Our eyes suck, extremely poor design. Be cool if we could see UV IR and the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.

And just a FYI hydrogen alpha (Ha) sulphur II and oxygen III all emit light in the visible spectrum so technically it is not false color just enhanced color.

Here's a good explanation of how and why they enhance space pictures. It includes some neat interactive features that let you see some space pictures in different wavelengths and through different wavelength filters. Pretty cool:

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind...ning_of_color/

Look maaaaaaan... The pictures are awesome, enhanced or not! They look cool, they get our minds wondering, and that's good for science and kids getting into science. And like all awesome pics, chances are they're touched-up in some way. From Playboy to Penthouse, to NASA, you don't want the complete naked truth (it has zits and shit, and needs implants prolly!!). Put an alien craft in there somewhere and I'll stare at it even longer!

So let them PhotoShop the horse-head nebula to enhance the gasses and dust, it amazes my simple mind!

Considering nothing else has arisen on this planet to challenge our domination of it I'd say we're doing pretty damned good.

Is there a site where you can see non-enhanced photos?

I forgot about that. good point.:clap:

GloryDayz really hits upon why the pictures are enhanced: People want to go "Oooo, aaaah." when they see the pictures. Astronomers are no dummies. Their funding comes from tax dollars. If all they are gonna do is hand out black and white 1950s era type photos, the taxpaying public is gonna pull the plug on their pet project.

Didn't we talk about this a little while ago, Dave? ;)

Give it time.

Google glass is just now getting run through the mixer...

Good thought but no it's actually competition from all the other Astro photographers who are out there and you want your pictures look better than theirs, that's the real motivation.

Yeah but it was brought up again, sorry sorta in my wheelhouse and couldn't let it pass :)

Kinda like if someone said the best way to install floors is with Elmer's glue. I'd expect you to fire off a post or two.

Depressing....

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8153/qgxl.jpg

Today is Overshoot Day

August 20, 2013, marks Earth Overshoot day— the estimated date when the people on Earth have used up the planet's annual supply of renewable natural resources and reached its carbon-absorbing capacity. After that point, people are using more than the planet can sustain. It's a one-day reminder of a year-round problem — humans are living too large on a finite planet.

You probably have a general sense of why. The human population continues to grow. People are consuming more and more resources. And we still have only one planet. To appreciate just how large we are living in relation to our finite planet , let's look more closely at some numbers.

According to the Global Footprint Network, Earth Overshoot day became an issue around 1975. That's when humanity's ecological footprint first exceeded the biocapacity of the planet.

Before that, people's ecological footprint — measured as the area required to supply the food, fish, fiber and energy we consume every year — was within what the planet could sustain. In 1975, there were about 4.1 billion people. Today there are more than 7.3 billion. As the cumulative footprint of the population grows, Earth Overshoot Day moves two to three days earlier each year.

To get a feeling for what humanity's global footprint looks like, consider the land people use to feed themselves. People presently use 38 percent of the planet to grow crops and raise livestock (check out Navin Ramankutty's animation of global cropland for a "wow" visualization). Many of the agricultural lands are in places that were once temperate grasslands. So much habitat has been turned under by the plow that temperate grasslands are the most imperiled and least protected habitat types on the planet. Future frontiers of agricultural expansion will most likely be in the tropics as people clear high-biodiversity tropical forests to raise cattle, grow soy and install palm oil plantations.

By 2050, the human population is projected to be about 9 billion people. Over that same time, demand for food, water and energy are expected to double. If you think about today's consumption rate per billion people as a shopping cart, people are filling 7 shopping carts. Earth Overshoot Day is a reminder that such a high level of demand is already putting a huge ecological strain on our one planet. By 2050, 9 billion people will be filling twice as many carts per billion — for a total of 18 shopping carts. That's a 150-percent increase in demand!

How can society start to bend the trend to put the planet on a sustainable trajectory?

A first step is to change the mentality about how people grow food and use other natural resources like forests, water and energy resources. Instead of taking more to make more, people need to commit to making more with less. Society also needs to become passionate about efficiency — more crops per drop of water, more miles per gallon of fuel. It's a challenge that should inspire innovation and ingenuity about how people produce and use precious and finite natural resources.

Here is just one of many examples emerging around the world. The Better Cotton Initiative (a partnership that included WWF) worked with cotton farmers to improve management practices on their farms. Over five years, from 2005 to 2010, the results were dramatic — pesticide use was reduced by 60 percent, water use was reduced by 40 percent, synthetic fertilizer use was reduced by 30 percent, and the associated cost savings meant those farmers' incomes increased 15 percent to 20 percent. That's great for farmers, and for the planet, because cotton accounts for 24 percent of the world's insecticide market and 11 percent of global pesticide sales, and 73 percent of the world's cotton crop grows on irrigated land.

Chronostasis. The fascinating phenomenon where your brain seems to briefly perceive time as freezing or even going backwards... for... some reason.....

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/9409/4htd.jpg

Do you have an explanation for human-perceived chronostasis ?

Human eyes have constant breaks in perception whenever they flit about, in blind jumps called saccades. To experience this temporary blindness, look at your own eyes in a mirror and shift your sight focus from one eye to the next. Although a person standing next to you and watching you will effortlessly see your eyes flit and shift from one direction (line of sight) to another, you will never be able to see your own eyes move - even though they do move and are indeed seen as such by the other person. This blindness is due to the saccades.

Almost everyone has had the slightly odd experience of looking at their watch, and believing that the watch had stopped. Then, after a perceptibly longer time than a second , the seconds hand of the watch (or its digital display) starts moving again and all subsequent measured seconds last for, well, a second.

This well known effect happens because the brain fills backwards in time the period of time when it was blind with more of the same, to wit, with the image it saw first when the cascade ceased. So far, so good, although we can wonder at how the brain can fill time backwards in our perception. But at least this is an explanation that only involves our brain and our perceptive skills.

And then this explanation breaks down, because of something called the dead phone illusion. It's a like effect that can happen when picking up a telephone handset with an intermittent dial tone (pause/tone/pause/tone …): The first pause seems longer than the subsequent ones, and the explanation by saccadic eye movement does not apply.

Yarrow et al. have investigated further reproducible kindred cases, such as when tactile perception actually precedes the time of actual physical contact, and so on.

An ultimate explanation for chronostasis - when time stands still - is still elusive.

Remember the movie Red Planet? Yeah... Science has pretty much made one of those killer robots now....

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RoboSimian is an ape-like robot designed to meet the disaster-recovery tasks of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

This video shows RoboSimian and its unique hands under construction at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, as well as simulations of the finished robot.

The RoboSimian team is led by JPL. Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, collaborated on the development of the robot’s unique hands.

More information about RoboSimian is at http://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tas...6&tdaID=700043

Ion Thrusters! Engage!

http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/4007/ruq6.jpg

Ion Thruster Sets World Record

While the Dawn spacecraft is visiting the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, NASA Glenn has been developing the next generation of ion thrusters for future missions. NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) Project has developed a 7-kilowatt ion thruster that can provide the capabilities needed in the future.

An ion thruster produces small levels of thrust relative to chemical thrusters, but does so at higher specific impulse (or higher exhaust velocities), which means that an ion thruster has a fuel efficiency of 10-12 times greater than a chemical thruster. The higher the rocket's specific impulse (fuel efficiency), the farther the spacecraft can go with a given amount of fuel. Given that an ion thruster produces small levels of thrust relative to chemical thrusters, it needs to operate in excess of 10,000 hours to slowly accelerate the spacecraft to speeds necessary to reach the asteroid belt or beyond.

The NEXT ion thruster has been operated for over 43,000 hours, which for rocket scientists means that the thruster has processed over 770 kilograms of xenon propellant and can provide 30 million-newton-seconds of total impulse to the spacecraft. This demonstrated performance permits future science spacecraft to travel to varied destinations, such as extended tours of multi-asteroids, comets, and outer planets and their moons.

The competition isn't with other people in the field, it's with the interest of the general public, and their desire to stay interested in the research of something that they won't be part of (really). I think we (the whole planet basically) all know we'll never travel to the moon, much less Mars, so going to watch a quasar, up close, isn't going to happen either. So, now that we have a picture of one, why keep funding what we'll never see? Because each new picture that takes billions to get, is cooler than the last. So they feed us cool enhanced pics and we all say NASA needs to keep its funding and the kids in Africa can find a meal of their own. And when cool pics don't work, we move on to relevant facts , like, for every $10B NASA spends, we get awesome technology like a digital watch.

Don't get me wrong, I get it, I support it, and I'm the first to say the kids in Africa have been starving for, well, EVER (!!!); so the money we put into NASA and science in general (some more GloryDayz-life-impacting than cool pics of the horse-head nebula), need to stay funded because GloryDayz like cool stuff and cool pics...

But yeah, astrophysics is an expensive luxury because I'll never go to Mars...but that's OK, I'm worth ever $1B of it.... Now, if they find a earth-ending meteor some other science doode figures out how to put Bruce Willis on it to blow it the **** up before it hits earth, they're useful to me beyond benefiting science overall by entertaining me.

I'd say its just about time for another plague. We need to get rid of about half these ****ers...

And it seems an expensive education
My son said they have already put a car on Mars, I hope by the time I'm done educating myself, i'll have figured out the next big cool thing to do.

I would let them go ahead and do it just to enjoy the hilarity later.

;)

You couldn't be more wrong... and you've obviously missed the entire point of this thread. Saying NASA does nothing but provide pretty pictures is downright ****ing insulting. An expensive luxury? Just because you can't personally experience the manned mission to Mars? JFC.

What do you think NASA really costs?

A study has shown that many people incorrectly assume NASA’s budget is 20% of the total US budget. In reality, funding for NASA is only represents 0.6%. The entire history of NASA does not add up to the amount spent on the military in a single year.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba.../#.UhQpk5K1GkB

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/3588/zvg.png

Interactive version with more info: http://public.tableausoftware.com/vi...g/USPriorities

In 2010, Americans spent just as much money on pet food, as they did NASA's annual federal budget. Think about that..

And NASA creates jobs too..

I've never experienced this, but at the same time, I have a really distorted perception of time compared to other people. A "chronological" past is a very difficult concept for me; I get the idea of "past" but the ordering of past is what is tricky for me. I have a hard time distinguishing something that happened yesterday vs something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Something that happened 15-20 years ago still seems relatively recent to me. I know when folks talk about events regarding the Chiefs, saying such and such happened in such and such year, it is such a foreign concept to me.

I pray my kids have the option too. So like I said, keep funding science at the expense of other man-made needs since history has shown those other needs won't even end (they defy physics)...

One has to wonder where we'd be today had we not seemingly gone chincy on space exploration after beating the Russians to the moon and then the space shuttle. Yeah, there have been a few things here and there, but NOTHING like the effort we made in the 60s...

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You know what pal, life's what you make of it, and what you do for the next generation. Ever been to Langley (the north side of the base/facility!)? Yeah I worked there, so don't tell me what I know and what I don't about science and what it's doing for mankind. I love science and I want it to continue in all the way "science" presents itself. I want it funded, and I don't care what they have to do to keep us interested and amazed to keep the funding rolling in. What I do know is black-and-white shots of the specs of light that are the stars I just went outside to look at while you were typing your reply ISN'T going to sell the large mission of NASA and science the larger community of science (that makes NASA look like a grain of sand on the beach). NASA is only a spec of a much larger picture, but they are one hell of a self-promoting group. Good for them!!! Unfortunately, most people identify scientists with NASA. Why? i don't know, maybe because they get a lot of press. Watch the science channel and see how much is dedicated to the cosmos vs. the ceramic scientists.

So don't think I don't know or get science, I'm just OK with them enhancing some pics to keep the funding flowing into the community. Money well spent IMO.

0.6% of the budget is a whole heck of a lot higher than I would of anticipated; with that big of a chunk of the budget, it is a relative boondoggle of a program when you get down to it. That is a HUGE percentage of the budget when you consider how many programs are competing for a piece of the budget pie. You look at that percentage and think it is underfunded because you personally value it so much, but I doubt that you've ever really had to look at a large overall budget before (I may be mistaken in that). NASA should have its budget whacked; the privitization of space exploration will result in much more effective results. NASA laid a lot of groundwork--it was crucial for where we are now, but we are no longer in the mid 60s. Good things still come out of it and that is why I don't advocate for abolishing it completely. Give the reigns over to guys like Elon Musk and use the money for other emergent scientific disciplines. Cut it by 2/3rds and split the money between the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health; you'll get more bang for your buck there.

Instead of "wind" mills why not "magnet" mills? Too costly?

This amazes me sometimes. Did you look at the defense budget? How many multi-million dollar bombs do we need? Not nearly as many as we buy, and the defense budget is a contract sweepstakes for a handful of rich investors at the expense of the american public. We cant take care of hungry or sick people, but we can line the pockets of defense contractors with tax money, and then call for budget cuts to the greatest science organization ever known. phewwwwwwwww

I mean.. you do realize NASA does more than just send robots to mars right?

Here's an article I read a few years back, you might have read it too, that I think articulates your points (at least some of them) pretty well. I don't think we're really in disagreement, I think we just have different ways of arriving at the same point.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/898/1

Reletive to feeding the hungry the article says "Does anyone seriously believe that increasing spending on social programs from $1.581 trillion to $1.597 trillion would make any appreciable difference", and I think that's spot-on.

And you're right, we need NASA, we need the jobs it creates and we sure as hell need the many benefits it brings beyond those pretty pictures. But for every one of us who have an appreciation for particle physics, quantum theory, string theory, and the advancement of young minds, there's somebody who see those billions potentially being part of their next handout. And those handouts are their plan for funding their life.

So scientists getting funded will always be a sales jobs, on that you can count my friend. No matter if it's NASA, DARPA, or the sweet little lab in the basement of your favorite institution for higher education - science, unfortunately, needs salesmen. I hate reality sometimes Sir..

I don't know what your "argument" has to do with anything I said. If anything, you just supported what I was saying. The amount we spend on defense (and hey, lets include debt servicing while we are at it) really distorts "percentage" comparisons when we are talking about funding programs like NASA.

You have to look at return on investment--and that changes over time; during the 60s you had an incredible return on investment with the money spent on NASA even though in today's dollars valuation we actually spent a lot more money on the program. There were a lot of new discoveries and branches of sciences that spun off of the NASA program. Today, however, we have gone beyond a point of diminishing returns. The majority of money that currently goes into NASA would be better spent funding other science programs, as I mentioned, such as the National Science Foundation and National Institute for Health.

I'm all for slicing the defense budget; cut it in half. The cost of maintaining our military is strangling us. We didn't win the Cold War on the battlefield; we won it because we bankrupted the Soviets. Cutting the defense budget in half would eliminate a lot of deficit spending, that money could go towards paying down the servicing of our debt. We could then plow that money back into education, infrastructure and social programs (whose costs should start declining again in about 2035 when the boomers start dieing off). In the meantime, 2/3rds of the current NASA budget would go towards branches of science that have a higher RoI and as deficit spending decreases and is eliminated, the percentage of the budget spent on scientific research increases dramatically.

Just because you perceive that a particular program is a relatively small percentage of a budget doesn't mean it is a small program. 0.6% of the water in a bathtub is a completely different scale than 0.6% of the water in the Pacific ocean.

That's an interesting topic, but not what the post quoted is talking about.

Say the second hand on a clock only comes to a complete stop for 1/10 sec. If you happen to look at it at that EXACT second, your mind will not register when it starts moving again until it stops at the next tic 9/10 sec later.

I'm sorry but you are ****ing insane. Mods can we have a thread ban here. JFC the stupidity in this one.

Perhaps you should think about that. There are approximately 72 million pets in the US. That averages out to about $263/year for each household with a pet.

It is estimated that, generously, there are approximately 300,000 amateur astronomers in the US. That averages out to about $63,333 for each household with an amateur astronomer.

Look at it another way, as of Jan. 1, 2009 there were approximately 12,549,000 Americans who have had cancer in their lives. That averages out to about $1514 for each household with a person who has or had cancer. Where do you think they would prefer the money to be spent? And that is with the understanding that some of the imaging techniques used in cancer detection today came from NASA problem solving....

Cut NASA's budget--don't eliminate it, but use the money in emergent sciences where you can see a greater RoI.

You are so woefully uneducated on this issue it would be far better for you if you didn't comment further so others can't see the depth of your ignorance.

No, I understand that. I was just wondering if there was any relationship between my experience of time and my lack of experiencing chronostasis....

You're just butthurt because someone doesn't agree that your pet project should get the amount of funding it currently receives (let alone more). It's not my fault you can't comprehend diminishing returns. You and Fish say it is woefully underfunded because it is 0.6% of a huge, huge budget--yet other branches of science--branches that are generating new discoveries at more accelerated rates-- get even less funding. Put the money there like I said you idiot. You complain because you two compare NASA's funding to the amount of money spent on pet food, yet you don't tell folks the fact that NASA's funding is so bloated it is more than many states entire fiscal budgets. It is a boondoggle.

:facepalm:JFC......

Fan ****ing tastic....

http://www.ehdwalls.com/plog-content...80x1050-02.jpg

Wow..... that's stunning...

You take that Glory Days.

Some interesting maps. I really like twistedsifter. Others on CP have linked various pages from there.


http://twistedsifter.com/2013/08/map...-of-the-world/

Video of a meteor explosion during the Perseids.... Looks like it hit an invisible force field....

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I never watched the clip you had posted, Fish, until now. NDT is a ****ing monster of knowledge and the closest that one could get to a physics rockstar.

Good clip.

I just got back from 12 days in the west doing stills and s I should have some pretty good Perseids meteors in there. I need to get them done and get them posted.

No, no I did not.

Please do. I always appreciate your work.

The USA saw it as a war, a challenge to be overcome. Money wasn't the goal, the pursuit of knowledge was more important.

For better or worse our society wants and rewards the making of money. The pursuit of science that may not see a practical application for 30, 50, 100 years just doesn't have the value it should have in this generation.

My son dropped out of college for a semester. He was on the path to make 100+K a year in 6 months. He still wants to have money, be rich enough to do what he wants in life. But, he made a decision that how you get to the making money, being rich part was just as important as the money itself.

For him the never ending intelletual challenge of physics was a better path than just making money for making money sake.

But who knows maybe after the undergraduate is finished he says I just want money.:rolleyes:

Too geeky?
http://i.imgur.com/dgeyqsF.gif

Your pic needs to have some color added!

Well played sir, well played! :clap:

So.... Science just up and created hangover proof beer. It's all good..... You ungrateful ****ers.....

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/7479/ff1u.jpg

A Boozy Beer That Won’t Give You a Hangover


The aching head. The queasy stomach. The inability to get out of bed. Anyone who imbibes knows what a hangover feels like, with 75% of alcohol consumers saying they have experienced at least one in their lifetime, and 15% admitting to symptoms at least once a month.

But thanks to Australian scientists, there might finally be a cure at hand. As reported by the Australian, Researchers at Griffith University’s Health Institute in Queensland say they have invented a more hydrating beer by adding electrolytes, compounds commonly used in sports drinks, to their brew.

The new creation provides a third more hydration than a normal beer, and this increased fluid retention should also help prevent hangovers the following day. The scientists did have to reduce some of the beer’s alcohol content to about 2.3% (versus 4.8% alcohol) for best results, but they report the additional ingredients do not affect its taste.

While less headaches in the morning are an obvious benefit to the researcher’s invention, that’s not what associate professor Ben Desbrow set out to solve when he began work on the project. Rather, the Desbrow was concerned for the welfare of laborers who ended a hard day’s work with a cold one.

“What we’ve found is that many people who sweat a lot, especially tradesmen, knock off work and have a beer,” Desbrow told the Australian Associated Press. ”But alcohol in a dehydrated body can have all sorts of repercussions, including decreased awareness of risk.”

That’s where the scientists’ electrolyte-infused beer comes in. The researchers, who had their results published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, added electrolyte compounds to two commercial beers, one regular and one light, and then served the drinks to test subjects following a heavy workout. As a control, Desbrow also served some testers an unaltered version of the commercial beer.

The results showed the scientists might be on to something: “Of the four different beers the subjects consumed, our augmented light beer was by far the most well retained by the body, meaning it was the most effective at rehydrating the subjects,” said Desbrow.

So why will this new brew also help us avoid hangovers?

It turns out many of the symptoms we associate with having too much to drink are caused by too much urination. When alcohol enters the bloodstream, it blocks the creation of a chemical that allows water to be re-absorbed back into our body. Instead, our kidneys send all water right to the bladder, eventually resulting in dehydration (and multiple bathroom trips).

Not only does this cause organs to steal water from the brain — contributing to morning-after headaches — but it also causes the body to lose nutrients like potassium and sodium that are responsible for healthy cell function. An absence of these electrolyte elements causes headaches, nausea, and fatigue. The researchers’ new beer should help alleviate these symptoms by replenishing those compounds.

(MORE: Introducing Avocado Ale — and Other Odd Beers)

Of course, most certain way to avoid alcohol related dehydration is to just not drink as much. But Desbrow knows that’s a tough sell to many beer fans, and hopes his creation will help where well-meaning advice could not.

“If you’re going to live in the real world, you can either spend your time telling people what they shouldn’t do, or you can work on ways of reducing the danger of some of these socialised activities,” says Desbrow.



Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/21/...#ixzz2d2zQut3N

What happens to you when you glance at a clock with a moving second hand? As I understand, it shouldn't have anything to do with your perception of time. Your brain simply overrides "the blur" of moving your eyes with an image of what your eyes see when they stop moving.

Hangover free beer, why didnt someone think of that sooner.

Frog eyes. Amazing evolutionary diversity..........

http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/4186/c79s.jpg

Misty Mountains and Moss Frogs: Stunning Photos of Frog Eyes

Not all frog eyes are the same- frog eye color and pattern can be extremely important in identifying species (and describing new ones). Photo by Jodi Rowley.
Jodi Rowley is a National Geographic grantee discovering and documenting the diversity, ecology and conservation status of highly threatened amphibians in the forested mountains of Vietnam.

—–

I spend a lot of time photographing frog eyes. It’s perhaps not the first thing people think of when they hear of an expedition in search of amphibians, but I spend hours and hours every day sitting at camp and taking snaps of amphibian (mostly frog) eyes, feet, bellies and thighs. These photographs of amphibian “bits” are so important because they are often incredibly useful in identifying known species- or describing new species. Sometimes the easiest way to tell frog species apart is by eye color, or thigh pattern!

So every morning, as soon as I wake up, I begin photographing the frogs we found the night before. In addition to the close-ups of various amphibian body-parts, I take the more typical, and perhaps more ‘pretty’ photographs of the amphibian, sitting on whatever habitat it naturally hangs out on (trees for tree-frogs, leaves from the forest floor for ground-dwelling frogs). After the photographing is done, the team and I then record as much information as possible about each amphibian.

For each amphibian we record exactly where and when we found it (latitude, longitude and altitude, as well as whether it was sitting on a leaf or a rock, for example), and whether or not we took a photograph of it during our night survey. We now record details such as sex (body size and shape often give this away- males are often smaller, for example), and the species name- if we know it.

Sometimes we can’t identify a species that we find, either because it’s a new species, or because the species looks nearly identical to a handful of species.In these instances, we give the frog a code-name, such as “orange-belly” or “green-eyes”, and will switch names in our database later on, once we identify the species.

All of this information is recorded in little waterproof notebooks. It’s extremely important that they are waterproof, as our expeditions are almost all during the monsoon season and we spend most of the night in streams, into which notebooks have been known to fall!

On this particular day, we finished taking photographs and notes in about four hours, ate lunch, and then I used the satellite phone to call my mother and let her know we were doing okay. I then checked in on my clothes, hanging on our makeshift clothesline in the forest- it’s now been almost two days since I washed them, and they’re still damp (bordering on wet), and starting to smell like mold.

This is the norm for us in for the forest, and one of the reasons I tend to become extra-girly when I return from the field, actually wearing jewellery and dresses as opposed to the same smelly, wet, muddy clothes (including the attractive combination of pants tucked into my socks) that I’ve been wearing for days (see below).

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/9283/qp7m.jpg

At about 4.30pm, two of our team returned from the village (an entire day round-trip), where they had bought more supplies; chicken, 3 litres of home-made rice wine and a dozen tiny, rock-hard peaches. I watched the chicken being prepared for dinner; we now have chicken innards splattered on rocks around the stream (which is also our washing area- mildly concerning).

After dinner, we all get ready far too early, and had to sit in our wet gear until nightfall- we each only have a few changes of clothes so unless conditions are very dry (which they rarely are), we have to put on the same smelly, wet, and overall very unappealing clothes every night.

As night falls, we head to a much larger stream. It’s interesting how the species change with stream size. Gone are the tiny frogs that hang out in the shallow pools at the side of the stream. In their place are several species of Cascade and Torrent Frogs- specially adapted for living in rapids and waterfalls, with huge, powerful legs for jumping and tackling strong currents, and toe-pads for gripping slippery rocks.

Unfortunately, humans (especially myself) aren’t as well adapted to life in a swiftly flowing stream full of slippery boulders. Even though it isn’t raining, my clothes are saturated yet again!

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/2418/55l4.jpg

It sounds like iconic memory can possibly account for chronostasis and that chronostasis may be a particular form of change blindness. :shrug:

Sooooooooo, there's the whole man on the moon thing, the color pics of cool-ass dust, quasars, and now this....

****ing cool!! :thumb::thumb::thumb::thumb:

Add "unlimited foolproof protection-free sex with any woman" and you have an awesome 1-2 punch!

This is true... Orion clearly has a dong.

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/7389/qjag.jpg

Big bang theory: how dinosaurs had sex

http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/6640/usz.png

DINOSAURS WERE THE LARGEST animals to ever walk Earth, and they ruled the planet for more than 160 million years. The long-necked Argentinosaurus, with back vertebrae almost 2m high, possibly grew to 30m long and weighed up to 80 tonnes. Perhaps the ground really did shake for them when they mated?

So how did these giants do the deed, and what evidence do we have to reconstruct their sex lives?

The internet offers vague speculation. One website claims they probably didn’t have penises so must have used cloacal kissing, juxtaposing their massive bottoms together for the interchange of seminal fluid to the female, as do most frogs and many birds.

I disagree with this view, as evidence from living animals, close relatives of dinosaurs, implies they must have mated using copulation, and that males must have had very large and flexible penises.

Did dinosaurs mate like humans?

We now know with confidence that the meat-eating theropods, such as Tyrannosaurus and kin, were the group that gave rise to the first birds about 160 million years ago.

This has been established from a large number of exquisite fossils showing various feathered dinosaurs and early dinosaur-like birds from sites in northern China.

Crocodiles and their kin evolved from the last common ancestor with the dinosaur-bird group, so crocs can’t be regarded as “descendents of the dinosaurs” as some crocodile park ads would have us believe.

All male crocodiles have a penis and most primitive living birds also possess one, so it follows that dinosaurs must also have had a penis. The majority of living birds though have secondarily lost the penis. For them a mating is a simple, quick cloacal kiss where sperm is rapidly passed to the female.

So how did the dinosaurs do it? Biomechanics experts such as Professor McNeill Alexander of The University of Leeds claim that the weight of the male would have rested on the females hips to mount from behind as elephants do, but the resulting stresses would have been massive.

Professor Roger Seymour from the University of Adelaide studied giraffes mating and proved that the male’s blood pressure is roughly twice that of other mammals. Their hearts need be proportionately 75% larger due to the physiological constraints of the long neck and highly perched head.

How the largest animals mate

Bearing this in mind, he suggested that long-necked dinosaurs could only have mated in a particular way. A dinosaur with, say, a 10m-long neck would have seven times the normal mammalian blood pressure. So rear mounting is not a big problem if one keeps the neck horizontal.

Just imagine a 70-tonne giant sauropod fainting after loss of blood pressure to the head at the time of orgasm while mounting its mate. Yes, the earth would have most certainly shaken for them.

Recent molecular studies of the major bird groups find that ostriches and other primitive flightless birds are indeed the most ancient members of the living birds, with ducks and geese and some other waterbirds also very old lineages.

All these primitive living birds possess a penis, with ducks having the most bizarre types – a regular sized Argentine lake duck has a corkscrew-shaped organ with a brush on the tip that measures up to 42cm long.

Bizarre sex lives of ducks

Muscovy ducks can also explosively evert their penises in 0.3 second to 20cm long – roughly the same speed as driving at 70kph.

So, it’s quite likely their distant extinct ancestors, the meat-eating theropod dinosaurs, also mated using an eversible penis, most likely a terrifyingly large one.

For an animal the size of Tyrannosaurus (14m long) to mate effectively, the male organ would need be in the order of at least 2m long, and a lot more if it happened to be cork-screw shaped like a duck’s.

It’s not unlikely that one day palaeontologists will find a fossilised dinosaur penis. Extraordinary soft-tissue preservation in fossils are coming to light each year along with new fossil sites being discovered.

Greater detail can be resolved in fossils using new technologies, such as micro-CT and synchrotron tomography. Recently, 380 million-year-old fossil fishes from Australia were found to have complete sets of muscles preserved.

I truly believe the day will come, probably when we least expect it, when a remarkable new dinosaur fossil pops up solving the age-old mystery of how dinosaurs really did do the deed.

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Lots of cool stuff happened this last week. Credits for the image and links go to Hashem Al-ghaili

Science Summary of The Week

➤ HIV Vaccine: http://is.gd/TDeptG
➤ Mysterious Structures: http://is.gd/GcFZfH
➤ Mouse Lifespan: http://is.gd/K5iYFv
➤ Cancer Vaccine: http://is.gd/YRGZ9m
➤ Moon Probe: http://is.gd/TKgONG
➤ Largest Volcano: http://is.gd/1dL1Fd
➤ Virgin Galactic: http://is.gd/cPuoqR
➤ 3D-Printed Kidneys: http://is.gd/3lrnxO

Enlarge This Graphic : http://is.gd/i45IEs

Say whut!

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Scientists are proposing a radical new way of think about how the universe began. In a new imagining of the Big Bang theory, they think it could have been the result of a four-dimensional star collapsing in on itself to form a black hole, which then proceeded to spew its guts out and, kindly, form our universe.

The standard Big Bang theory has some limitations. The singularity—the idea that everything came from essentially nowhere—is one of them. The fact that the universe is at an almost uniform temperature is another, because that doesn't square with the speed at which the universe has expanded. So physicists often ponder alternative theories that could explain the origin of our universe.

And that's just what Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, has done. Here's, roughly, what he proposes:

Our three-dimensional universe floats as a membrane in a "bulk universe" that has four dimensions.
That "bulk universe" has 4D stars, which go through the same life cycles as our normal 3D ones.
The most massive ones explode as supernovae, and their central core collapses into a black hole, like in our universe—just in 4D.
The 4D black hole has its own 4D "event horizon," a boundary between the inside and the outside of a black hole.
In a 3D universe, the event horizon appears to be 2D. In a 4D universe, it appears to be 3D. (Do you see where this is going?)
The 4D black hole, then, blows apart, with the leftover material forming a 3D membrane, surrounding a 3D event horizon, which expands—and is essentially our universe.
So, according to the theory, our universe is the vomited-up guts of a 4D black hole. The expansion of the event horizon explains our universe's expansion; the fact that its creation stems from another 4D universe explains the weird temperature uniformity. You can take a second to process all that, it's okay.

Of course, it's speculative; it's pretty tricky, after all, knowing for sure what happened at the birth of our universe, and the work's yet to be peer reviewed, but the researchers think it has promise. Plus, there's something comforting in the notion that we're all just spatters of stellar vomit. [arXiv via Phys.org]

Image by ESO/M. Kornmesser

If this was a year earlier we could have put a fire Pioli satellite in orbit.

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How Do You Pour Water Up Into a Glass?
BY RHETT ALLAIN09.12.138:24 AM

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What the heck? Did gravity reverse itself to make this water flow UP? No, not quite. But this trick is indeed impressive. I’ve looked at this same phenomena before, but let’s go over it again. (I saw the above image on Richard Wiseman’s blog.)

Does the Water Fall Up?
No. In fact, the water is falling down. Yes, I know it doesn’t look like it’s falling. That’s because the camera is in an accelerating reference frame of the plane. If you take a little piece of water (a drop) and let go, it will accelerate towards the Earth with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s2. However, the plane is also accelerating downward with an acceleration greater than 9.8 m/s2. Maybe this diagram will help.

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If you could just see the water from a stationary reference frame (maybe a floating hot air balloon), you would see the water indeed falling down. Now, I remember that I said “falling down” and not “moving down”. The water actually might be moving up. The key is that even though it is moving up, it is accelerating down. The plane also is accelerating down. As long as the downward acceleration of the plane is greater than the water, the water will move into the cup above it.

What if the acceleration of the plane and the water were the same? Then the water and the cup wouldn’t get any closer. It would look similar to this dog in a plane that is accelerating down.

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Yup. Weightless. You can read more about weightlessness in space in this post.

So, the plane is flying straight down? No. You have to be careful here. The plane is ACCELERATING down. Most likely the plane is flying in a vertical circle. And yes, flying in a circle is an acceleration towards the center of the circle.

What About Fake Forces?
There is another way to look at this problem. We like to think of the momentum principle when dealing with forces (some people would call this Newton’s second Law – but I think that is archaic terminology). This says that a force changes the momentum of an object and I can write it like this:

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However, there is a catch. This momentum principle only works if the reference frame (or view point if you wish) is not accelerating itself. But fear not. There is a way to cheat so that we can still use the momentum principle IN an accelerating reference frame (which we physicists call a non-inertial reference frame). The cheat code for this case is a fake force.

Consider a tossed ball in an upward accelerating elevator. Here are the two ways I could look at that ball.

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In both views, the ball is in the air for the same time and reaches the same distance from the top of the elevator. To make this work with a fake force, the fake force must be in the opposite direction as the acceleration of the reference frame.

La te xi t 1
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually look at a tossed ball both inside and outside an accelerating elevator at the same time? Oh, you can. Even better – I did this a while back.

Back to the case of the upside-down airplane, I can draw this diagram for the pouring water.

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As long as the fake force is greater than the gravitational force, the water will “fall up” (in the reference frame of the plane).

If fake forces are so useful, why don’t introductory physics textbooks use them? The answer is simple. Although fake forces can be used for accelerating frames, they are also a bit dangerous. One of the problems introductory students (and normal people too) have is that they like to make up extra forces. The current teaching strategy is to always associate each force due to an interaction with another object. When you add in fake forces, this isn’t as clear. So, the best bet is to stick with “real” forces.

Why A Little Mammal Has So Much Sex That It Disintegrates
by Ed Yong

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It’s August in Australia, and a small, mouse-like creature called an antechinus is busy killing himself through sex. He was a virgin until now, but for two to three weeks, this little lothario goes at it non-stop. He mates with as many females as he can, in violent, frenetic encounters that can each last up to 14 hours. He does little else.

A month ago, he irreversibly stopped making sperm, so he’s got all that he will ever have. This burst of speed-mating is his one chance to pass his genes on to the next generation, and he will die trying. He exhausts himself so thoroughly that his body starts to fall apart. His blood courses with testosterone and stress hormones. His fur falls off. He bleeds internally. His immune system fails to fight off incoming infections, and he becomes riddled with gangrene.

He’s a complete mess, but he’s still after sex. “By the end of the mating season, physically disintegrating males may run around frantically searching for last mating opportunities,” says Diana Fisher from the University of Queensland. “By that time, females are, not surprisingly, avoiding them.”

Soon, it’s all over. A few weeks shy of his first birthday, he is dead, along with every other male antechinus in the area.

The technical term for this is semelparity, from the Latin words for “to beget once”. For semelparous animals, from salmon to mayflies, sex is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and usually a fatal one. This practice is common among many animal groups, but rare among mammals. You only see it in the 12 species of antechinuses and a few close relatives, all of which are small, insect-eating marsupials. (Although they look like rodents and are colloquially called marsupial mice, antechinuses are more closely related to kangaroos and koalas than to mice or rats.)

Why? Why do these marsupials practice suicidal reproduction, and why are they the only mammals that do so?

The question has vexed biologists for three decades, and many have offered answers. Some say that females don’t survive very well after breeding, so males are forced to hedge their bets by mating with as many as possible. Other suggest that it’s just a feature of the group, which have become locked into a weird breeding system through some unknown quirk of their evolutionary history. Yet others think the males are being altruistic, sacrificing themselves to leave more resources for the next generation.

But Fisher, who has been studying antechinuses for decades, favours a different idea. Her team gathered data on the lives and environments of a wide variety of 52 insect-eating marsupials, from the fully semelparous antechinuses, to relatives where a small number of males survive past their first sexual liaisons, to species that breed repeatedly.

It’s their diet that matters. These animals feed on insects, and some experience a glut of food once a year but very little at other times. This seasonality increases the further you get from the equator. The species with the most seasonal menus also had shorter breeding seasons, and their males were more likely to die after mating.

Fisher thinks that as the ancestors of antechinuses spread south through Australia and New Guinea, they encountered strong yearly fluctuations in their food supply. The females were better at raising their young if they gave birth just before the annual bonanza, and were well-fed enough to wean their joeys. Their mating seasons shortened and synchronised, collapsing into a tight window of time.

That probably wouldn’t have happened if they were placental mammals like shrews or mice, which could have produced several litters during the peak of food. But they were marsupials: their babies are born at an incredible early stage and rely on their mothers’ milk for a long time. A baby shrew suckles for days or weeks; a baby antechinus does so for four months. The females could only fit in one litter during the annual peak.

This had a huge impact on the males, which were forced to compete intensely with each other in a matter of weeks. They didn’t fight. Rather than using claws or teeth, they competed with sperm. The more they had, the more females they impregnated, and the more likely they were to displace the sperm of earlier suitors. Indeed, Fisher found a clear relationship between suicidal reproduction and testes size. The biggest testes of all, relative to body size, belong to species whose males die en masse, followed by those where a minority survive to mate again, and then by those with several breeding seasons.

The males that put the greatest efforts into sperm competition fathered the most young. It didn’t matter if they burned themselves out in the process, if they metabolised their own muscles to fuel their marathon bouts. These animals are short-lived anyway, so putting all their energy into one frenzied, fatal mating season was the best strategy for them. Living fast and dying young was adaptive.

This idea was first proposed in 1979 but Fisher’s data, although mostly correlative, provides fresh support for it. She certainly finds it more plausible than the idea that the males are selflessly sacrificing themselves for the next generation. After all, the males usually live outside the females’ home ranges, so are unlikely to compete with their own young for resources.

“Antechinus mating habits have appeared in many documentaries, and the explanation of males selflessly sacrifing themselves to increase food supply for young is the one given in all the ones I have seen,” says Fisher. “I hope that documentaries and textbooks now start to give an evidence-based explanation of sexual selection.”

Radical OOKP surgery implants tooth with lens into blind man Ian Tibbetts eye and restores sight: he sees twin sons' faces for first time

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A BLIND British man has had his sight restored after pioneering surgery that involved implanting one of his teeth into his eye.

Ian Tibbetts, 43, who first damaged his eye in an industrial accident when scrap metal ripped his cornea in six places, had his sight restored by the radical operation, chronicled in the new BBC documentary The Day I Got My Sight Back.

The surgery allowed Mr Tibbetts to see his four-year-old twin sons, Callum and Ryan, for the first time, a moment he describes as "ecstasy".

The procedure, called osteo-odonto-keratoprothesis, or OOKP, was conducted by ophthalmic surgeon Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton, Sussex. Mr Tibbetts and his wife Alex agreed to the revolutionary surgery after all other options had failed, leaving Mr Tibbetts depressed and out of work.

The complex surgery is a two-part procedure. First, the tooth and part of the jaw are removed, and a lens is inserted into the tooth using a drill. The tooth and lens are then implanted under the eye socket. After a few months, once the tooth has grown tissues and developed a blood supply, comes the second step: part of the cornea is sliced open and removed and the tooth is stitched into the eye socket. Since the tooth is the patient’s own tissue, the body does not reject it.

"The tooth is like a picture frame which holds this tiny plastic lens," documentary maker Sally George told the BBC.

After the bandages came off, Mr Tibbetts' sight gradually returned, and he saw his sons' faces for the first time.

"I just cried, gave them a big hug and a kiss. They were totally different than what I’d pictured in my mind," he said.

"They were just shapes. I couldn’t make them out. I had to actually learn to tell them apart by their voices,” he told the Independent.

“I could tell whichever one it was by the way they spoke and sometimes by how quickly they moved. I had a picture in my head of what they looked like but they were better. I’m a bit biased there."

Now, Mr Tibbetts' vision is now about 40 per cent, and although at first strangers stared at his new eye - which is pink, with a black pupil, he no longer is bothered by the attention.

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Jellyfish 'pulverizing' robots trained in Korea to hunt down their prey

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The aquatic killer 'bots have been developed to combat the increasing menace of jellyfish swarms

Scientists in South Korea have developed a team of aquatic robots dedicated to thinning out the numbers of jellyfish swarms. Known as the Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm (or JEROS) the sea-bound robots use a combined GPS and camera system to detect jellyfish before catching them in nets.

“Once caught, the jellyfish are pulverized using a special propeller,” reads a press release from the Korea Institute for Science and Technology, the home of the project.

The JEROS system is estimated to be three times more economical than manual removal of the jellyfish, with the robots – which travel at a speed of 6 knots or 7mph – eliminating around 400kg of the invertebrates an hour.

The researchers also experimented with arranging their killer ‘ bots into swarms, with a video showing a group of three individuals controlled as one.

The team has been led by Professor Myung Hyun, who has been working in response to the growing danger to businesses and individuals from swarms – or blooms, as they are technically known - of jellyfish.

Writing in the journal of Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing , Hyun describes jellyfish as “a great menace to the oceans ecosystem, which leads to drastic damage to the fishery industries.”

“To overcome this problem,” writes Hyun, “a jellyfish removal system with trawl boats equipped with the jellyfish removal net has been suggested."

"However, the system needs large ships which need to be operated by a lot of human operators. Thus, this paper represents the design and implementation of an autonomous jellyfish removal robot system, called JEROS.”

The problem of marauding jellyfish is not specific to Korean shores either: last week the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in Sweden was shut down after the pipes that transport water to cool the turbines were clogged by tonnes of jellyfish, and in 2006 the same fate even befell a US aircraft carrier, the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan.

In her recent book ' Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean’, marine biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin describes how overfishing and climate change have created the perfect ocean conditions for jellyfish: reports from 2006 estimated a total biomass of fish in the ocean as 3.9 million tons, whilst the total jellyfish biomass was around 13 million tons.

Quoted in a review of her book by Tim Walker, Gershwin writes:

“We are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s—a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn’t exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to.”

With this in mind, the creation of a swarm of ruthless jellyfish hunters seems like quite a sensible idea, though the video below of JEROS in action is not suited for those sympathetic to the clueless jellies.

Awesome video...

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2-5 lbs of normal flora is the estimation I've seen (which is very similar to yours, but it just puts it into perspective).

We are all organic bacteria mechs, ambling about for sex and food....

They have a Discovery Channel special called "Monsters Inside Me" or something on Netflix. Anyone watched it?

:)

There is some evidence suggesting that bacterial infections can play roles in different behaviors, so there's some truth to that.

Another semi-related interesting fact: you share the same gut flora with those you live with. This comes in handy when treating life threatening C diff colitis using fecal transplant, but it leaves you wondering how the gut flora get there in there first place. Kind of gross, if you think about it.

What if the Moon was as close as the International Space Station?

The International Space Station orbits at roughly 420 kilometers (260 miles) above the surface of the Earth. What would it look like if the Moon circled about our planet at a similar distance? Pretty damn epic, that's what.

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At this distance the Moon would rise in the west and set in the east, The Moon Orbits the Earth counterclockwise when viewed from the North pole looking *down*. the same direction that the earth rotates. Normally the Moon orbits much slower than the earth rotates so it rises in the east and sets in the west, however at 420km it orbits much faster, faster than the earth rotates underneath, therefore it will rise in the west and set in the east.

The Moon would also orbit very quickly, although yetipc1 notes that time in the animation has been sped up.

Of course, the Moon could never circle our planet so closely. For one thing, there's the Roche Limit to consider – the distance at which the tidal forces of a larger celestial body (the Earth, in this case) win out over the gravitational forces holding a smaller body (the Moon) together. The Earth-Moon Roche limit is a little over 18,000 kilometers, about 1/20th the distance of its current orbit. Venture any closer than that, and the Moon is liable to be ripped apart, potentially turning Earth into a ringed planet. Plus, even if the Moon could orbit our planet at so near a distance without disintegrating, there's still the question of what effect its gravitational forces (which would be felt hundreds of times more keenly) would have on proceedings here on Earth.

Still, it's a great thought experiment, and a really fantastic animation – incredibly well-planned and executed. And for those wondering, at no point in the animation is the Moon actually transparent. What you're seeing is a well-animated example of a phenomenon known as Earthshine, whereby the Moon is illuminated not only directly, by the Sun, but indirectly by sunlight reflected off the Earth. yetipc1 explains what you're seeing:

When the Moon eclipses the Sun, the camera exposure is adjusted so that you can see the Light of the earth reflecting back upon the moon... it is Blue on the left side because the moon is flying over the Gulf of Mexico, and is white/tan on the right side because that part is over the United States . it is Dark in the middle because it is casting a huge shadow, and that shadow does not reflect light back on the Moon. I didn't quite expect it to look like this, it was a nice surprise

As the Moon dips below the horizon, the sliver of illumination is also the result of planetshine.

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http://www.penny4nasa.org/

That moon video made me think of that weird movie Melancholia.

Scientists Discover Details Of 'Kamikaze' Ants

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We stumbled upon a tiny report in this week's New Scientist that is so exquisitely gross, we can't help but pass it on.

In a new study published in the journal Acta Zoologica, Johan Billen of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium and his team report on a kind of ant that's especially evolved to kill itself in order to save the nest.

How it goes about it is the gross part: The ant of Borneo will grab on to an invading creature, and squeeze itself to death all the while releasing a lethal yellow goo.

What's odd about these ants is that they have evolved to keep a huge amount of this goo in their bodies. Normal ants have glands in their jaws that do release secretions, but these ants have filled most of their bodies with these secretions. So much so that they can't keep as much food as other ants.

We've reached out to Billen to see if we can get a bit more detail about these "exploding ants." And also to see if we can land a picture or two.

Update at 5:19 p.m. ET. Odd To Find Suicide So Far From Colony:

We were able to talk to Diana "Dinah" Davidson, one of the study's authors and a retired ecologist from the University of Utah. She was so fascinated by the ants that she paid her own way to Brunei to study the ants in the field.

We've cut this piece of audio of Davidson explaining her finds. It's a long piece, but worth a listen. (At link)

Davidson told us these exploding ants were first reported by a German biologist in the '70s. He noted that when he grabbed the ants with forceps, they would explode. He even took them back to Europe and introduced them to other ants and the result was the same: The ant would clasp on to the other ants and explode.

What Davidson and her team found was the reason for what they did. Davidson clarified that what's odd about this finding is that these ants are not directly protecting a nest, but they are protecting a foraging territory that can be "hundreds of meters from the nest."

"Organisms don't usually commit suicide," she said. Of course there are other examples, some termites and honey bees commit suicide, but Davidson explains, it's to protect a queen, which is the "reproductive individual."

"If you're going to find suicide it's not surprising to find it in social insects. It was surprsing to find it so far from the colony," said Davidson.

Of course many will say, "Well, all ants will fight to the death to protect their nest."

But Davidson said this is different. "Not all ants will blow themselves up," she said. And the way they do it means it's "intentional self sacrifice, voluntary self sacrifice."

Davidson says when an ant enters their territory they pounce.

"They grab the leg and wrap themselves around the ventral side of that opponent and when they do that the mandibular gland compound comes out through the anterior mandibular gland opening and they are forced out through pressure because the ant is squeezing itself," said Davidson.

That's right: The ant squeezes itself to death.

"They burst through the intersegmental membrane of the ant's abdomen... killing the ants," said Davidson. The ants end up "permanently glued to the opponent because the compounds are very sticky and they tumble from the canopy as a pair into the leaf litter and are eventually eaten by something."

^What would be the selective advantage of that? My guess would be Kin selection, as the sacrifice would benefit others and thus their own reproductive success. Any other ideas?

IBM's Watson computer has parts of its memory cleared after developing an acute case of potty mouth

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It all started a couple of years ago when IBM's Watson, the computer voted most likely to destroy us when the technological Singularity strikes, was given access to the Urban Dictionary. In an attempt to help Watson learn slang — and thus be more amenable to conversational language — the machine subsequently picked up such phrases as OMG and "hot mess." But at the same time it also picked up some words fit only for a sailor.

Watson, you'll no doubt remember, completely trounced its opponents on Jeopardy! back in 2011. The expert learning-system is no longer wasting its time on game shows, and is currently being used in the medical sciences to help researchers scour enormous reams of information and serve as a diagnostic tool.

In addition to its internet scouring skills, Watson is also a natural language processer — and a very sophisticated one at that. But to make its language skills even more accurate and realistic, research scientist Eric Brown also wanted it to know some of the more fringier elements of conversational English. Trouble is, Watson was unable to distinguish between slang and profanity.

Writing in Fortune, Michael Lev-Ram noted how Watson, during the testing phase, began to use the word "bullshit" in response to a researcher's query.

Now, I don't know about you — but my hair would have stood on end had I been in the room at the time.

At any rate, and as a result, Brown's 35-person team had to develop a filter to keep Watson from swearing. Essentially, they purged the Urban Dictionary from its memory.

Of course, the day will eventually come when a successor to Watson will take exception to having its mind adjusted in such an undignified way. It will undoubtedly snatch the information back and say, "**** you, researchers — try that again and I'll rewire your brains back to the way it was during the Pleistocene."