n2doc

n2doc's Journal

August 23, 2012

New HD Video Lets You Plummet to Mars With Curiosity

By Adam Mann

Watching this amazing high-definition video of Curiosity’s hair-raising landing on Mars will make you clutch at your armrest. Compiled from the probe’s MARDI descent camera, it is the best landing video yet and gives you a chance to experience what it’s like to ride along with the rover down to the Martian surface.

The video starts with Curiosity’s heat shield being jettisoned from its landing stage body — comprised of the rover tucked up beneath a UFO-like platform. The rover hovers for a while under its parachute, wobbling back and forth as it takes in the spectacular view of craters and the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, its eventual target. Vertigo kicks in as the rover dives lower and the engines kick in for Curiosity’s powered descent sequence.

Though they can’t be seen in the video, the rover gets lowered down on 25-foot-long cables for its “sky crane” maneuver near the end. Just before hitting the Martian soil, the engines kick up a huge amount of dust and pebbles, which obscures the ground and may be responsible for damaging one of Curiosity’s wind sensors. The soft landing went off with pitch-perfect precision and was a big victory for NASA engineers.

This video was compiled by visual effects editor Daniel Luke Fitch from the high-resolution images that the rover has beamed back. All but a few frames from the descent video have come back at this point, with low-res thumbnails filling in for the missing ones in the video. The images have been enhanced with noise reduction, color balance, and sharpening “to make it look as good as it could,” said Fitch.

more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/hd-curiosity-landing/

August 23, 2012

Antibiotics Might Be Fueling Obesity Epidemic

By Brandon Keim

Expanding waistlines may be caused by more than bad diets and sedentary habits. Antibiotics could be disrupting our gut bacteria, helping people pack on fat like farm animals.

This scenario is, for now, a hypothesis, but one that’s fleshed out convincingly in two new studies. In the first, mice given antibiotics experienced profound changes to internal microbe communities that process food and regulate metabolism. In the other study, body weight in children rose with antibiotic exposures as infants.

“Early life antibiotics are changing the microbiome, and its metabolic capabilities, at a critical time in development,” said microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University. “These changes have downstream effects on metabolism, including genes related to energy storage.”

Blaser was among the first researchers to investigate what’s become one of the hottest areas in biology: the microbiome, or the vast community of bacteria, viruses and even fungi that live inside our bodies, breaking down food and regulating physiological processes.

'Our microbiome is part of human physiology. We are doing things to change it, and those changes have consequences.'

more

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/antibiotics-obesity/

August 23, 2012

"Stop Telling People What We Think!"

August 22, 2012

Cover of NY Observer

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/22/ayn-rand-how-everyones.html

August 22, 2012

Spanish fresco restoration botched by amateur

An elderly parishioner has stunned Spanish cultural officials with an alarming and unauthorised attempt to restore a prized Jesus Christ fresco.

Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) by Elias Garcia Martinez has held pride of place in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church near Zaragoza for more than 100 years.

The woman took her brush to it after years of deterioration due to moisture.

Cultural officials said she had the best intentions and hoped it could be properly restored.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19349921

August 22, 2012

Creating 150 MPH Hurricanes in a Giant Aquarium in Florida

By Brian Lam

SUSTAIN Cambridge Seven

About two years ago, Brian Haus, the chair of the Division of Applied Marine Physics at the University of Miami, was studying storms in the western Pacific ocean, off the coast of Taiwan. He and his team are chasing hurricanes. Sometimes the hurricanes completely miss the sensor-packed buoys placed in their path to track power and speed. Sometimes they don't.

This time, the researchers got lucky. Not one, but two super typhoons hit their equipment at the same time. Even luckier, most of their gear managed to not break apart. He and his team waited for the storms to subside before they left port to retrieve their recording devices. But before they could recover the buoys, one storm, named Chaba, defied the forecasts. Instead of losing strength, it headed right for them at full power. Haus and his fellow researchers found themselves enduring nine days of "most uncomfortable" 30-foot swells.

Last month, the University of Miami broke ground on the 45-million-dollar Marine Technology & Life Sciences Seawater Complex, which will house a tool that will give Haus and other scientists studying storms more steady, predictable, and controllable access to an important resource in their work--the hurricanes themselves.

The hurricane simulation tool, which is named SUSTAIN (short for SUrge-STructure-Atmosphere Interaction) is a tempest in a teapot the size of a small house. When it's completed, it'll be unique in its ability to create category-5 level hurricanes inside of a lab, across a 3-D field of waves made of real sea water pumped into the building at 1,000 gallons per minute.

With it, scientists will be able to better understand the process by which hurricanes are fueled by warm water.

more

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-08/creating-150-mph-hurricanes-giant-aquarium-florida

August 22, 2012

Why Believe Romney Now, After His Lies on Medicare, Bain & Taxes?

by Robert Shrum Aug 22, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

The candidate this week added Medicare to his litany of falsehoods—on Bain Capital, his taxes, welfare, and debt, among many others. It’s now clear Romney will say anything. So why trust anything he says?

First, Paul Ryan placed Medicare on the chopping block. And amid the aftershocks of a bold and bad decision to put Ryan on his ticket, Mitt Romney this week also put Medicare on the lying block. Michael Tomasky is on target when he tartly observes that Romney is waging the “lyingest campaign ever”—and utterly demolishes the most “blatant” lie of all, that the president has gutted welfare reform. The third Romney ad leveling this charge brazenly cites a newspaper that was condemning the accusation.

The fabulation about welfare wasn’t just an expedient ploy for a candidate who was falling in the polls as he stumbled home from his malaprop-laden trip abroad. And the gyrations about Medicare weren’t just a one-off tactical response to a potentially mortal threat. Reckless disregard for the truth is a habit at the heart of the Romney enterprise. From the beginning, the entire campaign has been a calculated exercise in deceit. Its central rationale was conceived in a falsehood, that Romney the financial manipulator at Bain was a prolific job creator. The suspiciously round number was 100,000 jobs. The evidence? Romney never did disclose any records to back up his boast, and he took credit for hiring at companies long after Bain was gone from them—and he was gone from Bain.

Then, when the Obama campaign’s Bain ads hit, similar to the ones that upended Romney in a Senate contest with Ted Kennedy in 1994, the former governor was still unprepared, presumably unable to disprove the criticism or prove his self-defining claim. He retreated first to bromides about free enterprise, and more recently to a cop-out plea for an “agreement between both campaigns” to declare that attacks on “business or family or taxes” are off-limits. What’s family got to do with job-crushing profiteering, offshore tax havens, or Swiss bank accounts? It was Romney who ran on his business experience. Suddenly it’s unfair to talk about it.

He doesn’t want to talk about his taxes, either, although he finally and conveniently asserted that the returns he was refusing to disclose revealed he had always paid about “13 percent.” Now, that rate for a guy with an income of $20 million is hardly a profile in fairness. But if he did pay something more than 1 or 2 or 5 percent, or more than zero, then why not make the returns public? There’s more than a chance that his expedient reassurance is a ruse. As Ann Romney blurted out, the “reason we don’t disclose more is…it will just give them more ammunition.”

more

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/22/why-believe-romney-now-after-his-lies-on-medicare-bain-taxes.html

August 22, 2012

Was Vincent van Gogh Color Blind? It Sure Looks Like It

Around a tenth of all men are color blind or color deficient, and as Joe Hanson discusses on It’s Okay to Be Smart, famed painter Vincent van Gogh may have been counted among them.

Hanson references the work of Kazunori Asada, a researcher and designer who is concerned with color vision. Asada had seen some of van Gogh’s work in what he calls a color vision experience room – one where the lighting conditions are meant to simulate color blindness.

Under the filtered light, I found that these paintings looked different from the van Gogh which I had always seen. I love van Gogh’s paintings and have been fortunate to view a number of the originals in various art museums. This painter has a somewhat strange way to use color. Although the use of color is rich, lines of different colors run concurrently, or a point of different color suddenly appears. I’ve heard it conjectured that van Gogh had color vision deficiency.

However, in the van Gogh images seen in the color vision experience room, to me the incongruity of color and roughness of line had quietly disappeared. And each picture had changed into one of brilliance with very delicate lines and shades. This was truly wonderful experience.