Yearly Archives: 2011

The Sex of Numbers

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People See Odd Numbers as Male, Even as Female

Daisy Grewal, ScientificAmerican.com
Date: 31 August 2011 Time: 03:08 PM ET
rainbow of numbers
In one experiment, when foreign names were paired with “1” participants rated them as masculine and when paired with “2” they were rated as feminine.
CREDIT: skvoor / Shutterstock

Gender is so fundamental to the way we understand the world that people are prone to assign a sex to even inanimate objects. We all know someone, or perhaps we are that person, who consistently refers to their computer or car with a gender pronoun (“She’s been running great these past few weeks!”) New research suggests that our tendency to see gender everywhere even applies to abstract ideas such as numbers. Across cultures, people see odd numbers as male and even numbers as female.

Scientists have long known that language can influence how we perceive gender in objects. Some languages consistently refer to certain objects as male or female, and this in turn, influences how speakers of that language think about those objects. Webb Phillips of the Max Planck Institute, Lauren Schmidt of HeadLamp Research, and Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University asked Spanish- and German-speaking bilinguals to rate various objects according to whether they seemed more similar to males or females. They found that people rated each object according to its grammatical gender. For example, Germans see the moon as being more like a man, because the German word for moon is grammatically masculine (“der Mond”). In contrast, Spanish-speakers see the moon as being more like a woman, because in Spanish the word for moon is grammatically feminine (“la Luna”).

Aside from language, objects can also become infused with gender based on their appearance, who typically uses them, and whether they seem to possess the type of characteristics usually associated with men or women. David Gal and James Wilkie of Northwestern University studied how people view gender in everyday objects, such as food and furniture. They found that people see food dishes containing meat as more masculine and salads and sour dairy products as more feminine. People see furniture items, such as tables and trash cans, as more feminine when they feature rounded, rather than sharp, edges.

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/15859-odd-numbers-male-female.html

 

Greenland Ice Chunk Ready to Go

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Giant Chunk of Greenland Ice Set to Break Away

by Andrea Mustain
Date: 02 September 2011 Time: 01:50 PM ET
greenland glacier ice berg, greenland glacier collapse, greenland ice island, ice shelf collapse, arctic ice melt, arctic melt season, sea level rise, glaciers and sea level rise, petermann glacier
August 5, 2009: This ‘before’ picture shows the disintegrating ice shelf before it floated away.
CREDIT: Jason Box, Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University.

An ice shelf is poised to break off from a Greenland glacier and float out to sea as an island twice the size of Manhattan, scientists say.

“I don’t know exactly when,” Jason Box, a climatologist with Ohio State Unversity’s Byrd Polar Research Center, told OurAmazingPlanet. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened today — or if it happened next summer.”

Just a year ago, in August 2010, the same glacier produced an even larger iceberg — a mass of ice four times the size of Manhattan, the largest in recorded Greenland history — yet researchers warn that the next spectacular break could have more-dire consequences.

Box said it’s not clear when the 62-square-mile (160 square kilometers) ice shelf, which is dangling from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, will detach from the mainland. “I think it’s more likely to occur during periods of melt, and that’s coming to an end, so I’m losing confidence it’s going to break this year,” Box said.

Ice shelves are enormous plates of ice that float on polar seas but are connected to the shoreline by the land-bound glaciers that feed into them.

During much of the Arctic melt season, summer sunlight pounds the Earth’s highest latitudes nearly 24 hours a day. Melting typically draws to a close in early to mid-September, when cooler temperatures and shorter days arrive.

Box said scientists first noticed a jagged crack in the glacier’s ice — a growing rift he dubbed ‘The Big Kahuna’ — in 2008. However, a subsequent search through satellite data revealed the rift first appeared about eight years earlier.

“We can see the crack widening in the past year through satellite pictures, so it seems imminent,” Box said.

Ice shelf collapse can affect sea levels.

to read more, go to:   http://www.livescience.com/15890-greenland-ice-chunk-break.html

 

 

ET’s and Dolphins

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Dolphin Studies Could Reveal Secrets of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Keith Cooper, Astrobiology Magazine
Date: 02 September 2011 Time: 01:49 PM ET
Analysis of Dolphin Communication
Analysis of dolphin communication with Information Theory has shown it to be surprisingly intricate and possibly second only to human communication in terms of complexity on Earth.
CREDIT: Wild Dolphin Project.

How do we define intelligence? SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, clearly equates intelligence with technology (or, more precisely, the building of radio or laser beacons). Some, such as the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, suggested that intelligence wasn’t just the acquisition of technology, but the ability to develop and improve it, integrating it into our society.

By that definition, a dolphin, lacking limbs to create and manipulate complex tools, cannot possibly be described as intelligent. It’s easy to see why such definitions prove popular; we are clearly the smartest creatures on the planet, and the only species with technology. It may be human hubris, or some kind of anthropocentric bias that we find difficult to escape from, but our adherence to this definition narrows the phase space in which we’re willing to search for intelligent life.

Technology is certainly linked to intelligence – you need to be smart to build a computer or an aircraft or a radio telescope – but technology does not define intelligence. It is just a manifestation of it, perhaps one of many.

Astrobiologists see intelligence a little differently. The dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to learn, while others see it as the capacity to reason, to empathize, to solve problems and consider complex ideas, and to interact socially.

Intelligence in the universe

If we take these characteristics to be a broad working definition of intelligence, our view of intelligent life in the universe suddenly looks very different. No longer are we confined to considering only life that has technology.

To be fair to SETI, at this moment in time it cannot search for anything other than beacons – the vast distances across the cosmos coupled with our own baby steps into the Universe mean that we don’t have the capability to search for any other form of intelligent life other than those that can deliberately signal their presence. However, what a wider definition of intelligence tells us is that we are not alone, not even on our own planet Earth.

Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford, was one of the first to put forward the theory that the evolution of intelligence is driven by social factors, allowing animals to survive, interact and prosper in large and complex social groupings. These include notions of reciprocal altruism (I scratch your back, you scratch mine), politics (forming sub-groups and coalitions within the larger group) and understanding the emotions of others (empathy, which in turn relies on theory of mind, the ability to be aware of one’s self and others).

Looking at it that way, modern social networking on media such as Facebook may just be a symptom of what helped drive us to become intelligent in the first place, many tens of thousands of years ago.

Here’s the trick – to be social, you must be communicative. Staying quiet is anti-social. Personal interactions require communication, of some form, and the more complex the interaction, the more complex the communication. So if intelligence and social behavior is linked – and many people agree that it is – then the best place to start looking for intelligence is in animals that like to chat with one another.

And that brings us to dolphins.

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/15889-dolphin-intelligence-search-extraterrestrial-life.html

Rick Perry Bumper Sticker

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Best Rick Perry Bumper Sticker Ever (PICTURE)

First Posted: 8/21/11 11:25 AM ET Updated: 8/21/11 11:55 AM ET

It’s not uncommon for political bumper stickers to crop up during campaigns, but sometimes an image goes above and beyond its simple purpose. This is one of those bumper stickers.

Granted, the tape might give them some problems down the road, but we think it gets their message across.


Hungry for more Perry awkwardness? Here’s the GOP candidate answering a child’s questions:

for more, go to:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/21/best-rick-perry-bumper-sticker_n_932400.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000005

 

Americans and Religions

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10 things the Belief Blog learned in its first year

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN.com Religion Editor

(CNN) – In case you were wondering about all the balloons and cake: CNN’s Belief Blog has just marked its first birthday.

After publishing 1,840 posts and sifting through 452,603 comments (OK, we may have missed one or two) the Belief Blog feels older than its 12 months would suggest. But it also feels wiser, having followed the faith angles of big news stories, commissioned lots of commentary and, yes, paid attention to all those reader comments for a solid year.

10 things we’ve learned:

1. Every big news story has a faith angle. Even the ordeal of 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for more than two months. Even the attempted assassination of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Even March Madness. Even – well, you get the point.

 

2. Atheists are the most fervent commenters on matters religious. This became apparent immediately after the Belief Blog’s first official post last May, which quickly drew such comments as:

acerider
Can we have a fairy tale blog too?

Sunil
This is nothing but America moving away from its wondrous spirit of Apollo 11 into a mindset of the perpetually intellectually challenged.
I think there was some news today about scientists having created the first artificial cell. That should have been a HUGE story. And yet, what do we get? A faith blog. Pathetic.

Rachel
This blog is terrifying. It’s amazing how much power the radical religious right is amassing in our country right now. If I can’t have some legislation, can I at least have some news that does not cater to zealots?

Those early comments presaged an avalanche of alternately humorous and outraged atheist responses on virtually everything the Belief Blog publishes. They’re more evidence that atheists are coming out of the closet to trumpet their disbelief, argue with the faithful and evangelize their godlessness. (It’s worth noting that the Belief Blog does plenty of atheism stories.)

3. People are still intensely curious about the Bible, its meaning and its origins.

It’s an ancient tome, but more than any other book in the Western tradition (with the Quran being the lone exception), the Bible still fascinates us. And it still feeds our most heated debates. In February, a guest post here arguing that the Bible is more ambiguous on homosexuality than traditionally thought elicited more than 4,000 comments. A response post insisting that the Bible clearly condemns homosexuality brought in an equal number of comments – and was the most popular story on CNN.com on the day it was published.

Other Belief Blog pieces about biblical scholarship – including a recent offering about biblical misquotations – have also caught fire. More of us may be reading it on iPhones these days, but the Good Book still matters a lot more than the popular culture lets on.

4.   Most Americans are religiously illiterate. Despite the appetite for stories and commentary about the Bible, most Americans know little about it. A huge Pew survey released in September found that most Americans scored 50 percent or less on a quiz measuring knowledge of the Bible, world religions and what the Constitution says about religion in public life. Ironically, atheists and agnostics scored best. How did you do on the quiz?

5. It’s impossible to understand much of the news without knowing something about religion. Why did the Egyptian revolution happen on a Friday? Why was Osama bin Laden’s body buried so quickly after he was killed? Why did Afghan rioters kill seven United Nations workers in April? You simply can’t answer those questions without bringing in religion.

6.  Regardless of where they fit on the spectrum, people want others to understand what they believe. That goes for pagans, fundamentalist Mormons,Native Americans, atheists – everyone.

7. Americans still have an uneasy relationship with Islam. Nearly 10 years after the September 11 attacks provoked many Americans to pay attention to Islam for the first time, much of the country is still somewhat uncomfortable about the religion, which counts 1.5 billion followers worldwide.

The biggest domestic religion story in the Belief Blog’s young life was probably last year’s opposition to a proposed Islamic Center and mosque near New York’s ground zero. And with the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaching, domestic tensions around Islam may flare again. The Arab Spring, meanwhile is raising weighty questions about Islam’s role in post-autocratic regimes, guaranteeing the religion – and its relationship with the U.S. – will be one of the world’s big stories for years to come.

8. God may not prevent natural disasters, but religion is always a big part of the response. We see it play out every time Mother Nature delivers a punishing blow, from March’s Japan earthquake and tsunami to the recent tornado that flattened much of Joplin, Missouri.

9. Apocalyptic movements come and go. The May 21st doomsdayers drew loads of interest, largely thanks to a massive ad campaign, but they’re hardly original.

10. Most Americans don’t know that President Barack Obama is a Christian. It’s ironic, since church-based community organizing led him to politics and since hisclose relationship with a pastor almost sunk his presidential campaign, but that’s what a Pew poll found last year.

Only about a third of Americans correctly identified Obama’s religion, while nearly one in five said he’s a Muslim. Another irony: The longer Obama’s been in office, the smaller the proportion of Americans who can correctly name his faith. As the 2012 presidential race approaches, this story bears watching, since views of candidates’ religion influence voting patterns.

More on Lee and Katia

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Tropical Storm Lee moving ashore; Katia continues northwest
Posted by: JeffMasters, 1:53 PM GMT on September 03, 2011 +6
Tropical Storm Lee is marching steadily northwards towards landfall in Louisiana, and continues to slowly intensify. The storm’s central pressure is now down to 993 mb, as measured by an Air Force hurricane hunter aircraft at 7am CDT. However, the center of Lee is now very close to the coast, and the storm doesn’t have much time to intensify further before the center moves over land. The main impact from the storm on the coast thus far has been heavy rains. At New Orleans Lakefront Airport, 5.88″ inches of rain had fallen from Lee as of 8 am CDT this morning. Top winds were 35 mph, gusting to 55 mph. Though Lee’s top winds are rated as being 60 mph, it is difficult to find any land stations that have reported sustained winds of tropical storm force, 39 mph or greater. One station that has is at the tip of the Mississippi River Delta, where Southwest Pass measured sustained winds of 40 mph, gusting to 58 mph, at 7:03 am CDT. Upper-level winds out of the southwest are creating a moderate 10 – 20 knots of wind shear over Lee, keeping the storm’s heavy thunderstorms pushed to the east side of the storm. Latest satelllite loops show Lee is becoming increasingly organized.
Figure 1. Radar-estimated rainfall from Lee from the New Orleans radar. Lee has dumped a large region of 4 – 8 inches so far (orange colors.)


Figure 2. Predicted rainfall for the 5-day period ending at 8 am EDT Thursday Sep 8, 2011. Lee is expected to bring a large swath of 4+ inches of rain all the way to New England. Image credit: NOAA/HPC.

Forecast for Lee
Lee’s large size, ill-formed circulation center, and the presence of dry air on its west side due to an upper-level trough of low pressure make Lee look a lot like a subtropical storm on satellite imagery, with a broad center and the majority of the heavy thunderstorms in a broad band well removed from the center. Subtropical storms can undergo only relatively modest rates of intensification, and Lee is unlikely to become a hurricane. Also tending to slow intensification will be the fact that much of its circulation is over land. Damages from Lee are likely to be less than $100 – $200 million, with the greatest threats being fresh water flooding from heavy rains. Given that much of the region Lee will traverse over the next few days is under moderate to severe drought, the storm’s rains may cause more economic benefit than damage. Since Texas is on the dry side of the storm, that state will see very little rainfall from Lee, except very close to the border with Louisiana. The rains from Lee appear to have mostly ended across extreme southern Louisiana, so the feared 10 – 15 inches of rain does not look like it will materialize there. One possible concern for Lee’s rains will be the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where recovery efforts from the devastating flooding due to Hurricane Irene may be hampered by the additional 2 – 4 inches that may fall from Lee’s remnants by the middle of the week.Tornadoes from Lee are potential hazard today, as NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center is highlighting the Northern Gulf Coast in their “slight risk” area for severe weather. A tornado watch is posted for the region, but no tornadoes have been reported as of 8 am CDT.

Lee is the 12th named storm this year, and came eight days before the half-way point of the Atlantic hurricane season. Climatologically, September 10 marks the half-way point. A typical hurricane season has just 10 – 11 named storms, so we’ve already had more than a whole season’s worth of storms before reaching the half-way point. At this rate, 2011 will see 24 – 26 named storms, making it the 2nd busiest season on record, behind 2005. Lee’s formation date of September 2 puts 2011 in 5th place for earliest date of arrival of the season’s 12th storm. Only 2005, 1995, 1936, and 1933 had an earlier 12th storm.

Hurricane Katia 
The latest set of model runs show very little change in the outlook for Hurricane Katia. Katia will continue its long trek across the Atlantic Ocean, and will not pose a danger to any land areas over the next five days. Katia is still struggling with dry air and wind shear that has risen to a high 20 – 25 knots. Latest satellite loops show a lopsided hurricane that is suffering from the impacts of dry air and wind shear on its southwest side.

Bermuda Triangle to Host Humpbacks

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Bermuda Triangle to Become Humpback Whale Haven

Katherine Tweed, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor
Date: 02 September 2011 Time: 09:28 AM ET
humpback whales
Humpback whales feeding.
CREDIT: NOAA

The Bermuda Triangle holds an often maligned and mysterious place in ocean lore, but for endangered humpback whales, it’s about to get a little more welcoming.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently announced a letter of intent signed by the Bermuda Department of Environmental Protection to establish a sister sanctuary to NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary for the gentle giants.

The sister sanctuary would not be the first for Stellwagen Bank, located in the Gulf of Maine, and its humpback whales. Beginning in 2007, Stellwagen established the world’s first sister sanctuary with the Dominican Republic’s Santuario de Mamiferos Marinos de la República Dominicana to protect the endangered migratory marine mammal on both ends of its range.

Whale populations

There are five distinct populations of humpbacks in the North Atlantic, with Stellwagen Bank being the feeding grounds for one of the groups. The other four are off the coasts of Nova Scotia, Norway, Greenland and Iceland. Down in the Caribbean, the whales mingle during breeding season, and one of the largest congregation spots is off the coast of the Dominican Republic.

But protecting just two points in the humpbacks’ range is not enough to ensure their survival. Bermuda will protect the species in its migratory corridor, rather than the furthest reaches of its range, the first marine mammal sanctuary to offer such a waypoint.

“This is a first step in putting together conservation stepping stones throughout their migration,” said Nathalie Ward, coordinator of the Sister Sanctuary Program for Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

to read more, go to:  http://www.livescience.com/15881-bermuda-triandle-humpback-whale-sanctuary.html

Sleeping with the Chimps

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Scientist Snoozes for 6 Nights in Chimp Nests

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 02 September 2011 Time: 10:24 AM ET
Chimpanzees build a new nest every night.

 
A chimpanzee nest in Kenya.
CREDIT: Joey Verge, under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Every night, wild chimpanzees build themselves nests high in the trees and tuck themselves in for a good night’s sleep. But no one knows exactly what makes these nests good sleeping spots for chimps. So biological anthropologist Fiona Stewart decided to find out — by bedding down in the chimp nests herself.

Stewart, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, found that the shaggy arboreal assemblages in her field site in Tanzania weren’t exactly five-star lodgings, but they did keep hertemperature up and the bug bites down. Sleeping high above ground also eased the anxiety of hearing hyenas call to each other in the East African night.

Stewart “is a very adventurous person,” said William McGrew, Stewart’s former doctoral adviser and a professor of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her findings could help explain why early humans broke from the chimp tradition of sleeping in trees, McGrew said.

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/15883-scientist-sleeps-chimpanzee-nest.html

Light Bending Yields Odd Images

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Weird Light-Bending Experiment Turns Scientists Into ‘Coneheads’

by Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer
A new light-bending experiment turns physicists into coneheads.
Top, clockwise from left: Patrice Genevet, Nanfang Yu, Federico Capasso, Zeno Gaburro, and Mikhail A. Kats. Bottom: A simulation of the image that would appear in a large mirror patterned with the team’s new phase mirror technology.
CREDIT: Eliza Grinnell and Nanfang Yu

In a mind-bending, and light-bending, discovery, scientists have produced a fun-house-like warping of light that defies existing laws of physics.

For centuries, simple equations (taught every year to high-school physics students) have described how light moves through different media, for example from air into glass. Now, however, researchers have found that if the boundary between media is sufficiently complex (in this case, coated with nano-sized wires), those laws no longer apply.

The discovery has prompted the physicists to rewrite the traditional equations to account for the characteristics of the boundary surface. In most cases where these tweaked equations are applied, the new laws simplify back to their traditional forms, but sometimes, they show that light can behave in incredibly strange ways

New Alaskan Quake

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Massive earthquake on the subduction slopes of the unpopulated Alaskan Islands

Last update: September 2, 2011 at 12:02 pm by By 

to read more, go to:   http://earthquake-report.com/2011/09/02/massive-earthquake-on-the-subduction-slopes-of-the-unpopulated-alaskan-islands/