A Day On The Internet

There is no such thing as Time:

“As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows,” says Barbour, “and the question is, what are they?” For Barbour each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. “We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less.”

Barbour’s Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book’s spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity existing without time, existing outside of time. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them in a step-by-step fashion makes a story unfold. Still, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent. As Barbour says, “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” The physics of reality for Barbour is the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment. Instead all the different possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom throughout all of creation, exist simultaneously. Barbour’s Nows all exist at once in a vast Platonic realm that stands completely and absolutely without time.

Why does alcohol cause the spins?

The spins happen because of an odd effect alcohol has on your ears — specifically, on three tiny, fluid-filled structures called the semicircular canals. Inside each of these canals is a fluid called endolymph and a gelationous structure called the cupula, which is filled with cells covered in fine, hair-like stereocilia.

As you move around, the movement of the endolymph lags behind the more solid cupula, distorting and bending it — and those little hairs. When the hairs bend, the electrical signal they send to your brain is altered, helping you to make sense of the rotations your head experiences on each of the three planes the canals sit on — movements up and down, left and right and backward and forward — and keep your balance.

Booze throws this system out of whack. Alcohol thins the blood, and when boozy blood travels to the inner ear, it creates a density difference between the cupula and the fluid in the canals, and distorts the cupula’s shape. The little hairs bend and send a signal to your brain that tells it you’re rotating when you’re really not, and this illusion of motion makes it seem like the room is spinning.

Malcolm Gladwell from Wikimedia Commons

Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks:

So, instead, here is a recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. You start each chapter with a pat anecdote about an individual’s professional or entrepreneurial success, or narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form. This is what the psychologist Christopher Chabris has named the “story-study-lesson” model, perhaps first perfected by one Malcolm Gladwell. A series of these threesomes may be packaged into a book, and then resold again and again as a stand-up act on the wonderfully lucrative corporate lecture circuit.

Sperm can’t turn left, or don’t want to:

Sperm are small, but they’re quick—an individual sperm can wiggle through a space 25 times the length of its body in a single second. (For comparison, a human would have to run 540,000 miles per hour to achieve the same relative speed.)

The sperm’s combination of tininess and agility makes them almost impossible to track, since researchers have to zoom way in with their microscopes to see the frenetic flagellates at all (think of following a fast-flying bird through binoculars, except moreso).

That’s where Aydogan Ozcan (one of PopSci’s own Brilliant Ten!) comes in: the UCLA engineer has developed a method to record the motion of individual sperm cells using a “lens free” imaging platform.

To track the sperm, Ozcan and his team positioned two LEDs—one red, one blue—at a 45-degree angle with each other, and pointed them at a sample gamete-filled fluid. When the multi-directional, multi-colored lights illuminated the sperm, they cast holographic shadows—shadows that can be reconstructed to obtain 3-D images—which Ozcan recorded and processed.

The technique allowed the researchers to track the motion of about 15,000 sperm cells simultaneously. The team found that, rather than moving forward in a straight line, about 5 percent of sperm swim in a small helical, or corkscrew, pattern. Perhaps more surprising was that almost all (about 90%) of the helical swimmers spun to the right.

Do youtube sensations sell records?

But of the many Internet music sensations who have tried to score a profitable music career, a handful have succeeded. Justin Bieber, for instance, was discovered in 2008 when his now-manager Scooter Braun was browsing YouTube. Soulja Boy, similarly, sparked a dance craze in 2007 with the viral video “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” and garnered a platinum album, Souljaboytellem.com, the year afterward. Eighteen-year-old Christina Grimmie landed a Disney web series and a summer gig opening for Selena Gomez.

For other artists, though, the “second act” hasn’t taken off so spectacularly. In 2008, Dutch pancake house waitress Esmee Denters was the first artist signed to Justin Timberlake’s record label Tennman Records after she became a YouTube phenomenon with her covers of Timberlake’s and Natasha Bedingfield’s pop songs. Her 2009 album peaked in the mid-50 range on a few European countries’ album charts and failed to chart outside of Europe. Greyson Chance, a 12-year-old who was hailed as the “next Justin Bieber” for his floppy haircut and viral 2010 talent-show cover of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” released an album via Ellen DeGeneres’s label that spent a modest six weeks on the Billboard chart last August. Malaysian folk singer Zee Avi was heavily promoted by YouTube and even toured with Pete Yorn in 2009, but her two full-length releases have spent a combined total of three weeks on the Billboard 200—peaking at No. 129.

And Lana Del Rey, a captivating young ingénue (or so it seemed at the time) enjoyed a swirl of reverent, murmured Internet buzz last summer, and by winter she had risen all the way to the Saturday Night Livestage. But her mystique quickly crumbled when it surfaced that “Lana Del Rey” was the re-invented persona of a failed, parentally pampered pop star of the past. Critics panned her album Born to Die and a stiff, bizarre SNL performance left viewers doubtful, and since then Del Rey’s early promise has dwindled, sadly, to punchline status.

Amazing social life of the Green iguana:

Juvenile iguanas form groups termed pods or chuletas (Burghardt et al. 1977), usually consisting of about four individuals. They indulge in a tremendous amount of social behaviour of the sort typically regarded as unique to mammals and birds, rubbing their bodies and heads against one another, displaying their dewlaps, nodding their heads and wagging their tails at each other. They engage in allogrooming (grooming other members of the social group). The young iguanas stay associated at night, when they sleep in close physical contact with other pod members, sometimes even lying on top of them. Baby iguanas definitely recognise their own kin, apparently using olfactory cues (Werner et al. 1987), and continue to stay with them for many months after hatching (Burghardt 2002).

While these pods obviously consist of siblings, they seem to exhibit some sort of structure, with one iguana acting as leader. Burghardt (1977) described and photographed cases where juveniles followed one another in a line through vegetation and across the ground, with the iguana or iguanas in the lead often looking behind to, apparently, check on the progress of the followers. At some point juveniles have to leave Slothia and swim to the mainland, and to do this, the iguanas have to make their way through a reed-bed before setting out across the water. Prior to departing, the juveniles were seen to engage in lots of head-rubbing and other physical contact, and the individual that appeared to lead the group was the one that engaged in the greatest amount of these activities. Invariably this was the first animal to enter the water and start swimming. If its companions failed to follow, it would return to shore. The iguana identified as ‘leader’ was also reported to disappear into the reeds and reappear with additional recruits.

Polish exorcism boom leads to launch of ‘Egzorcysta’ magazine:

With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world’s first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.

“The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.

Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.

“It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki told AFP.

Virgin birth seen in wild Vipers:

It is not clear how asexual reproduction evolved in normally sexual species, but the absence of a process called genomic imprinting may have had a role. In mammals, genomic imprinting causes a set of genes from one parent to dominate over the other, and this interaction requires genes from both parents to create viable offspring. Reptiles don’t undergo genomic imprinting, so mating isn’t required for mothers to develop their young — but it is not known why.

Nor is it known what spurred the female snakes to reproduce asexually. Booth points out that isolation from males is not the key: the snakes were collected from habitats with males, which undoubtedly were on the lookout for females. For whatever reason, the females forsook their potential mates, or rejected sperm from pairings, to deliver parthenogenic litters. Booth says that the finding removes the “prevailing dogma” that facultative parthenogenesis occurs only when females are isolated.

The science of baldness:

While you’ve probably heard of the expensive treatments likes Rogaine and Propecia, the latest hair loss remedy is so simple it’s silly: Vitamin D. This basic nutrient is all the rage in baldness research, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. Unlike the products currently on the market, innovative new treatments targeting vitamin D receptors have the ability to help people who are already bald regrow their hair.

That being said:

Don’t get all excited and go buy a boatload of vitamin D, though. The advances in research have less to do with the presence of the nutrient that it does with how your body uses it. 

History of cheating in Chess:

In the late 18th century, for example, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen toured Europe with a machine called The Turk, which he promoted as a mechanical chess master. Legend holds that Napoleon and Ben Franklin are among the chess aficionados who lost to Kempelen’s brainchild. Decades after those big wins, word got out that The Turk, which Kempelen built to woo Empress Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina of Austria, was a royal scam: For all its pulleys and wheels, Kempelen always made sure an accomplished and totally human chess player was hiding inside the machine, making all the right moves.

A Reddit thread recently argued that both Jack and Rose could have occupied that door-raft. James Cameron says NO, and is willing to work with Myth Busters.

 Cameron argues that while sheer surface area may have allowed two people to lay on top, physics would not. It flipped when Jack tried to get on, you see. And the filmmaker says that Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters will be tackling this mystery of buoyancy on an upcoming episode, and he would like to help them prove that he was right.

Facebook forced The New Yorker to remove a cartoon depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden because the cartoonist drew in two dots representing Eve’s nipples.

What is it about an elephant’s tusk that makes it so valuable?

What in the world could fuel such demand for animal teeth? An ascendant Chinese middle class, whose millions can now afford the prized material. According to Gettlemen, as much of 70 percent of the illegal ivory heads to China, where a pound can fetch as much as $1,000. “The demand for ivory has surged to the point that the tusks of a single adult elephant can be worth more than 10 times the average annual income in many African countries,” Gettlemen writes.

This explains the mechanics. Demand rises, price goes up, and the costs poachers and smugglers are willing to endure increase in sync. But what underlies the demand? Why do so many Chinese people want these elongated cones of dentin?

The comparison to diamonds is commonly made: Diamonds, like ivory, are a natural substance with little inherent value but prized social significance. Desire in richer lands tumbles poorer societies into resource wars and labor abuse. And certainly the modern dynamics are the same. But demand for ivory is something demand for diamonds is not: ancient. And its history as a technology, a material with few peers for centuries, propels this demand even today.

The life and times of America’s first convicted murderer:

“This year John Billington the elder…was arraigned, and both by grand and petty jury found guilty of willful murder by plain and notorious evidence, and was accordingly executed. This, the first execution among them was a great sadness to them. They took all possible pains in the trial, and consulted Mr. [John] Winthrop [governor of the  Massachusetts Bay Colony], and the other leading men at the Bay of Massachusetts recently arrived, who concurred with them that he ought to die, and the land be purged of blood. He and some of his relatives had often been punished for misconduct before, being one of the profanest families among them. They came from London, and I know not by what influence they were shuffled into the first body of settlers.”

The story of  astronaut Frank Culbertson who watched 9/11 from space:

I had just finished a number of tasks this morning, the most time-consuming being the physical exams of all crew members. In a private conversation following that, the flight surgeon told me they were having a very bad day on the ground. I had no idea…

He described the situation to me as best he knew it at ~0900 CDT. I was flabbergasted, then horrified. My first thought was that this wasn’t a real conversation, that I was still listening to one of my Tom Clancy tapes. It just didn’t seem possible on this scale in our country. I couldn’t even imagine the particulars, even before the news of further destruction began coming in.

Vladimir came over pretty quickly, sensing that something very serious was being discussed. I waved Michael into the module as well. They were also amazed and stunned. After we signed off, I tried to explain to Vladimir and Michael as best I could the potential magnitude of this act of terror in downtown Manhattan and at the Pentagon. They clearly understood and were very sympathetic.

I glanced at the World Map on the computer to see where over the world we were and noticed that we were coming southeast out of Canada and would be passing over New England in a few minutes. I zipped around the station until I found a window that would give me a view of NYC and grabbed the nearest camera. It happened to be a video camera, and I was looking south from the window of Michael’s cabin.

The smoke seemed to have an odd bloom to it at the base of the column that was streaming south of the city. After reading one of the news articles we just received, I believe we were looking at NY around the time of, or shortly after, the collapse of the second tower.