand, covets the fries' tempting fragrance, their plots. And he is a single Rib, separated from his fellows. The oven-crisped taters are a brotherhood. The McRib has presumably not been invited to conspire with the ketchup, the shakes, or the cheeseburger, despite his familial relationship with the third. And yet in a transcendental leap, the speaker is able to peer through the McRib's artificial meat eyes, like Emerson through his transparent eyeball, and to perceive a deep, existential angst that transcends the food-human divide.
Then, the masterstroke. Like a dessert after the cognitive and sensory meal this elusive poem proffers, we have “that one special guy,” that “smooth apple pie.” He is the single item on the menu who does not envy the fries, who floats coolly above all the plotting and counterplotting of his fellow lunch options. This mysterious, debonair treat is the poem's twist ending, heralding … well, we are not sure. But he resembles an important piece of West's personal iconography—the “damn croissants” that will not be rushed. He gives those unflappable buttery pastries of 2013 an American spin, one infused with our native fruit, and with all of the hard-won experiential knowledge apples have suggested since the fall of man. In a universe of loneliness, ambition, and epistemological confusion, what precious truth, veiled to the rest of the fast food ecosystem, does this “special guy” know?
The poem won't answer these questions. And yet a pale, speculative allegory emerges from McDonald's' bill of edible fare. You can be the conniving fries, West seems to say, or you can be the sad haters who want to be the fries, squinting out at them with your artificial eyes. (Fries, as potatoes, once had eyes, but no longer do. Their pandering to commercial tastes has corrupted their vision, perhaps.) The fries may smell good and have a lot of fans, but they aren't the real thing.
Only a very few special guys can be the apple pies: self-possessed, secretive, genius. The apple pie is who the speaker ultimately wants to emulate, if he can shake off the hollow, glamorous value system of the fries. He yearns to, but those fries look good. McDonalds, damn.
cogdis
1471979353000
general
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgo.theregister.com%2Ffeed%2Fwww.theregister.co.uk%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2Fcorbyn_lied_virgin_trains_lied_harambe_died%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Corbyn lied, Virgin Trains lied, Harambe died
Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your train seats
Video So, Jeremy Corbyn recorded a message in which he was sitting on the floor of a train traveling between London and Newcastle, claiming it was "ram-packed" (as exampled by his floor sitting) and that was why all of the trains needed to be renationalised.…
general
1471979002000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fthetwo-way%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2F491056067%2Fextinct-micro-lion-is-named-for-sir-david-attenborough%3Futm_medium%3DRSS%26utm_campaign%3Dresearchnews&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Extinct 'Micro Lion' Is Named For Sir David Attenborough
Microleo attenboroughi was a tiny, marsupial Australian lion that lived some 18 million years ago. Paleontologists said they named it after the famed naturalist "for his dedication and enthusiasm."
science
1471978232000
images
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seattletimes.com%2Fnation-world%2Fphotos-of-the-day-aug-23-2016%2F%3Futm_source%3DRSS%26utm_medium%3DReferral%26utm_campaign%3DRSS_photos-of-the-day&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Photos of the Day: Aug. 23, 2016 Explore the news of the day with these images from around the world. images
1471977677000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F63000221%40N05%2F28563775053%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 S. oreophila purple throat (MK017)
This clone is the parent to some of the most stunning purple throated, heavily veined oreophilas in cultivation today. Interestinly enough, the offspring have even darker, more prominent purple throats. Late summer to early fall pitchers can be consistently produced if the plant is kept very happy all grow season long. These late traps are usually the most colorful and spectacular pitchers produced.
gaia
1471974255000
general
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fvideo%2Findex%2F497039%2Fwhat-life-is-like-for-a-four-year-old-diabetic%2F%3Futm_source%3Dfeed&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 What Life Is Like for a Four-Year-Old Diabetic
Dahlia was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was a toddler. This touching short documentary, Blood Sugar, is filmed from her perspective. Through the lens, we witness her world of blood, needles, and very youthful innocence.
This film comes to us from the Loading Docs initiative, which supports 10 filmmaking teams to create three-minute, creative documentaries that tell New Zealand stories. This year's theme is change.
general
1471973359000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fhealth-shots%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2F491063738%2Fhealth-officials-struggle-to-fight-deadly-sepsis-infections%3Futm_medium%3DRSS%26utm_campaign%3Dresearchnews&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Health Officials Struggle To Fight Deadly Sepsis Infections
Although a CDC study released today found that 80 percent of cases develop outside the hospital or at a nursing home, many people still don't know about this lethal medical condition.
science
1471973356000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Faysha-akhtar%2Fwhat-does-a-fish-know-and_b_11660014.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dscience%26ir%3DScience&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 What Does A Fish Know And Feel?
Most of us would cringe at the thought of ripping a dog's mouth open with a hook. Why don't we cringe when we think about doing this to a fish? Our society not only considers hooking and suffocating fish to be socially acceptable, we celebrate it. Fishing shows abound on TV, almost every coastal town holds fishing competitions, and CNN routinely displays photos of fishermen with their latest and largest catch. Fishing is also commonly used as a sentimental symbol of the good life.
Perhaps we don't think twice about the ways we treat fish because we don't really know much about these animals. Biologist Jonathan Balcombe wants to change this. In his New York Times best selling book, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, Balcombe presents the latest scientific evidence showing that there is so much more to fish than we commonly believe. And, to emphasize that fish are individuals, Balcombe doesn't use the word "fish" as a collective plural. If there is more than one fish, he uses "fishes." I had the occasion to speak with Balcombe about his book. Why did you decide to write a book about fish and why now?
As a scientist working on animal sentience, I was often encountering new studies of fishes showing that they have rich, interesting lives. But most of this information was buried away in scholarly journals that most folks never read. Translating science into something lay-readers find engaging is something I find challenging and enjoyable. And with fishes being the most exploited group of vertebrates on Earth, there was also a strong ethical motive to write a book of popular science about fishes.
What has your research found about what a fish knows?
Fishes are incredibly diverse, and many are clearly intelligent. Consider groupers. These large, charismatic reef-dwelling fishes will approach trusted divers for handouts or just for the pleasure of being stroked. Careful studies in the Red Sea have shown that a grouper will perform a head-shaking signal to a moray eel as an invitation to go hunting together. Groupers will also point to a prey fish hiding in the reef where the grouper cannot reach but the eel can. If the prey escapes to open water, the grouper is waiting to catch it. Both species have higher hunting success when they collaborate.
Another sharp fish is the cleaner wrasse. A 2012 study showed that these small fishes learned to solve a mental problem faster than chimpanzees, orangutans, monkeys, and a scientist's four-year-old daughter.
What about what a fish feels? Do they experience emotions?
It's pretty clear that fishes can form attachments to one another, and they can become bonded to their human guardians, too. Several readers wrote to me about the games and affection they shared with individual pet fishes, and one can watch online videos of pet fishes who swim into the hand to receive gentle caresses and other pleasurable or playful interactions.
This behavior is borne out by studies like one in which wild-caught surgeon fishes responded to stress by swimming up next to a moving wand to receive caresses, which caused their stress--measured as blood cortisol--to decline. Stationary wands were ignored by these fishes, whose stress levels remained high.
Why do you think other no other scientist has written this book before?
I'm rather dumbfounded that nobody had. With all the great things we are learning about this hugely underestimated group of animals, it has to have been one of the lowest hanging fruits for an author to pick. The moment I thought of it I knew that it was something that had to be done, and it is an incredible privilege to have written this book.
What is the most interesting feedback you have received so far from a reader?
I enjoy hearing from readers wanting to share their personal stories of fishes, and I find these the most interesting. For instance, I received a letter last week from a woman in her seventies who detailed an experience from over 40 years ago when she used to feed the fishes at the back of a pet store. She had to use a stepladder to hand-feed a tank of Oscar cichlids on the top shelf. Soon these smart fishes were jumping from the water to take morsels from her fingertips. It became a game. One day, one Oscar jumped clear of the tank and made a nosedive toward the cement floor six feet below. Miraculously, a tank holding "feeder" goldfishes protruded from a shelf at floor level and the Oscar landed in it. Megan quickly returned the cichlid to his home tank. When she returned to the shop the next morning she found the same Oscar in the goldfish tank! After this happened three days in a row, she installed a lid on the Oscar tank.
You know I focus on the intersection between animal protection and human health. Why should we care about fish? Is there any benefit for us?
There are many reasons to care about fishes. For one thing, their ocean habitats produce most of the world's oxygen. For another, fishes are a critical part of aquatic ecosystems. As they go, so go their ecosystems (and vice versa). Beyond these practical considerations are the philosophical ones that recognize fishes as having lives of value to themselves. Most of us do not need to harm fishes or their habitats to live happy healthy lives. Today, consumers have many choices in what they eat, and I hope growing numbers of humans will make compassionate, conscientious food choices that no longer support industries that cause ecological harm and animal suffering.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
science
1471973354000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FPhysicsWorld%2F%7E3%2F6hUHAz4K5mY%2Funlocking-the-mysteries-of-the-formation-of-our-solar-system-with-chimera&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Unlocking the mysteries of the formation of our solar system with CHIMERA Register now: Thursday 22 September A webinar sponsored by Andor science
1471973351000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FPhysicsWorld%2F%7E3%2FiPGPVvWiJWE%2Fmagnetic-bacteria-target-hard-to-treat-tumours&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Magnetic bacteria target hard-to-treat tumours New technique transports drugs into solid cancers science
1471973349000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FPhysicsWorld%2F%7E3%2FIraJUKDwjEs%2Fthe-monk-and-the-multiverse&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 The monk and the multiverse A journey into the remarkable mind of the 13th-century monk, scholar and proto-cosmologist Robert Grosseteste science
1471973138000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Faysha-akhtar%2Fwhat-does-a-fish-know-and_b_11660014.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 What Does A Fish Know And Feel?
Most of us would cringe at the thought of ripping a dog's mouth open with a hook. Why don't we cringe when we think about doing this to a fish? Our society not only considers hooking and suffocating fish to be socially acceptable, we celebrate it. Fishing shows abound on TV, almost every coastal town holds fishing competitions, and CNN routinely displays photos of fishermen with their latest and largest catch. Fishing is also commonly used as a sentimental symbol of the good life.
Perhaps we don't think twice about the ways we treat fish because we don't really know much about these animals. Biologist Jonathan Balcombe wants to change this. In his New York Times best selling book, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, Balcombe presents the latest scientific evidence showing that there is so much more to fish than we commonly believe. And, to emphasize that fish are individuals, Balcombe doesn't use the word "fish" as a collective plural. If there is more than one fish, he uses "fishes." I had the occasion to speak with Balcombe about his book. Why did you decide to write a book about fish and why now?
As a scientist working on animal sentience, I was often encountering new studies of fishes showing that they have rich, interesting lives. But most of this information was buried away in scholarly journals that most folks never read. Translating science into something lay-readers find engaging is something I find challenging and enjoyable. And with fishes being the most exploited group of vertebrates on Earth, there was also a strong ethical motive to write a book of popular science about fishes.
What has your research found about what a fish knows?
Fishes are incredibly diverse, and many are clearly intelligent. Consider groupers. These large, charismatic reef-dwelling fishes will approach trusted divers for handouts or just for the pleasure of being stroked. Careful studies in the Red Sea have shown that a grouper will perform a head-shaking signal to a moray eel as an invitation to go hunting together. Groupers will also point to a prey fish hiding in the reef where the grouper cannot reach but the eel can. If the prey escapes to open water, the grouper is waiting to catch it. Both species have higher hunting success when they collaborate.
Another sharp fish is the cleaner wrasse. A 2012 study showed that these small fishes learned to solve a mental problem faster than chimpanzees, orangutans, monkeys, and a scientist's four-year-old daughter.
What about what a fish feels? Do they experience emotions?
It's pretty clear that fishes can form attachments to one another, and they can become bonded to their human guardians, too. Several readers wrote to me about the games and affection they shared with individual pet fishes, and one can watch online videos of pet fishes who swim into the hand to receive gentle caresses and other pleasurable or playful interactions.
This behavior is borne out by studies like one in which wild-caught surgeon fishes responded to stress by swimming up next to a moving wand to receive caresses, which caused their stress--measured as blood cortisol--to decline. Stationary wands were ignored by these fishes, whose stress levels remained high.
Why do you think other no other scientist has written this book before?
I'm rather dumbfounded that nobody had. With all the great things we are learning about this hugely underestimated group of animals, it has to have been one of the lowest hanging fruits for an author to pick. The moment I thought of it I knew that it was something that had to be done, and it is an incredible privilege to have written this book.
What is the most interesting feedback you have received so far from a reader?
I enjoy hearing from readers wanting to share their personal stories of fishes, and I find these the most interesting. For instance, I received a letter last week from a woman in her seventies who detailed an experience from over 40 years ago when she used to feed the fishes at the back of a pet store. She had to use a stepladder to hand-feed a tank of Oscar cichlids on the top shelf. Soon these smart fishes were jumping from the water to take morsels from her fingertips. It became a game. One day, one Oscar jumped clear of the tank and made a nosedive toward the cement floor six feet below. Miraculously, a tank holding "feeder" goldfishes protruded from a shelf at floor level and the Oscar landed in it. Megan quickly returned the cichlid to his home tank. When she returned to the shop the next morning she found the same Oscar in the goldfish tank! After this happened three days in a row, she installed a lid on the Oscar tank.
You know I focus on the intersection between animal protection and human health. Why should we care about fish? Is there any benefit for us?
There are many reasons to care about fishes. For one thing, their ocean habitats produce most of the world's oxygen. For another, fishes are a critical part of aquatic ecosystems. As they go, so go their ecosystems (and vice versa). Beyond these practical considerations are the philosophical ones that recognize fishes as having lives of value to themselves. Most of us do not need to harm fishes or their habitats to live happy healthy lives. Today, consumers have many choices in what they eat, and I hope growing numbers of humans will make compassionate, conscientious food choices that no longer support industries that cause ecological harm and animal suffering.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
gaia
1471973133000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fdavid-helvarg%2Ffrank-ocean-versus-the-real-ocean_b_11658178.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Frank Ocean Versus The Real Ocean It's nice that Frank Ocean just released his long-anticipated new album, 'Blonde', that some say is truly awesome. But the fact that 12 of 20 stories on a Google News search under the word "ocean" on Sunday were about his music and that on Monday it had proportionately grown to 6 out of 9 "ocean" news stories might also indicate a larger problem with our culture, society and survival odds as a species.
Our increasingly urbanized celebrity-driven culture and corporate ratings-driven news media are reducing people's awareness of how essential the seas are to our economy (90 percent of trade, also fishing, tourism, real estate, etc.) national security (we're still a maritime nation) and yes, survival. Over half the oxygen Frank Ocean breathes in before singing some of his haunting "baritone with tenor moments" comes from the photosynthesis of ocean phytoplankton that is now in decline for reasons science does not yet fully understand.
The global ocean is experiencing a cascading series of disasters linked to industrial overfishing, pollution, loss of habitat and fossil-fuel fired climate change. By mid-century, by weight, there could be more plastic than living fish in the seas. The ocean's basic chemistry is being altered by climate-linked ocean acidification that is making it harder for shell-forming creatures to survive be they plankton, coral, crab or clam. And a warmer more acidic ocean also holds less dissolved oxygen. Within decades it could look more like the seas did 20 million years ago, meaning more jellyfish, harmful algal blooms and microbial mats and far fewer bony fish, seals, whales and dolphins.
Certainly the flooding disaster in Louisiana that reflects how fossil-fuel fired climate change can and will put low-lying coastal regions at risk and the mucky green algal bloom that's choking parts of Florida's shoreline are two reasons we ought to be seeing more news stories about our coasts and ocean than we are. Frank Ocean and his family were themselves forced to leave New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. And while no single weather event can be directly linked to climate change, that's kind of like saying no single medal won by Russian athletes at the last Winter Olympics can be directly linked to Russia's state-sponsored doping program, yet the trend lines are clear. Just ask the next president.
As much as some would like to think it's about Donald Trump's policy choices like climate denial, his celebrity status and the media's love of spectacle were contributing factors in turning a former reality show TV star and real estate developer into one of this year's two major party contenders for President of the United States. Still, neither Mr. Trump nor former Secretary of State and Senator Hillary Clinton have mentioned ocean issues on the campaign trail. I don't know if they've mentioned Frank Ocean but I'd be less surprised.
In the past two weeks, I've written about what a good ocean policy for the next President should be (in Sierra magazine) where the presidential candidates stand as best we can tell (in The Progressive) and why President Obama should establish an Atlantic Ocean Monument before leaving office (in The Hill).
I've also helped launch a letter to Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump signed by 115 prestigious ocean leaders in the hope we'll get a response from their campaigns in September and thus make the blue in our red, white and blue something voters get a chance to learn and think about when they cast their ballots.
But if the media won't address serious issues beyond border walls and emails then we'll just have to continue to work at the marine grassroots (seaweed) level and hope for a breakthrough in public awareness and citizen action. And of course it would help if some of our major celebrities would also speak out for healthy seas and the practical solutions that can still help turn the tide. That bait ball is in your court, Mr. Ocean.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
gaia
1471968372000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdotearth.blogs.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2Fcan-future-global-warming-matter-today%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Can Future Global Warming Matter Today? Scientists studying past and current climate conditions mull the challenges in making future warming matter today. gaia
1471968369000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fpascal-mittermaier%2Fcities-nature-and-the-lea_b_11594176.html&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Pascal Mittermaier: Cities, Nature and the Leaders of Tomorrow - An Interview With LEAF Alum Orlando Raez Orlando Raez has been working in city planning since 2004, but he's been thinking about environmental issues and the relationship between cities and nature for much longer.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdailyoverview.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F149371533634&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 We're continuing this week's focus on urban planning with...
We're continuing this week's focus on urban planning with this Overview of Washington, D.C., USA. The city's L'Enfant Plan was developed in 1791 by Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant for George Washington, the first President of the United States. L'Enfant designed a compass-aligned grid for the city's streets, with intersecting diagonal avenues that were later named after the states of the union. The diagonal avenues also intersect with the north-south and east-west streets at circles and rectangular plazas in order to create more open, green spaces. Lastly, L'Enfant laid out a 400 foot-wide (122 meter) garden-lined “grand avenue” - what is now know as the National Mall that connects the US Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial (the latter two are visible at right in this Overview). /// Source imagery: @digitalglobe (at Washington, District of Columbia)
images
1471968324000
images
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2F500px.com%2Fphoto%2F169142867%2Fcypress-by-david-perry&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Cypress by David Perry
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2F500px.com%2Fphoto%2F169040381%2Fsarah-jaffe-by-matt-lief-anderson-music&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Sarah Jaffe by Matt Lief Anderson Music
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fdean-regas%2Fpluto-not-a-planet-for-10_b_11650536.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dscience%26ir%3DScience&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Pluto: Not A Planet For 10 Years
A Grown-Up's View When I was a kid, Pluto was a planet. Of course, when I was a kid our map of the solar system was very immature. Astronomers knew of nine round planets that went around the Sun, and Pluto was one of them. But Pluto was always the oddball. It was the smallest, the coldest, the last, and the planet with the weirdest orbit. But in my youth, it was always a planet, and I liked Pluto all the more for its eccentricities.
However, in the 21st century we grew up. Astronomers put aside their smaller toy-telescopes of the past and utilized their new big-boy technology. With these grown-up telescopes, we learned that the solar system was much, much more complex. In addition to the planets, there are over 600,000 asteroids of various sizes and shapes that circle the Sun. There are objects that defy easy definition that swing wildly in elongated orbits or hang out near planets or even between planets. Then, there is the big shocker: we found over 1,000 other objects in Pluto's realm and beyond. Pluto, it turned out, was not alone, was not the last, and was not even weird. It had over 1,000 other brother-, sister-, and twin-worlds way out there. There is Eris an object nearly as large as Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, and countless other unnamed orbs plying the outer edges of our solar system. These new objects along with Pluto didn't fit into the categories we set up in our infancy.
Seeing Pluto Clearly And there is another layer to our solar system, a region even farther from the Sun where a mysterious object named Sedna lives. Sedna takes almost 12,000 years to circle the Sun and it may be the forerunner to a myriad of future discoveries in this region of space. Perhaps a new, never-before-seen planet exists 10-1,000 times farther away than Pluto.
Ten years ago, an international group of astronomers decided Pluto's fate. Pluto was not a planet in the same way that the Earth was a planet. They did not destroy it. Pluto did not fly out of the solar system or get sucked into a black hole. It did not change at all. We changed. It was as if we went to the eye doctor and got new glasses. We see Pluto much more clearly for what it is.
I miss my childhood fascination with Pluto, but it's time to come of age. I know there will be some growing pains, but after ten years let's fully jettison our childish notions of Pluto. Pluto isn't a planet. My new boyish crush is with a true oddball - a lone wolf in the depths of space called Sedna. Let's not bemoan the loss of Pluto but instead revel in what has been gained. Check it out and you'll see that Sedna is the new Pluto!
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
science
1471963407000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Flindahall.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F149366850490&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Joseph Totten Scientist of the Day General Joseph... https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/17/BostonGlobe.com/Business/Images/Minot%20light%20ROUGHSEA-7431359-7538.jpg
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fpaul-simpson%2Fwater-the-commodity-under_b_11661222.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Water: the commodity underwriting our low-carbon future The quintessential first thought when you think of saving water, drilled into us at childhood, is turning off the tap when you brush your teeth. As we age and the world advances -- with a global climate agreement and the new Sustainable Development Goals -- a broader view on water is now mainstream. It includes economic pillars such as agriculture; the immense amount of cooling water that power plants need to function; and the water embedded in the food you eat, the cotton shirt you wear and even the smart phones we cannot imagine living without.
We must now take that thinking another step forward, and consider the vital role that water will play as the world moves towards enacting the Paris Agreement and its underlying promise to cut GHG emissions by the nearly 200 countries that signed it.
Water security - access to a stable supply of sufficient amounts of good quality freshwater - is fundamental to achieving our low-carbon ambitions. For instance, China's climate action plan, submitted to the United Nations earlier this summer, outlines the pivotal role that hydropower will have in achieving its goal of reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Hydropower is already the country's second largest source of energy, after coal, and Beijing plans to increase its capacity to 420GW by 2020, up from nearly 300 GW today. To give you an idea of its importance to China's power market, Bloomberg reports that "hydropower accounts for all the increase in China's electricity output over the past two years."
Now consider the fact that in less than 15 years, a 40% global shortfall in water supply versus demand is expected to materialize if we carry on with business as usual. We find ourselves in a position where urgent action is required, in river basins the world over, to secure the water we need to enable us to meet our sustainable development and climate goals.
This reality is already becoming apparent to the business world, as some companies have found that water challenges have the potential to increase GHG emissions. For example, poor water governance in a basin BASF operate in has forced them to increase the amount of recycled water they use, which in turn is now challenging the company's 2020 energy goal. Endesa reports that many of their current activities aimed at reducing GHG emissions require large amounts of water. Carbon Capture and Storage Technology (CCS) for example, will allow the company to generate electricity from coal with nearly zero emissions, but would increase power plant's water needs and dependencies.
So water, and the lack thereof, could put a halt to our low-carbon ambitions. However, better water management could also help us go further in delivering much needed emissions reductions. Clues as to the opportunities available are found in plain sight in CDP's corporate water data, disclosed through our platform by some of the world's largest companies.
Mars reports working with farmers in the Mississippi Delta to use alternate wetting and drying (AWD), an irrigation technique that reduces both water use and GHG emissions with little or no impact on yields. And Lockheed Martin discloses cutting US$77,000 in electrical costs, 800 metric tons of carbon emissions and 8% of its water usage annually in its site in Maryland as a result of a chiller replacement. By ensuring water security is considered in GHG emissions reductions plans, companies will ensure that their growth strategies and low-carbon transition plans remain on track. Early action and leadership will be beneficial to company's bottom lines as well as contributing positively to the communities and environments upon which they depend.
While it is clear companies have a critical role to play in safeguarding our water resources, they can't do it alone. Policymakers are increasing recognizing that they must not only work with local water users, but also forge impactful partnerships with the private sector. Our new policy briefing, launching at World Water Week in Stockholm at the end of August, offers clear recommendations for policymakers to consider in the run up to COP22. And this Autumn, CDP will be doing more to help companies take their first steps towards improved corporate water stewardship, in partnership with the We Mean Business coalition. We'll be revealing more on this at Climate Week New York in September. Be sure to follow @CDP and @WMBtweets to keep up to date with our news.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
By Brian Richter, Chief Scientist, Water, The Nature Conservancy
Australia is one of the driest inhabited places on Earth. Yet nearly two-thirds of the country's land area is devoted to agriculture, generating 93 percent of the domestic food supply. The country is only able to sustain this level of food production through irrigation and an active water market—a system in which water-use entitlements can be bought and sold and water can be transferred from one user to another. The system is working for farmers, but Australia is still trying to figure out how to meet the needs of one specific water user—nature. One potential solution to balance the water needs of people and nature, though, may lie with the power of impact investment.
Around the world, more than 30 percent of all rivers, lakes and aquifers are being heavily tapped, mostly for irrigated agriculture. These sources are spread across 60 countries, and dependence on them continues to grow. But as use grows, so does the impact on people and nature. Since 1970, freshwater species populations have declined by an estimated 76 percent globally. And depletion of water sources leaves our communities and economies vulnerable to water shortages in drier times.
To date, our approach to overcome these water scarcity challenges has been to invest more in infrastructure to increase water supplies, such as large reservoirs that store river water, canals that import water from distant sources and wells that go deeper into our aquifers. But we can no longer build our way out of water scarcity—the cost of new infrastructure remains out of reach for many communities, and there are no new supplies to tap.
Water markets have proven immensely effective in many regions—from Australia to the western United States—for stimulating water conservation and enabling the transfer of saved water to other users who need more. By making water a tradeable asset, the system rewards those who can save some water and make it available to others. Furthermore, the cost of providing water to new users through markets is far less than the cost of infrastructure-based approaches and further damage to the environment can be averted.
Water markets can be especially effective when implemented in areas where water is mainly consumed for irrigation. If we can find ways to save just a small percentage of the water used on farms, it will free up a great volume of water that can be used for other purposes, including the protection and restoration of natural ecosystems. But having a water market does not necessarily ensure benefits for nature. In Australia's Murray-Darling Basin and many other areas with water markets, too many entitlements were originally issued, too much water has been withdrawn from the environment and freshwater ecosystems are suffering the consequences.
This is where impact investment can help. Investors who wish to see environmental and social returns, as well as financial returns, can put their money toward market-based solutions that direct water back to the environment while still preserving human uses. One example of this is Water Sharing Investment Partnerships (WSIPs), which operate within existing water markets and use investor capital and other revenue sources to acquire water-use entitlements from willing sellers.
These rights can then be reallocated to depleted freshwater ecosystems or sold or leased to other water users seeking more supplies, thereby generating financial returns for investors. While the primary purpose behind WSIPs is to move water back into the environment, another critically important purpose is to keep farmers farming. In some areas, funds from WSIPs could even be used to help farmers invest in more efficient water technologies, freeing up some of their water to be returned to the environment or sold on the market.
The Nature Conservancy, through a partnership between the Conservancy's impact investing unit, NatureVest, and its Australia and Water teams, launched its first WISP, the Murray-Darling Basin Balanced Water Fund in Australia, in April 2016. This and other impact investment-driven solutions are explored in a new report released by the Conservancy, titled “Water Share,” which shows the potential to return water to depleted ecosystems in many of the 37 water-scarce countries that already have water rights systems, the basic prerequisite for a water market. If all regions with existing water rights systems could establish water markets functioning on par with the Australian market, they could collectively generate total annual water sales of US$13.4 billion per year, equating to market assets of US$331 billion.
Those numbers indicate the great potential water markets hold for nature and investors, and it is high time to unleash that potential—because scarcity is expanding and intensifying around the globe. But with creative financial solutions, nature and people can better share the most precious resource on our planet.
gaia
1471957815000
images
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F76909717%40N02%2F29099742331%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 London / Sunset from Primerose Hill
Primrose Hill is a hill of 213 feet (65 m) located on the northern side of Regent's Park in London, and also the name given to the surrounding district. The hill summit has a clear view of central London.
images
1471956805000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgo.theregister.com%2Ffeed%2Fwww.theregister.co.uk%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2Fnasa_reconnects_with_lost_floating_spacecraft%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 NASA tried turning lost spacecraft STEREO-B off and on again... but it didn't work. True story
But Deep Space Network brought her back online
NASA has managed to reestablish a connection with the STEREO-B spacecraft after contact was lost in October 2014.…
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F100162031%40N03%2F29069098772%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 The Light Will Guide
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2F491024846%2Fdo-you-read-terms-of-service-contracts-not-many-do-research-shows%3Futm_medium%3DRSS%26utm_campaign%3Dresearchnews&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Do You Read Terms Of Service Contracts? Not Many Do, Research Shows
During an experiment, people consented to sharing their private information with the NSA, and to surrendering their first-born as payment for access to a fictitious social networking site.
science
1471945954000
design
%feed http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/22/12594202/rdio-spotify-mac-light-theme-devin-halladay-design This light Spotify theme for Mac is a tribute to Rdio design
For those who still mourn the loss of Rdio, Devin Halladay has a solution. The 19-year-old designer has hand-crafted a Spotify skin for Mac, which brings Rdio's best design principles to the streaming service that has survived the booms and busts of the modern music industry. You can download the skin over at Halladay's website, and it requires you to switch your Mac security settings to permit apps downloaded from anywhere. Halladay says there's some kinks he has to work out, but it should operate like a light mode replacement for Spotify's desktop app.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fhealth-shots%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2F490527970%2Fbeyond-slurpees-many-japanese-mini-marts-now-cater-to-elders%3Futm_medium%3DRSS%26utm_campaign%3Dresearchnews&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Beyond Slurpees: Many Japanese Mini-Marts Now Cater To Elders
Convenience is in the eye of the generation. Increasingly, corner markets in Japan target the 27 percent of residents over 65 — offering nursing care advice and home delivery of meals and groceries.
science
1471938017000
images
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2F500px.com%2Fphoto%2F168986797%2Fpaulina-s-dream-by-rarindra-prakarsa&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Paulina's dream by Rarindra Prakarsa
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FScience360NewsServiceBreakingStory%2F%7E3%2FiyPe8Fd_4hQ%2Fproton-pump-found-regulate-blood-ph-stingrays&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Proton pump found to regulate blood pH in stingrays
Full Text:
Researchers have discovered the same enzyme used by “boneworms” to dissolve whale carcasses, and that helps promote photosynthesis in corals, also regulates blood pH in stingrays. The study could help scientists better understand the enzyme's function in human kidneys to regulate blood and urine functions.
This tiny origami robot is made of laser cut PVC and polystyrene. Once heated, the body folds around a magnet and the robot is controlled using an external magnetic field, allowing it to move around on land or in water. Once finished, the robot can dissolve to nothing in acetone (except the magnet). The body of the robot is made of PVC, with creases where it is supposed to fold, and a magnet. Heating the magnet activates the sheet to self-fold into a functional 3-D robot capable of conducting basic tasks and behaviors like swimming, delivering and carrying blocks, climbing a slope and digging. The researchers have developed three models of the origami robot: A water-degradable model, whose outer layer dissolves in water; a conductive model (aluminum coated polyester); and an acetone-degradable model, whose entire body (except the magnet) dissolves in acetone. The researchers say these origami robots could be used to access unreachable sites and show promise for use in medical applications.
Image credit: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
science
1471933859000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F08%2F160822125448.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Scientists map migration paths of Arctic breeding birds Conservation of intertidal habitat -- 65 percent of which has been lost over the last 50 years -- is critical to the survival of countless birds during migration on the East Asian Australasian Flyway. gaia
1471928596000
science
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2F490972873%2Fyou-vs-future-you-or-why-were-bad-at-predicting-our-own-happiness%3Futm_medium%3DRSS%26utm_campaign%3Dresearchnews&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 You vs. Future You; Or Why We're Bad At Predicting Our Own Happiness
Researcher Dan Gilbert says that human beings are the only animals that think about the future. But we don't always do the best job at predicting what will make us happy — or even who we will be.
science
1471925729000
general
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ozy.com%2Frising-stars%2Fcould-she-be-hillarys-secretary-of-space%2F70059&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Could She Be Hillary's Secretary of Space? Entrepreneur Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux is laying the groundwork for a policy on space for the masses. general
1471925413000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F08%2F160822181814.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 'Cyclops' beetles hint at solution to 'chicken-and-egg' problem in novel trait evolution Beetles with cyclops eyes have given scientists insight into how new traits may evolve through the recruitment of existing genes -- even if these genes are already carrying out critical functions. gaia
1471925409000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F08%2F160822100651.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Beetles pollinated orchids millions of year ago, fossil evidence shows When most people hear the word 'pollinator,' they think of bees and butterflies. However, certain beetles are known to pollinate plants as well, and new fossil evidence indicates that they were doing so 20 million years ago. gaia
1471924772000
technology
%feed http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/22/490961959/fbi-releases-mobile-app-for-finding-bank-robbers?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology FBI Releases Mobile App for Finding Bank Robbers
The new app enlists public's assistance in identifying bank robbers with wanted posters at your finger tips.
technology
1471924769000
technology
%feed http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/08/22/490655700/uber-competitor-in-nyc-promises-drivers-benefits-even-employee-status?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology Uber Competitor In NYC Promises Drivers Benefits, Even Employee Status
While Uber and Lyft both fight in courts to keep their workers as independent contractors, new ride-hailing startup Juno is moving to offer full employee status and other benefits.
technology
1471924767000
technology
%feed http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/08/22/490895637/on-six-flags-virtual-reality-coaster-the-ride-is-just-half-the-thrill?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology On Six Flags' Virtual Reality Coaster, The Ride Is Just Half The Thrill
Magic Mountain in Southern California has a roller coaster in which riders put on VR goggles to see an imagined world while their bodies undergo the physical thrills. How is it? We get a review.
technology
1471924762000
technology
%feed http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/21/489765987/the-last-razor-repairman-in-paris?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology The Last Razor Repairman In Paris
In a tiny shop from a bygone era, Jacques Guillaume gets calls about more than razors because there's nobody to fix things anymore. "Today, manual work like this is passé and obsolete," he says.
technology
1471921751000
general
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgo.theregister.com%2Ffeed%2Fwww.theregister.co.uk%2F2016%2F08%2F23%2Fmicrosoft_lost_a_city_because_it_used_bad_wikipedia_data%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Microsoft's maps lost a city because it used bad Wikipedia data
Bing Maps relies on Wikipedia? Even a bit? Umm, guys, you do know anyone can edit it?
Microsoft has laid part of the blame for Bing Maps' mis-location of the Australian city of Melbourne by a whole hemisphere on Wikipedia.…
general
1471920332000
gaia
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fadam-m-roberts%2Fwildlife-and-12yearold-gi_b_11651080.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 Wildlife And 12-Year-Old Girls Who takes to social media and calls a 12-year-old girl a "stupid bitch?"
There has been a firestorm of activity about a young lady from Utah named Aryanna who has been posting pictures on social media of her recent kills in Africa: zebras, giraffes, and many other animals shot with a gun or the pink arrows she pulled from her quiver. Aryanna refers to these hunts as a dream come true and something she will forever cherish.
Interestingly, she has also issued a lengthy formulaic defense of her barbarism, working through the checklist of pro-hunting claims to justify her young bloodlust: money from hunts goes back into conservation; these animals are not endangered; meat from the kills feeds poor African families; hunters are precise killers who only take the shot when they feel guaranteed in their ability to kill swiftly.
Time after time, Born Free has debunked these hunting myths in numerous fora. We have revealed the paltry sum from hunts that is actually returned to conservation efforts and the comparatively small amount of tourism revenue generated by thrill kills as opposed to non-lethal tourism activities; that hunting disrupts family systems and ecosystems, regardless of whether the species is predator or prey, endangered or plentiful; that there is much more community value from having wildlife alive to benefit local communities in perpetuity rather than a one-off slaughter; and that individual animals suffer from being shot (think Cecil), whether with bullet or arrow.
But, here's what really engaged my interest about this specific girl and this specific explosion of vitriol on both sides of the wildlife slaughter industry: I'm the father of a 12-year-old girl. I am looking at pictures of Aryanna, posing with her kills, poised to shoot an arrow. Here's what I see, aside from the horror of the kill: a little girl with her hair up, a backwards baseball cap, a t-shirt, jean shorts, and sneakers. My 12-year-old daughter, Mia, works hard to get her hair up just right, wears a baseball cap backwards, and wears t-shirts, jean shorts, and sneakers.
They are just little girls. Little girls who are influenced by their parents, by their fathers, and who view wildlife as amazing... just in very different ways.
Mia and I just returned from a week-long father/daughter summer trip to Yellowstone. Mia wanted to go to Wyoming. Mia wanted to see wildlife. And, there we were, hiking the Grand Tetons, looking up at bird nests, and driving through Yellowstone searching for wildlife: a herd of elk; a male with antlers taller than Mia; a lone coyote searching for food in the tall grass; chipmunks scurrying to and fro; and buffalo... so many buffalo!
For more than an hour, we sat watching hundreds of buffalo in the valley below grazing, dust-bathing--just really existing in peace. I glanced over at Mia, all of 12, and noticed the tears. My little 12-year-old was crying, so deeply and personally moved at the experience of seeing these animals--just living naturally and being there, in front of us.
As I read the Facebook posts and online commentary about Aryanna, I was truly astounded by the level of anger and viciousness. The incendiary language. The hate. Make no mistake; we who object to animal slaughter for sport, or fun, or commerce receive the hatred back ten-fold.
At the end of the day, they are, genuinely, just little girls. So, I teach Mia compassion, care, and concern for all living things. Aryanna's dad teaches her to kill animals for sport and to justify it with a litany of defenses.
I believe to my core that we should raise our children to respect other living beings: to protect them and, at the very least, to leave them alone to behave and live naturally in the wild. Mia believes this, too, and is literally moved to tears at the mere sight of thriving, heaving herds of buffalo.
Step one, I think, is to dial down the rhetoric in a significant way. We can believe different things but behave respectfully toward one another; it's what compassion is all about. Step two is a bit more challenging, though, isn't it? There is not a simple or straightforward strategy for changing minds. I doubt I will sway Aryanna's father and I know he will not sway me.
I wonder what might happen, however, if two 12-year-old girls, backwards baseball caps and all, could just talk to each other without external influence... or maybe build a friendship around humane activities. Perhaps fewer animals would suffer and their happiness in life would be equally strong.
Perhaps Aryanna would no longer see a giraffe or zebra as something to selfishly covet, dead, on display in her home. Perhaps she would desire a world with wild animals safe and free. Perhaps she would realize that she could enjoy nature while still shooting bullets and arrows at inanimate targets, just as the archers and shooters do in the Olympics. Perhaps there would be more common ground there than anyone might expect.
Maybe while Aryanna and Mia are exploring compassionate friendship, I'll buy her dad a beer.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild, Adam
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
A picture I took of a baby zebra at the zoo in Arizona. It's a beautiful creature and looks even better in black and white than in color. Then again, the zebra didn't change color, only the background. Enjoy.
![]("https://media.npr.org/include/images/tracking/npr-rss-pixel.png?story=491104093")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2Fd2%2Fc2%2F99%2Fd2c299de5d09a55c14ef3d2e4c99b56b.jpg&width=540&mix=0385d-pin-gifs")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F03%2F40%2F6b%2F03406b242af168f4e46befd9434ac26a.jpg&width=540&mix=0385d-pin-gifs")
!["2_global_location_fullres"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb092e7d4f970d-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"2_global_location_fullres\"")
!["MRZARABY]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b8d214d301970c-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"MRZARABY")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Eff%2FTheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond%3Fd%3DyIl2AUoC8zA&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FTheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond%2F%7E4%2Frksi7Csro0o&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
!["0bc8c1c1f3eaab608b_verylargetelescope2"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b8d214c23a970c-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"0bc8c1c1f3eaab608b_verylargetelescope2\"")
!["Uhd_beletsky_par_28"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b7c88b0fa4970b-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"Uhd_beletsky_par_28\"")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FTheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond%2F%7E4%2FRhKieSKtPE4&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
!["In]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm9.staticflickr.com%2F8011%2F28560279423_8e3477595c_m.jpg&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
!["6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb08f4f101970d-800wi"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb092e5aae970d-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb08f4f101970d-800wi\"")
!["6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb08f4f294970d-800wi"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b8d214b03a970c-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb08f4f294970d-800wi\"")
!["6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b7c8514a6e970b-800wi"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b8d214b048970c-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b7c8514a6e970b-800wi\"")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FTheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond%2F%7E4%2FaTzycLuFEUU&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
!["Star-talk"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b7c88b00ae970b-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"Star-talk\"")
!["6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb08f4f101970d-800wi"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b8d214b475970c-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb08f4f101970d-800wi\"")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FTheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond%2F%7E4%2FP9rhTWDYg9U&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
!["Rho2cas"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b8d2144e3f970c-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"Rho2cas\"")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FTheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond%2F%7E4%2FUdKAU63mGU0&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
!["Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f188336%2fgettyimages-53323638"]("http://i.amz.mshcdn.com/U0npJ_Ca0WmZT7g773f0yCESIao=/575x323/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F188336%2FGettyImages-53323638.jpg")
!["Feed-tw"]("http://a.amz.mshcdn.com/assets/feed-tw-f7c0a094d16b7ee7c91a1e50839a8e00.jpg")
!["Feed-fb"]("http://a.amz.mshcdn.com/assets/feed-fb-c0a21e8841794479b8086c32c6f24ba1.jpg")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F08%2Fnorth-korea-796x398.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F04%2Ffacebook-messenger.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F08%2FScreen-Shot-2016-08-23-at-11.30.22-AM-796x445.png&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F08%2Ffacebook-targeting-796x398.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F08%2FDelphi-796x398.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F06%2FDeal-with-it-Instagram-1.gif&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2015%2F12%2FZuckerberg-Chan-Initiative-1200x600.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2014%2F07%2F105188783-730x491.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2015%2F07%2FNASA-1200x622.jpg&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F08%2Fezgif.com-optimize-11.gif&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2F66.media.tumblr.com%2Fe09b5d48e89266ff4f556ba5b4246cc5%2Ftumblr_ntfbjrmWlX1tgx0wyo1_500.png&width=540&mix=0b54d-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.designboom.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F08%2F091-800-fb.gif&width=540&mix=0b54d-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.designboom.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F08%2Fjohn-yuyi-social-media-tattoo-designboom-01.jpg&width=540&mix=0b54d-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2F66.media.tumblr.com%2Fc9db682315623170345476d799fab44a%2Ftumblr_oc9qfqhdpy1qgiw5to1_500.jpg&width=540&mix=0b54d-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.designboom.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F08%2Fteamlab-resonating-spheres-trees-light-festival-tadasu-no-mori-shimogamo-shrine-designboom-01.jpg&width=540&mix=0b54d-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F1e%2F47%2Faf%2F1e47af3d29dfdfa90bac7fd1f5d42973.jpg&width=540&mix=c5054-pin-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2Fe3%2F83%2F62%2Fe383626cd4532e49043131b284f0660c.jpg&width=540&mix=c5054-pin-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2Fdd%2F0b%2F2f%2Fdd0b2fd5413e7b4f329b62c7a857520c.jpg&width=540&mix=c5054-pin-art")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F00%2Fe9%2F33%2F00e933e3fa3af3f9621bbbcbaa831395.jpg&width=540&mix=c5054-pin-art")
!["Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f186162%2fscreen_shot_2016-08-22_at_9.43.22_am"]("http://i.amz.mshcdn.com/vGrenyIpdzhISIDMEyk4w4SelFE=/575x323/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F186162%2FScreen_Shot_2016-08-22_at_9.43.22_AM.png")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--SvegTKwn--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/zl96l7ea7hkgfeesncdr.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--P_Zs40J4--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ba5eybadsp7oy9q7hdn0.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--wjOdrwt9--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/xj9dvbthvogumxyaw86q.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--DAQtEdO4--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/kky1hflohdsr48fc6oyj.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--HNS9QbOe--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/oqtiukcks5qeuxpym64y.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--vQh8g19r--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/djhcinq5lmmqjmzzf58l.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--7VQBXSA7--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/bmgybj3tlcghdknp4clt.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--HEZRW2P4--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ym72sx99texgidwq2vbf.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--2AvgOrHX--/fzyooltcgkzeea38oao2.png")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--X6QBmgtM--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/sfxstagf9x8sjfrpakmh.png")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Hc-AJgN---/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/fnshurwvt97ecqfh0ort.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--MdQtL0Cv--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/f7cuuuw9crmaxw8xlflk.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--57f69PMF--/ffaahtq1qwky9pklwrjp.gif")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--8WDTgshR--/rjihvy8mv7vglpzvt7e2.png")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--C54my7_p--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/yukpakxljxabz9yenlwy.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--deHs0fLB--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/iekpwfbyvf8husn7c4mc.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--fHk3Efik--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/uio8hj8c1nzd6ucmtiwe.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--WonaGD-m--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ozjdqbl87d7lv88hkvn1.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Bb49JNjc--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/gxigpptc7jvsbq7kyt8p.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--AdDmRoQJ--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/vto4ihaeq5hjhzqnaq89.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--jcExmXrR--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ez0baf9z3fq8vbvbsc0q.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Ha3-K7wl--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/hhijueryiw4riwpfams5.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--NjlLhhmA--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/piox127vruhpeq8pjlwp.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--d41qtjfx--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/kzkrz5spnjtfzqt4phra.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--_vWMczqe--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/lplp9xid20he8pcplftm.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--A4_blhWw--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/vbui2hxcxsuiawozfrwq.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s---5MF20sR--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/e3jpaqt9oh9uur65uhhn.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--WMZvWCQh--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/dfehrn5xlurglbxtur0n.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--xPvyVIbU--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/y2gh8yfetbzgjse1y98d.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--l3B2HEef--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/oigq67njbv3i08fbuzl5.jpg")
!["Today's]("http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--c4iA6uBq--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/e6zukr9wggefdhrtgoqz.jpg")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2F66.media.tumblr.com%2F9a2e84a7c4d4ac1cdf694ad6a787dae8%2Ftumblr_ocdftre2ie1rlkdy0o1_500.gif&width=540&mix=219b9-gifs")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2F67.media.tumblr.com%2F89365c5d47ab9af61175c4ffe922584d%2Ftumblr_ocbr5nmuOy1rlkdy0o1_500.gif&width=540&mix=219b9-gifs")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2F65.media.tumblr.com%2F1bc3c9a9a958e2732b1303fcc79a9b11%2Ftumblr_ocd3vtsX1C1r6ivyno1_500.jpg&width=540&mix=42dfe-culture")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2F67.media.tumblr.com%2Fa630beeb77da090939380db540f8a860%2Ftumblr_ocbl50dfRH1r6ivyno1_500.jpg&width=540&mix=42dfe-culture")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/169184425/m%3D900/fb1617292a1977a6a2ed6074c436c13c")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/169137499/m%3D900/1eb4e506cafafedf2899e72818c29500")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/169043015/m%3D900/b55ed53116f27b1610c4f13947da831d")
!["Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f184950%2f86b0e1eabbee4d7aac9a63d3b742a819"]("http://i.amz.mshcdn.com/L98AGvFs6yTulpVUbzihuAleXxY=/575x323/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F184950%2F86b0e1eabbee4d7aac9a63d3b742a819.jpg")
!["Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fstory%2fthumbnail%2f18572%2fsddefault"]("http://i.amz.mshcdn.com/YuZsByAGSaaQoTqNvJpGBoiYG6Q=/575x323/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fstory%2Fthumbnail%2F18572%2Fsddefault.jpg")
!["Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fstory%2fthumbnail%2f18558%2fxpdr1"]("http://i.amz.mshcdn.com/SooIMmwGh3YJZtQXPHZVM0r_eUk=/575x323/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fstory%2Fthumbnail%2F18558%2Fxpdr1.jpg")
!["The]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8501/29080618832_98bbe0a496_m.jpg")
!["Sunset,]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8164/29108641481_d0040aa761_m.jpg")
!["London]("http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7469/28552206404_e5ae961ae7_m.jpg")
![]("http://www.bradblog.com/Images/Twitter_GreenNewsReport_mini.png")
![]("http://www.bradblog.com/Images/facebook_mini.gif")
![]("http://www.bradblog.com/Images/iTunes_mini.png")
![]("http://www.bradblog.com/images/Stitcher_GNR_mini.jpg")
![]("http://www.bradblog.com/images/TuneIn_mini.png")
![]("http://www.bradblog.com/images/rss_feed_mini.png")
![]("http://bradblog.com/images/GNR_FloodingBatonRouge081916.jpg")
![]("http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/ee43934196d8f0004a64d0bd76372894/204222631/caterpillar-robot.jpg")
Soft robots aren't easy to make, since they require a completely different set of components from their rigid counterparts. It's even tougher to scale down the parts they typically use for locomotion. A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics... !["75388-Lang-525x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18224503/75388-Lang-525x700.jpg")
!["75388_1_Lang-511x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18224552/75388_1_Lang-511x700.jpg")
!["75388_6_Lang-504x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18224658/75388_6_Lang-504x700.jpg")
!["75388_7_lang"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18224812/75388_7_lang.jpg")
!["75388_26_Lang-512x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18231834/75388_26_Lang-512x700.jpg")
!["75388_18_Lang-504x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18224948/75388_18_Lang-504x700.jpg")
!["75388_24_Lang-515x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18225204/75388_24_Lang-515x700.jpg")
!["75388_10_Lang-511x700"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18225132/75388_10_Lang-511x700.jpg")
!["75388_22_lang"]("https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18225105/75388_22_lang.jpg")
![]("http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/dd51871b35b34b680fde9e3c72156bea/204223866/100295466-ed.jpg")
The robots are coming, and they're taking our jobs. Or that's the concern, anyway. A recent Oxford University study surmises that over the next two decades, about 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being made obsolete thanks to automation. This i... ![]("http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/no-id/1471965780495625.jpg?crop=0.6423611111111112xw:1xh;*,*&resize=630:*&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=90")
![]("http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/36849/147196679701431.png")
![]("http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/36849/1471968789298702.png")
![]("http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/36849/147196884551756.png")
![]("http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/36849/1471966817902415.png")
![]("https://media.npr.org/include/images/tracking/npr-rss-pixel.png?story=491056067"){kind=tracking}
![]("http://static.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/08232016-pod23_01-1560x985.jpg")
!["S.]("http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7531/28563775053_37e7321d5c_m.jpg")
![]("https://media.npr.org/include/images/tracking/npr-rss-pixel.png?story=491063738"){kind=tracking}
!["2016-08-23-1471953931-9314546-fish.jpg"]("http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-08-23-1471953931-9314546-fish.jpg")
![]("http://66.media.tumblr.com/97d52d68ffb694c5a207371c0ee93fbd/tumblr_ocdcpcGklK1tnemwao1_500.jpg")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/169142867/m%3D900/8fe0f4c725e1d5eeedfc2e281f721eec")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/169060685/m%3D900/b7e800641bbdc72bbfd54e73a2471a20")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/169040381/m%3D900/a1b87d3d51de9e76d9a52df3cf28c209")
!["2016-08-22-1471871941-3143713-Pluto1.jpg"]("http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-08-22-1471871941-3143713-Pluto1.jpg")
!["2016-08-22-1471872002-8612962-Pluto2.jpg"]("http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-08-22-1471872002-8612962-Pluto2.jpg")
![]("http://66.media.tumblr.com/ef36c7068cd1ad97dfc1a500d85dce52/tumblr_ocbiigAZrz1ry3nado1_500.jpg")
![]("http://66.media.tumblr.com/5b68417ae41504e149fd4436f8a6fbd0/tumblr_ocbiigAZrz1ry3nado2_500.jpg")
![]("http://67.media.tumblr.com/171b4193edfc1f64b0410c93c9992396/tumblr_ocbiigAZrz1ry3nado3_500.jpg")
![]("http://67.media.tumblr.com/0d69c276b02ec14e1242e64ec0f0df97/tumblr_ocbiigAZrz1ry3nado4_500.jpg")
![]("http://66.media.tumblr.com/b7c80d0c8ac83d8093ce33dceac91f46/tumblr_ocbiigAZrz1ry3nado5_500.jpg")
![]("http://66.media.tumblr.com/c14fd294f2073534c65f62374e548e2a/tumblr_ocbiigAZrz1ry3nado6_500.jpg")
!["2016-08-23-1471960781-6763550-Chinahydropower.PNG"]("http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-08-23-1471960781-6763550-Chinahydropower.PNG")
!["The]("http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2016/08/tnc_32273608_preview_cropped.jpg")
!["Water]("http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2016/08/WaterShare_Cover.jpg" "\"https://global.nature.org/content/water-share\"")
!["London]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8203/29099742331_42c9247b3b_m.jpg")
!["Slow"]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8033/29142259926_bb42ac2ce5_m.jpg")
!["The]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8258/29069098772_cbc9981593_m.jpg")
![]("https://media.npr.org/include/images/tracking/npr-rss-pixel.png?story=491024846"){kind=tracking}
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn3.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FfnsHpmbQtNU6UYUB12UKiWCX-Qk%3D%2F0x0%3A2466x1644%2F1310x873%2Fcdn0.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_image%2Fimage%2F50483179%2Frdio-spotify-light-theme-skin-screenshot-1.0.png&width=540&mix=22833-design")
!["Sunset]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8278/29140882606_bf458a7f21_m.jpg")
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/168962527/m%3D900/d3db41403068d6c289f0f09c7555a11e")
![]("https://media.npr.org/include/images/tracking/npr-rss-pixel.png?story=490527970"){kind=tracking}
![]("https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/168986797/m%3D900/d693b6ad1eef1ec0e4cbf4dd29a32582")
![]("https://media.science360.gov/files/story/7d46bc44-e447-4a25-8aa5-b44a5bf539e3-largeImage.jpg")
![]("https://media.science360.gov/files/pic-day/4e72d77e-7fc1-41a2-9945-4e6baec97009-largeImage.jpg")
![]("https://media.npr.org/include/images/tracking/npr-rss-pixel.png?story=490972873"){kind=tracking}
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Finclude%2Fimages%2Ftracking%2Fnpr-rss-pixel.png%3Fstory%3D490961959&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Finclude%2Fimages%2Ftracking%2Fnpr-rss-pixel.png%3Fstory%3D490655700&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Finclude%2Fimages%2Ftracking%2Fnpr-rss-pixel.png%3Fstory%3D490895637&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Finclude%2Fimages%2Ftracking%2Fnpr-rss-pixel.png%3Fstory%3D489765987&width=540&mix=3106b-technology")
!["BABY]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8119/28549632253_8503d2f11b_m.jpg")
![Figures that Speak]("http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/75388_23_Lang.jpg"){kind=link}
![weighs in]("http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/75388_10_Lang.jpg"){kind=link}