Min Igelkot e Inte Dum

About 65 million years ago, the earth was struck by an asteroid some 10 kilometres in diameter with a mass well over a trillion tons.  This ejected billions of tons of life-bearing rocks and water into space — a surprisingly large amount of Earth could have ended up not just on the moon and Mars, as might be expected, but much further afield.  In particular, places that seem compatible for life: the Jovian moon Europa, the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and Earth-like exoplanets orbiting other stars.  Almost as much ejecta would have ended up on Europa as on the moon: around 10 ⁸ individual Earth rocks in some scenarios.  That’s because the huge gravitational field around Jupiter acts as a sink for rocks, which then get swept up by the Jovian moons as they orbit.  But perhaps most surprising is the amount that makes its way across interstellar space.  More Earth ejecta must have ended up in interstellar space than all the other planets combined.  Gliese 581 is a red dwarf some 20 light years from here that is thought to have a super-Earth orbiting at the edge of the habitable zone.  About a thousand Earth-rocks from this event would’ve made the trip, taking about a million years to reach their destination.  Nobody knows if microbes can survive that kind of journey or even the shorter trips to Europa and Enceladus.  But if microbes can, they ought to flourish on a super-Earth in the habitable zone.  By the time we get there, there may be lifeforms quite similar to ours.  If this scenario has indeed taken place, then the probability is almost one that our solar system was (and is) visited by microorganisms that originated in alien solar systems.

Diffuse gas called plasma flows outward from the sun as the solar wind and carries with it magnetic field lines from the sun.  The entanglement between magnetic field lines from the sun and other magnetic field lines anchored in Earth’s core occurs when these lines are brought together by gusts of solar wind.  In the process of smoothing this entanglement, one or more holes are created that now link field lines, with one originating in the sun and the other in the earth’s metallic core.  This linkage allows charged particles to cross a previously forbidden boundary that separates the earth’s volume from the sun’s.  The formation of these interconnections represents a stress reduction.  The aurorae are a byproduct of this change in how the magnetic field line strands are connected, since with the hole, charged particles from the sun are now allowed access into the atmosphere below the earth’s magnetic shield.  One result is the beautiful colours of the northern lights.  Most effects of solar weather that have an earthly influence gain entrance through holes of this type that are in place when a solar disturbance hits.  In this sense the sites of reconnection are the 'keyholes’ for the intrusion of solar weather into near-earth space.

No Ordinary Skies: This artist watched a scientific programme about nebulas and found it inspiring.  Quite.

A single chemical reaction is said to have undergone autocatalysis, or to be autocatalytic, if the reaction product itself is the catalyst for that reaction.  A set of chemical reactions can be said to be “collectively autocatalytic” if a number of those reactions produce, as reaction products, catalysts for enough of the other reactions that the entire set of chemical reactions is self-sustaining given an input of energy and food molecules.  Ultimately, biological metabolism itself can be seen as a vast autocatalytic set, in that all of the molecular constituents of a biological cell are produced by reactions involving this same set of molecules.  Self-sustaining chemical factories, in which the product of one reaction is the feedstock or catalyst for another results in a virtuous, self-contained cycle of chemical creation.  Such a set can be made up of many autocatalytic subsets of different types, some of which can overlap.  In other words, autocatalytic sets can have a rich complex structure of their own.  Evolution can work on a single autocatalytic set, producing new subsets within it that are mutually dependent on each other — self-sustaining, functionally closed structures can arise at a higher level, an autocatalytic set of autocatalytic sets.  I take this to mean that autocatalysis is fractal.  The building blocks in an autocatalytic set need not be molecules at all but any units that can manipulate other units in the required way.  The economy is essentially the process of transforming raw materials into products such as hammers and spades that themselves facilitate further transformation of raw materials and so on.  The economy is an (emergent) autocatalytic set.

The world’s air has reached a new milestone for carbon dioxide (CO ² ), the main global-warming pollutant.  Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million (ppm) of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere.  The number isn’t quite a surprise, because it’s been rising at an accelerating pace.  Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for CO ² .  It now stands globally at 395.  So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400-level, but the rest of the world will follow.  CO ² is the chief greenhouse gas and stays in the atmosphere for 100 years.  Some CO ² is natural, mainly from decomposing dead plants and animals.  Before the Industrial Age, levels were around 275 ppm.  For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed.  The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase.  It’s been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw CO ² levels in the 400s.

"Global warming isn’t happening, but if it is happening it’s a natural cycle, and even if it’s happening and it’s man-made, well, it’ll actually help plants grow because that’s what plants breathe — CO ², you can look it up — and even if it’s happening and it’s man-made and it won’t be beneficial, well, it won’t be that bad and it’ll cost less to just adapt because spending all that money to stop using fossil fuels will be too hard, and by the way, alternative energy sources aren’t as good as enviros are promising, plus scientists are all alarmists so they can get funding for their studies, and the wind turbine lobby is influencing energy policy (but not coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear) — either that or there’s an international Marxist conspiracy to impose socialist policies and end American capitalism.”

Battered by erosion and facing global warming, some places are moving back from the sea.  Up and down the California coast, communities are deciding it may not be worth trying to wall off the encroaching ocean.  Until recently, the thought of bowing to nature was almost unheard of.  But attempts to curb coastal erosion are proving futile — and the problem is expected to grow worse if seas continue to rise.  The sea, some communities reason, is relentless.  Any line drawn in the sand is likely to eventually be washed over.  Around the globe, places that are experimenting with retreat have adopted various strategies.  In Britain, several sites along the Essex coast deliberately breached seawalls to create salt marshes, a natural barrier to flooding.  In the US, a stark example is found in Alaska, where entire villages have moved to higher ground in the face of melting sea ice.  Hawaii’s famous beaches slowly shrink.  Some scientists believe the state should explore whether, and how, to move back development.  Several states along the Atlantic coast have adopted no-build zones, setbacks, or rolling easements that allow development but with a caveat — as the sea advances, homeowners won’t build seawalls, but must shift inland or else let go.  The California Coastal Commission says planned retreat is an attractive option in theory, but difficult to execute along densely-populated coastlines.

For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been rebutting climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.  Over time, nearly every argument has been refuted by accumulating evidence.  Some polls indicate that as much as 97% of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.  Yet in recent years, those that remain unconvinced have seized on one last argument that can’t be readily dismissed — clouds will save us.  Clouds can either warm or cool Earth, depending on type and location.  Will they shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilisation depends?  The greatest remaining mystery in climate science is the difficulty predicting how clouds will react.  Most scientists believe clouds will have a neutral effect or even amplify warming (perhaps strongly).  But there’s ample room for dissent.  The energy that drives life on earth arrives as sunlight.  To maintain equilibrium, the earth returns the energy it doesn’t need back into space, primarily as heat.  Clouds alter the energy exchange flow in both directions.  The earth’s surface has already warmed about 1.4°F since the Industrial Revolution, most of that in the last 40 years.  Modest as it sounds, it’s an average for the whole planet, representing an enormous addition of heat.  An even-larger amount is being absorbed by the oceans, causing some of the world’s land ice to melt and oceans to rise.  At the low end, Earth could warm by another 2°F.  The likelier figure, some say, is 4°F.  At the high end, maybe 8°F.  In all outcomes, warming over land is roughly twice the global average and warming in the Arctic greater still.  In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20-25°F — more than enough over time to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea levels by 20 feet or more.  Ultimately, as more data accumulate, it’ll become obvious how clouds are reacting.  But that could take decades.  The stakes are high.

Richard Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth Project.  Its aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss.  Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, the project will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming.  The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6 billion data points – freely available on a website.  It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet’s temperature.  Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science.  By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming.  In no other field would Muller’s dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naïve.  “We’re bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious,” Muller says over a cup of tea.  “We’re an independent, non-political, non-partisan group.  We’ll gather data, do analysis, present results, and make it all available.  There’ll be no spin, whatever we find.”  Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change?  “We’re doing this because it’s the most important project in the world today.  Nothing else comes close.”  Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex ways.  Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for instruments that record in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.  The time measurements are taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm.  The accuracy of individual stations drifts over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next.  Each of these interferes with a station’s temperature measurements, perhaps making it read too cold, or too hot.  And these errors combine and build up.

A warmer Earth increases the melting of sea ice during summer, exposing more dark ocean water to incoming sunlight.  This causes increased absorption of solar radiation and excess summertime heating of the ocean — further accelerating the ice melt.  The excess heat is released to the atmosphere, especially during the autumn, decreasing the temperature and atmospheric pressure gradients between the Arctic and middle latitudes.  A diminished latitudinal pressure gradient is linked to a weakening of the winds associated with the polar vortex and jet stream.  Since the polar vortex normally retains the cold Arctic air masses up above the Arctic Circle, its weakening allows the cold air to invade lower latitudes, while the Arctic becomes warmer.  This seems counterintuitive to some, “proof” that global warming is misconceived.

Another way of providing a touchscreen you can feel: Might it be possible to somehow marry a physical tactile surface with a flat touchscreen?  Can you have any type of keyboard or interface you want rise and fall on demand out of a touchscreen (to get the best of both worlds)?  Tactus Technology has created a tactile layer that lets real physical buttons morph out of a transparent touchscreen surface when needed, disappearing back into the screen when done.  Made of glass or plastic, the 1-millimetre-thick slightly-elastic layer has numerous micro-channels filled with a non-toxic fluid.  Increasing fluid pressure with the aid of a small internal controller causes transparent physical buttons to grow out of the surface of the layer in less than a second.  Once formed, you can feel the buttons, rest your fingers on them, or type on them, just like a mechanical keyboard.  “When you don’t want the buttons, you reduce the fluid pressure, draw the fluid out and the buttons recede back to their original flat state.”  (No messy cleanup — the minimal amount of fluid needed is contained within the device.)  Once the layer morphs to create the buttons, they remain stable and you can type on them for seconds or hours.  Triggered to rise or fall by a proximity sensor, or by software, the button’s shape, size, height, and firmness can be very finely controlled.  It’s possible to pre-configure multiple button sets in the manufacturing process and have different button sets rise according to the users’ interface needs.  Immediate benefits are being able to touchtype much faster than the 25 words-per-minute possible with a touchscreen keyboard, and being able to do far more on-the-go with our existing devices.  At present, accessibility is a huge issue for the visually challenged, the elderly, and those suffering from muscle or joint disorders.  Using an increasing number of touchscreen-enabled devices (ATMs to microwaves to mobile phones) is a constant struggle — so if touchscreens truly become tactile, it could really help.

A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered — or thought they remembered — that the Sixth Commandment decreed: “No animal shall kill any other animal.”  And though no once cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings that had taken place did not square with this.  Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, and when Benjamin, as usual, said that he refused to meddle in such matters, she fetched Muriel.  Muriel read the commandment for her.  It ran, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.  Somehow or other the last two words had slipped out of the animal’s memory.  But they saw now that the commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball. — George Orwell, Animal Farm

This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties.  The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout.  Several were Americans.  Two were teens, including a girl who looked younger than her 17 years.  “How old are these people?”  Obama asked, according to two officials present.  “If they’re starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we’re moving into a whole different phase.”  It was not a theoretical question: Mr Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.  He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscores just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.  Mr Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.  When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.  The names of others on the panel are unknown, how they decide someone should die is unknown, and what evidence is used to determine a death sentence is unknown.  Everything about this process is deliberately opaque and there is no written record of the panel’s deliberations.  Nothing else in Mr Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record.  His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarised political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.  When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”  [Killing another person should never be “easy.”]  But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the CIA for identifying a terrorist “signature” are too lax.  The joke was that when the CIA sees “3 guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it’s a terrorist training camp, said one senior official.  Men loading a truck with fertiliser could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, sceptics argue.

Jailed former Yukos Oil Company owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky wished Prime Minister Vladimir Putin kindness and tolerance and said he pitied a man who felt only love for dogs.  During Putin’s presidency, Yukos, once Russia’s largest company by market value, was bankrupted under $30 billion worth of tax claims and sold off in pieces.  Khodorkovsky has called the case against him retribution for his political opposition to Putin.  Putin, 58, described as “Alpha Dog” in US embassy cables, is often shown on state tv as an action man in close proximity to animals including whales, tigers and bears.  Putin was asked in his annual call-in show last December whether he is happier in the presence of animals than his ministers.  “I believe the Prussian King Frederick the Great once said: 'The better I know people, the more I like dogs,’” Putin answered.  This quote is also attributed to Mark Twain, Madame de Staël, Charles De Gaulle, Gloria Allred, Alphonse de Lamartine, Joussenel, Jeanne-Marie Roland and Unknown (among others).  I wonder who really said it — I’m thinking some stand-up comic.

If an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have 3 months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place.  Not all domestic drone surveillance is that ominous.  “Air Force components may, at times, require newly collected or archived domestic imagery to perform certain missions,” the Air Force concluded.  Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; keeping tabs above a domestic military base.  Even those missions, however, raise “policy and legal concerns that require careful consideration, analysis and coordination with legal counsel.”  The potential trouble with those local intelligence missions is that once the drones’ powerful sensors and cameras sweep up imagery and other data from Americans nearby, the Air Force won’t simply erase the tapes.  It’ll start analysing whether the people recorded are, among other things, “persons or organisations reasonably believed to be engaged or about to engage, in international terrorist or international narcotics activities.”  Suddenly, accidental spying provides an entrance point into deliberate investigations, all done without a warrant.  And it doesn’t stop with the Air Force.  “US person information in the possession of an Air Force intelligence component may be disseminated pursuant to law, a court order,” or the Pentagon directive that governs acceptable domestic surveillance.  So what begins as a drone flight over, say, a national park to spot forest fires could end up with a dossier on campers getting passed on to law enforcement.

No synchrony: Of over 1,700 devices checked (at 4 prestigious East Coast hospitals), only 3% were found to be accurate to within 3 seconds.  One in 5 were off by more than 30 minutes; one ultrasound machine was running 42 years (and some minutes) early.  The average error was a staggering 24 minutes.  [Average?  The 42-year discrepancy has seriously skewed the average.  Honestly, the mean should have been used here.)  Such discrepancies might have been responsible for drug dosing errors, missed or repeated procedures and therapies that lasted longer or shorter than necessary.  In 2007, Andreas Valentin of the Rudolfstiftung Hospital in Vienna examined 113 intensive care units in 27 countries, finding that mistimed medications were the leading error in the administration of intravenous drugs, accounting for nearly half of all mistakes.  Via Andrew Sullivan.

"I have just returned from a business trip to Portugal with a potential fine of 27 (£25) and a possible Portuguese Police criminal record.  So what was my crime?  I hired a car from Hertz and drove it on the new motorway (paid for by an EU grant)!  In September 2011 the EU imposed an austerity package on Portugal — this included putting high tolls on the excellent motorway system.  But the Portuguese had never before charged motorway tolls, so there are no toll booths to collect the money.  The Portuguese government overcame this by installing cameras along the motorways, telling all Portuguese number plate motorists that they must pay the tolls — they must go to the post office after 2 days but before 5 days, to pay cash.  The result is that no Portuguese driver uses the motorways; they’re deserted, empty of traffic.  But ordinary roads are overloaded and town centres chaotic.  Ordinary roads are breaking up, but road works are cancelled because of the EU austerity measures.  I collected my rental car at 7pm at the airport and drove to my hotel.  Dutifully, 2 days later I went to the post office and asked what I owed for one short trip.  The counter lady advised my car had been used for 3 motorway journeys that day so I owed $9.90.  She wanted me to pay for the previous hirer who, quite logically, left on a plane earlier that day.  When I refused to pay someone else’s tolls, I was told I would get a fine and a criminal record.  She wouldn’t accept part payment for what I owed, so I left without paying anything.  And I still had to drive back to the airport on the motorway to return the car so how would I pay it all anyway?  I asked the staff at Hertz.  Their advice?  “It’s best not to use the motorway on the last 2 days of your stay in Portugal.”  But the only way to get there and not miss my plane is to drive on the motorway.  At the airport, I went to the post office and asked to pay for the trip; she said I’d have to come back in 2 days to pay for it because the scanning equipment doesn’t advise them until then.  I left unable to pay for the trip I had made.  When I handed the car back to Hertz, I told the manager what happened.  He explained, “Well, you’ll get a fine and a criminal citation in about 5 months time.”  Solution?  Don’t drive in Portugal.  (You can take a taxi.  Or just stay home instead.)

A train strike in Sao Paulo recently forced 20 million commuters into cars, creating a traffic jam that authorities estimate covered 250 kilometres of roads and highways at its peak.  This smashed the previous morning rush-hour record of 190 kilometres – but was not as high as Brazil’s all-time traffic record of 295 kilometres during an evening peak in June 2009.  Police motorcycles had to clear the way for ambulances through the chaos.  The incident has renewed concerns over Brazil’s ability to host the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.  Brazil’s traffic jams might be bad, but they aren’t the worst in the world.  In August 2010 a massive traffic jam in China lasted 9 days.  Cars and trucks bound for Beijing got caught in a queue for about 100 kilometres because of road works to repair damage caused by the increase in traffic.  A number of breakdowns at critical points, as cars overheated, brought the busy arterial to a grinding, steaming halt.  At the time, drivers complained locals over-charged them for food and water while they were stranded in the gridlock.  Australia’s worst ever gridlock lasted 12 hours.  In April 2010 thousands of motorists were left stranded overnight as rescue crews struggled to clear an overturned truck on the F3 freeway north of Sydney.

The Corryvreckan is the 3rd largest whirlpool in the world.  It’s on the northern side of the Gulf of Corryvreckan, between the islands of Jura and Scarba off the west coast of Scotland.  Flood tides and inflow from the Firth of Lorne to the west can drive the waters of Corryvreckan to waves of over 30 feet (9 metres), and the roar of the resulting maelstrom can be heard 10 miles (16 kilometres) away.  A documentary team once threw a mannequin into the Corryvreckan (“the Hag”) with a life jacket and depth gauge.  The mannequin was swallowed and spat up far down current with a depth gauge reading of 262 metres with evidence of being dragged along the bottom for a great distance.  Corryvreckan means “cauldron of the speckled seas” or “cauldron of the plaid”.  Strong Atlantic currents and unusual underwater topography conspire to produce a particularly intense tidal race in the channel.  As the flood tide enters the narrow area between the two islands it speeds up to 8.5 knots (about 16 kilometres per hour or 10 miles per hour), and also meets a variety of seabed features including a deep hole and a pyramid-shaped basalt pinnacle that rises from depths.  These features combine to create whirlpools, standing waves and a variety of other surface effects.  Although not, as is sometimes believed, formally classified by the Royal Navy as unnavigable (the Admiralty’s West Coast of Scotland Pilot guide to inshore waters calls it “very violent and dangerous” and says “no vessel should then attempt this passage without local knowledge”), the nearby 'Grey Dogs’, or 'Little Corryvreckan’, are classified as such.  Experienced scuba divers who have explored the waters have described it as “potentially the most dangerous dive in Britain.”

At Its Best — A Lake Las Vegas jewel, Villa del Cielo in Henderson, Nevada, has a main 6,524-square-foot 2-story villa plus 4 private and beautifully appointed casitas — 3 casitas serve guests and the 4th functions as a private office and library.  Owner and designer Lori Venners (of LVI Design) teamed with Texas architect Thomas Oppelt (Paddle Creek Design) and builder Greg Kaffka.  Construction took 4 years to complete.  The property is located at 12 Via Verona and is for sale through Sotheby’s Realty for US$6.9 million.

A study in France found that red lipstick boosts female waitresses’ tips from male customers, though not from female customers.  Researchers had 7 waitresses wear red, pink, brown or no lipstick while serving 447 customers in 3 restaurants in the town of Vannes.  In France, tipping is unusual because a 12% service charge is included in the price of the menu item.  Male patrons give tips more frequently to waitresses wearing red lipstick than to other waitresses, and, when they tip, they give more.  This effect was found only for the red lipstick, not the other colours.  A waitress’s lipstick or lack of it appeared to make no difference in how female patrons tipped.  In prior research, women photographed against a red background were rated as more sexually attractive by men, but not by other women.  Men found women in red clothes more attractive and even sat closer to a woman in a red shirt versus a blue one.

Last year, Charlene Wittstock, former Olympic swimmer, was forced to deny rumours that she attempted to run away from Monaco back to her home country of South Africa before her wedding to Prince Albert.  Scandal swirls around the house of Grimaldi after Voici magazine in France reported she was coaxed back from Nice for the wedding only after she struck a deal that if she provides Albert with an heir, she can get divorced and receive a generous financial settlement.  The 34-year-old, whose post-nuptial kiss with Albert was astonishingly awkward, is now 'depressed’ at her failure to get pregnant.  To be fair, you’d need recompense for marrying Albert.  For a noted playboy, he’s distinctly lacking in charisma; balding and overweight, he speaks in an alienating and unattractive Mid-Atlantic English drawl.  He has struggled with a stammer his whole life.  Fascinatingly, it’s far worse when he speaks in French, the language he used to communicate with his terrifying father, Prince Rainier, than when he speaks in English, the language he spoke to his mother.  Albert took the throne in July 2005 after the death of his strait-laced father.  The driven Rainier had built the sleepy Mediterranean port into a tax haven for the rich and created a glittering financial centre.  Most Monegasques won’t speak on the record, but Patrick Middleton, Irish-born editor of the expat website Riviera Reporter, is one of the few to publicly express doubts.  At the time of the wedding he said: “Monaco looks like a paradise from the outside, but as Grace Kelly found out, it is also a prison.  It’s a police state.  Phone calls are regularly monitored and if they don’t like you or you make trouble, they just kick you out.  It can be a very unpleasant place to actually live.  And, unlike Princess Grace, Charlene won’t be able to quietly zip off to her apartment in Paris for a month and do what she wants — the world’s media is watching.  Monaco is a combination of the sinister and the ridiculous.  It’s only the size of New York’s Central Park, so it’s a very incestuous community with enormous rivalries not just in the wider society, but also within the palace itself, which is a nest of vipers.  There are many very rich, idle trophy wives who have nothing better to do than criticise each other.”

By French photographer and artist Thomas Mailaender.  Using images from the internet, Thomas Maileander replays in a picture or sculpture one of the incongruous scenes of digital life.

Microglia are quite different from their neighbours.  Unlike neurons and other glial cells, they begin in the embryonic yolk sac as immune-cell progenitors, just as the macrophages that patrol the bloodstream for foreign invaders do.  During prenatal development microglia migrate to the brain, where they become its dedicated immune cells.  Researchers assume that the brain needs microglia because the blood–brain barrier seals it off not only from toxins, pathogens and some drugs in the bloodstream, but also from the immune cells circulating there.  In live brains, microglia retract their many appendages and morph into big, round bogs that gobble up pathogens and clear away cellular wreckage.  At rest, their delicate branches snake through densely packed neurons, constantly extending and shrinking.  They’re dynamic, regrowing when they need to, much more than any other adult brain cell.  Its concerted movements survey the brain every couple of hours, attacking invaders and damaged tissue and trimming away weak synapses between neurons.  This pruning occurs on a large scale in developing brains, and it’s an important part of learning and memory.  Autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia are often associated with faulty pruning.

Imagine it’s the year 2032.  You are a high school student.  You’re at a centre where a visual scanner confirms your identity so you can enter a room to receive a brain scan.  A robot attendant with a soothing voice recommends that you relax and take a nap.  As you lie down in the scanner, earphones playing your favourite music block out ambient noise, you find yourself drifting off to sleep.  When you wake up, the scan is over and there’s good news.  You have a good chance of being admitted to the college of your dreams.  Someday you’ll have some kind of brain imaging (or multiple kinds of brain imaging) to assess the quantity and quality of your gray and white matter, the speed of your information processing in specific brain networks, and the neurochemistry of your neurons.  The brain imaging data algorithms that combine all this information could well give an accurate indication of your intelligence and your cognitive strengths and weaknesses — maybe even your vocational talents.  A brain image is about 1/3 the cost of a test prep course, which most students enroll in anyway.  So if a student has the choice between taking a prep course and a paper-and-pencil SAT or opting for the brain scan, the brain scan might be easier, cheaper, and faster — and might even be demanded by parents.  Nevertheless, no matter how talented you are, you still have to work like mad to become the very best.  If you never do anything with your talents, then being smart won’t really mean much at all.  Will a scan spot that as well?

In a video shot by Canadian Denis Farmer in New Brunswick and posted on accuweather.com, clouds are moving fast (actually typical for a big storm front) and as they do, a man’s profile emerges.  (It even resembles Abraham Lincoln at one point.)

Unusual hand-carved antique French Art Nouveau sculptural chair from the mountain region of France in excellent original condition.  The wood species cannot be identified but is probably fruitwood.  Seat height is 17”.  Circa 1900; $4,800.

Paying for your taxi in NY isn’t one of the easiest things to do.  Drivers often push for cash, and sometimes the shoddy built-in card scanners stop working mysteriously.  What’s worse, you can only pay when you’re let out, which means you’re left frantically swiping your card while you obnoxiously block traffic.  Thing of the past.  With Square, you can pay while the trip is in progress.  Plus, it even sends receipts right to your phone or email.  According to the NY Times, taxi drivers will also be given an iPhone that allows them to add toll fees and to message with dispatch.  Embracing emerging technology like this is major a step.  The average New York City taxi cab driver makes US$90,747 in revenue per year.  There are roughly 13,267 cabs in the city.  In 2007, NYC forced cab drivers to begin taking credit cards, which involved installing a touch screen system for payment.  During payment, the user is presented with 3 default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%.  When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%.  The 15% tip — standard in New York City — is now unavailable unless you go through the mental arithmetic and manual entry of the amount.  But beyond the annoyance factor, there’s the “you’ve got to be kidding” element.  For a commodity service like a point-A-to-B cab ride, what would rate a 30% tip?  (Let alone a permanent “30% tip” button in the interface?)  After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%.  Those 3 buttons resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips.  Per year.  Those are some very valuable buttons.

The Space Shuttle Enterprise passes lower Manhattan and the still-under-construction 1 World Trade Center tower as it rides on a barge in New York Harbor, 6 June 2012.  It was being moved up the Hudson River to be placed at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.

Yoga instructor Tao Porchon-Lynch goes through poses in her yoga class in Hartsdale, New York, 14 May 2012.  At 93 years old, Porchon-Lynch was named the world’s oldest yoga teacher by Guinness World Records.

A bird comes in to land atop one of the domes of the landmark Taj Mahal as Venus, top left, begins to pass in front of the sun, as seen from Agra, India, Wednesday, 6 June 2012.

A small proportion of insect species are renowned for their social skills.  Ants, termites, and some bees and wasps are “eusocial insects” with highly-developed social structures and behaviours.  Five years ago, research put termites into the same group as cockroaches .  Termites are now classed as a new family of cockroaches called Termitidae.  There are around 4,000 cockroach species so far described by science.  Of these, about 25 have adapted to live among people.  Two species, the German cockroach (Blattella germanica) and the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) have been studied in particular detail.  During the day, both rest in groups within dark cracks, crevices, or pipes.  At night, these groups (herds, as scientists sometimes call them) split up, with individual cockroaches roaming in search of food and water.  Cockroaches that don’t hang out with one another suffer isolation syndromes.  Young German and American cockroaches left alone take longer to moult and become adults.  Their later behaviour is severely affected — they find it harder to join a community and mate later in life.  Cockroaches rely on chemical cues to convey information to their cohorts about the location and type of food they’ve found.  Using chemicals called cuticular hydrocarbons expressed on their bodies, they even communicate about which crack or shelter might make a good home for the day.  Sometimes they lay scent trails by depositing fæces rich in these chemicals, which other cockroaches can follow.  These chemicals also allow cockroaches to identify each other — in particular recognising who they’re related to, and how closely.  So-called kin recognition plays an important part in cockroach social life and allows individuals to avoid mating with siblings.  These behaviours permit information to be shared and decisions made quickly, benefiting the group as a whole.  Indeed, they can be seen as forms of cooperation, an emerging property of swarm intelligence.  Cockroaches are extremely adaptable to new environments and will eat almost anything.

Echidnas, also known as spiny anteaters, belong to the family Tachyglossidae in the monotreme order of egg-laying mammals.  There are 4 extant species, which, together with the platypus, are the only surviving members of that order, the only extant mammals that lay eggs.  Although their diet consists largely of ants and termites, they’re no more closely related to the true anteaters of the Americas than to any other placental mammal.  They live in Australia and New Guinea, small, solitary, covered with coarse hair and spines.  They have snouts, elongated and slender, which function as both mouth and nose.  Like the platypus, they’re equipped with electrosensors and have short, strong limbs with large claws.  They’re powerful diggers.  Echidnas have a tiny mouths and a toothless jaws and feed by tearing open soft logs, anthills and the like, using long, sticky tongues (which protrude from their snouts) to collect prey.  The short-beaked echidna’s diet consists largely of ants and termites, while the Zaglossus species eats worms and insect larvae.  The female lays a single soft-shelled, leathery egg 22 days after mating, depositing it directly into her pouch.  Hatching takes place after 10 days; the young echidna, called a puggle, then sucks milk from the pores of the two milk patches (monotremes have no nipples), remaining in the pouch for 45-55 days — when it starts to develop spines.  The mother digs a nursery burrow, deposits the puggle, and returns every 5 days to suckle it until weaning at 7 months.  The average wild echidna can live 16 years.  Males have a 4-headed penis; during mating, the heads on one side “shut down”, not growing in size; the others release semen into the female’s 2-branched reproductive tract. Heads used swap each time the mammal copulates.  Contrary to previous research, the echidna does enter REM sleep, but only when the ambient temperature is around 25°C (77°F).  At temperatures of 15°C (59°F) and 28°C (~82°F), REM sleep is suppressed.

Electroreception is known only in vertebrates.  It is found in lampreys, cartilaginous fishes (sharks, rays, chimaeras), lungfishes, bichirs, coelacanths, sturgeons, paddlefishes, catfish, gymnotiformes, elephant fishes, monotremes, and at least one species of cetacean.  Electroreceptive animals use this sense to locate objects around them.  This is important in ecological niches where the animal cannot depend on vision, for example in caves, in murky water and at night.  Many fish use electric fields to detect buried prey.  Some shark embryos and pups “freeze” when they detect the characteristic electric signal of their predators.  In passive electrolocation, the animal senses the weak bioelectric fields generated by other animals and uses it to locate them.  These electric fields are generated by all animals due to the activity of their nerves and muscles.  Sharks are the most electrically sensitive animals known, responding to DC fields as low as 5 nVolts per centimetre.  The electric field sensors of sharks are called the ampullae of Lorenzini.  They consist of electroreceptor cells connected to the seawater by pores on their snouts and other zones of the head.  A problem with the early submarine telegraph cables was damage caused by sharks who sensed the electric fields produced by these cables.  It’s possible that sharks may use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate the oceans using this sense.  The electroreceptors of monotremes consist of free nerve endings unlike the specialised receptor cells of fish and amphibians.  They’re located in the mucous glands of the snout.  Among the monotremes, the platypus has the most acute electric sense.  The platypus appears to use electroreception along with pressure sensors to determine the distance to prey from the delay between the arrival of electrical signals and pressure changes in the water.  The electroreceptive capabilities of the two species of echidna (which are terrestrial) are much simpler.  Experiments have shown that they can be trained to respond to weak electric fields in water and moist soil.  This behaviour is believed to be used in hunting for buried prey after rains.  The electric sense of the echidna is hypothesised to be an evolutionary remnant from a platypus-like ancestor.  The vibrissal crypts of the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis) were shown to be capable of electroreception as low as 4.8 μV per centimetre — sufficient to detect small fish.

I never saw a purple crab; I never hope to see one.  But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.  Four new species of freshwater crab, bright purple in colour, have been discovered in the biologically diverse but ecologically-threatened Philippines.  The tiny crustaceans burrow under boulders and roots in streams, feeding on dead plants, fruits, carrion and small animals in the water at night, said Hendrik Freitag of Germany’s Senckenberg Museum of Zoology.  Found only in small, lowland-forest ecosystems in the Palawan island group, most have purple shells, with claws and legs tipped red.  The 4 new species slightly differ from each other in the shapes of their body shells, legs, and sex organs.  The Philippines is one of 17 countries that harbours most of Earth’s plant and animal life.  Reptiles, birds or mammals likely prey on the crabs; it’s possible people in remote areas also collect them for food.

The manatee is a cousin to the dugong — both are thought to have evolved from 4-legged land mammals over 60 million years ago.  Their closest living relatives today are elephants and hyraxes.  Manatees are brownish-gray and have thick, wrinkled skin, often with coarse hair, or “whiskers”, a mass of 400-550 kilograms (880-1,200 pounds) and a mean length of 2.8-3.0 metres (9.2-9.8 feet), though some can get more than twice that big.  Babies are born weighing an average of 30 kilograms (66 pounds).  They have large, flexible, prehensile upper lips, used to gather food and eat, as well as for social interactions and communications.  Their snouts are shorter than dugongs; their small, widely-spaced eyes have eyelids that close in a circular manner.  Adults have a set of cheek teeth which are continually replaced throughout life (new teeth grow at the rear as older teeth fall out farther forward).  At any given time, there typically are no more than 6 teeth in each jaw.  The manatee’s tail is paddle-shaped, while the dugong’s tail is fluked.  Half a manatee’s day is spent sleeping in water, surfacing for air at intervals no greater than 20 minutes.  The rest of the time is spent grazing in shallow waters at depths of 1–2 metres (3.3–6.6 feet).  The Florida subspecies is known to live up to 60 years.  Manatees understand discrimination tasks and show signs of complex associated learning and advanced long term memory on a level similar to dolphins.  They typically breed every two years; gestation lasts about a year, and it takes a further 12-18 months to wean the calf.  Only a single calf is born at a time.  Aside from mothers with young or males following a receptive female, manatees are solitary creatures.  They emit a wide range of sounds used in communication, especially between cows and their calves.  Adults communicate to maintain contact (and taste and smell may at times be forms of communication).  Manatees are herbivores and eat over 60 different plant species (such as mangrove leaves, turtle grass, and algae).  An adult commonly eat up to 10% of its body weight per day.  They have been known to eat small amounts of fish from nets.  Their slow-moving, curious nature, coupled with dense coastal development, has led to many violent collisions with propeller-driven boats and ships, leading frequently to maiming, disfigurement, and even death.  As a result, a large proportion of manatees exhibit spiral cutting propeller scars on their backs.  They are listed as vulnerable to extinction.

Having evaded a fisherman’s net this mullet fish is gobbled up whole by a brown pelican hunting in the waters around the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador.  Spotting an opportunity, the peckish pelican opens it gaping bill to scoop up its supper, swallowing the fish whole.  Professional photographer Tui de Roy, from Takaka, New Zealand took the amazing underwater snap in the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific.

Lots of things happened on that day.  They must have.  But the claim by a University of Cambridge-trained computer scientist that his supposedly super computer programme has determined that the second Sunday in April, 1954, was the most boring day since the dawn of the 20th century is getting some attention.  After a computer analysis of more than 300 million facts (done by a search engine called True Knowledge), it seemes clear that … well … nothing great happened on 11 April 1954.  While on most days, “lots of famous people are born, famous people die, there are events happening … this particular day was extremely notable for having almost nothing occur”.

More than 200,000,000 people have visited the tower since its construction in 1889, making it the most visited paid monument in the world.  On 31 March 2012 the structure turned 125 years old.  One of the biggest Eiffel Tower “haters”, novelist Guy de Maupassant, even used to have lunch in the Tower’s restaurant — that was the only place in Paris where he couldn’t see this “disgusting” structure, he explained.  Around 60 tons of paint are used every 7 years to protect it from rust.  It gets covered in 3 shades of brown, with the darkest at the bottom.  (The metal structure of the Eiffel Tower weighs 7,300 tonnes, while the entire structure, including non-metal parts, weighs around 10,100 tonnes.)  Even the strongest storm gives it only a 3.5 inch sway.  And the sun can make the top of the tower shift away up to 7 inches.  The height of Eiffel Tower, including its 24 metre (79 foot) antenna, is 324 metres, equivalent to 81 levels in a conventional building.  (From here and there.)

This man is 69 years old, but half his face looks much older than that.  He was a trucker and, for 28 years, his face received more sunlight on the left side, resulting in premature ageing.  His condition is called unilateral dermatoheliosis, from the Greek dermis and helios, skin and sun.  It’s also called photoageing, and it results from chronic exposure to the sun’s UVA and UVB rays.  In his case, it only affected the left side of his face because of his work.  As he drove, he received many more hours of sunlight through the left window of his vehicle.  Since UVB and UVA can cause DNA mutations leading to skin cancer, doctors recommended their patient use sun protection and topical retinoids, as well as periodic monitoring for skin cancer.  If you’re going to be exposed to the sun in any way — even if you aren’t at the beach or a swimming pool — use protection.

Alfred Hitchcock wearing a Beatle wig, 1964.

Lower Mustang, Annapurna region, Nepal.

I have no idea what this is — or was.