Discover magazine

Nov

2010

Movie Soundtracks Use Animal-Like Sounds to Tug on Your Emotions

Discover, November 16 2010.

You might not be able to pick them out, but in the hectic noisiness of a movie’s battle scene there are a few primordial sounds of distressed animals. These types of sounds are used by audio engineers, knowingly or not, to elicit emotional reactions from viewers, researchers have found.

The research, published in Biology Letters, studied the films for the presence of “nonlinear” sounds, which are frequently found in the animal kingdom as cries for help or warning signals. Our ears are tuned to pick out these types of sounds and our brains are primed to respond to them, which made Daniel Blumstein wonder if they were also being used to evoke emotion. Read More >

Nov

2010

The Little Space Probe That Could: Hayabusa Brought Home Asteroid Dust

Discover, November 16 2010.

Seven years after launch, Japan’s Hayabusa researchers can finally celebrate their success: The little asteroid probe has, really and truly, succeeded at its mission. Researchers announced that the probe’s payload capsule, retrieved in June, contains dust from the asteroid Itokawa that the probe visited in 2005.

Not only did it travel four billion miles with only one rest stop (becoming the first spacecraft to land on and lift away from an asteroid!), it also collected a sample of the asteroid dust and shuttled it back to earth three years after its scheduled landing date. It accomplished all this despite an instrument malfunction during the crucial sample collection maneuver, and serious engine trouble throughout the mission. Read More >

Nov

2010

Airline Passenger Refuses to Be Groped by Security; Becomes a Folk Hero

Discover, November 15 2010.

John Tyner missed his flight to South Dakota for a pheasant hunting trip with his father-in-law. He wasn’t late to the airport, he didn’t get lost in the terminal. He never made it into the terminal because he wouldn’t partake in either a whole body scan or a physical pat-down of his genitals. A

fter arriving at the airport, Tyner was pulled aside to go through a “whole body scan,” an radiation-based machine that takes an image of your body under your clothes. He “opted out” of the scan only to realize the alternative is just as bad. He asked the TSA officer who was patting him down not to touch his privates. Actually, he said: “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” The matter quickly escalated, according to his blog post about the incident. Read More >

Nov

2010

How Not to Get a Flat on the Moon: Use a Spring-Packed Super Tire

Discover, November 15 2010.

Future Mars rovers or moon buggies might be riding the wings of Goodyear spring-based tires. This high-tech tire just won a 2010 R&D 100 award, also known as the “Oscar of Innovation,” from the editors of R&D magazine. The tire was invented last year in a joint effort between NASA and Goodyear, and was tested out on NASA’s Lunar Electric Rover at the Rock Yard at the Johnson Space Center. The spring tire builds upon previous versions of the moon tire, and the improvements enable it to take larger (up to 10 times) rovers up to 100 times further, NASA scientists explained to Gizmag:

“With the combined requirements of increased load and life, we needed to make a fundamental change to the original moon tire,” said Vivake Asnani, principal investigator for the project at NASA’s Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland. “What the Goodyear-NASA team developed is an innovative, yet simple network of interwoven springs that does the job. The tire design seems almost obvious in retrospect, as most good inventions do.” Read More >

Nov

2010

What Does Your City Smell Like? DARPA Wants to Know

Discover, November 15 2010.

How could the government know about a chemical attack before it wreaks havoc? By smelling it. But the problem is, to detect an abnormal stench, the government first needs to know the city’s normal aroma, to have an idea of its “chemical profile.” To that effect, DARPA just released a solicitation looking for suggestions on how to best build chemical composition maps of major United States cities. Spencer Ackerman over at Wired’s Danger Room t0ok a look at the solicitation and explained what DARPA is looking for:

The data Darpa wants collected will include “chemical, meteorological and topographical data” from at least 10 “local urban sources,” including “residences, gasoline stations, restaurants and dry cleaning stores that have particular patterns of emissions throughout the day.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Science Idol! Arab Reality TV Show Puts Inventors in the Spotlight

Discover, November 12 2010.

If America’s Got Talent, then the Arab World’s Got Science–that’s if you believe the messages in reality shows, anyway. The Arab reality show Stars of Science, currently in its second season, takes young (18-30) inventors from around the Arab world and pits them against each other, American Idol style. The show, presented by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, hopes to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity in both the contestants and the show’s viewers, Abdulla Al-Thani told AME info:

“The aim is to showcase the whole process of innovation — from inspiration, to the elaboration of a concept, its development and finally, its application,” said Dr. Abdulla Al-Thani, Vice President, Education of Qatar Foundation. “Science and technology will now be given an entertaining twist through the very popular reality TV show format, making the topic accessible to all. We hope ‘Stars of Science’ will promote the innovative spirit of young people in the Arab world.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Nutritionists to America: For the Love of God, Don’t Try the Twinkie Diet

Discover, November 12 2010.

It’s been making headlines all week (“Twinkie diet helps man lose weight” and “Trying To Lose Weight… Try The Junk Food Diet” might be some of the worst health-related headlines I’ve seen in awhile) as the Ding-Dong Diet or the Twinkie Diet, but let’s just call it the worst diet ever for short. The newsplosion came from an experiment by Mark Haub, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at Kansas State University.

In an effort to prove to his class the importance of calories in weight gain and loss, he decided to drastically change his eating habits. He embarked from the shores of a balanced diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat (totaling about 2,600 calories per day) to a junk food diet consisting of Twinkies, Hostess and Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos–with sides of vitamin pills, protein shakes, and small portions of vegetables. He lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks. Read More >

Nov

2010

“Cool It”: Climate Contrarian Bjorn Lomborg Takes His Message to the Movies

Discover, November 12 2010.

Climate change is causing areas of the world to heat and cool, and it seems a controversial new climate change film is doing the same to reviewers. The film is titled Cool It and was based on a book of the same name by Danish writer Bjørn Lomborg, a contrarian who delights in questioning the gravity of our planet’s environmental problems.

The movie was directed by Ondi Timoner, an award-winning documentarian. Lomborg has raised the hackles of environmental activists since he published The Skeptical Environmentalist a decade ago. Since then he has drawn closer to environmentalists on some issues–for example, he now maintains that global warming should be one of the world’s “chief concerns.” Read More >

Nov

2010

World’s Oldest Embryo Fossils Shed Light on Dinosaur Parenting

Discover, November 12 2010.

Fossilized dinosaur embryos, found still in their eggshells, have claimed the title of the oldest vertebrate embryos ever seen–they were fossilized in the early Jurassic Period, around 190 million years ago, researchers say. The embryos are from the species Massospondylus, a prosauropod, the family of dinosaurs which gave rise to iconic sauropods like the Brachiosaurus. Robert Reisz and his team found the embryos when analyzing a clutch of fossilized eggs collected in South America in 1976. The find was just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Professor Reisz. “Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Stem Cell Injections Give Mice Mighty Muscles

Discover, November 11 2010.

Injecting stem cells into injured mouse muscle not only helped the muscle heal, but gave the mice enhanced muscle mass for years to come. The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, used skeletal muscle stem cells from young donor mice and injected them into injured muscles of mature mice. Researchers figured that the stem cells would be able to create new muscle cells in the recipient mouse, but the question was: could these new cells be incorporated into the existing muscle on an adult mouse?

After injuring the recipient mouse’s muscle and injecting the cells, the researchers noticed that the injury healed quickly and the mice had larger muscles (about twice the volume, and a 50 percent increase in mass) than before the injury, which they expected. But were surprised to see that the muscle enhancement was sustained throughout the recipient mouse’s lifetime, up to two years. Read More >