Citizen Science in the City
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Month: February 2017
Watch a Record 104 Satellites Tumble Into Orbit
An Indian rocket delivered a record-setting 104 satellites into orbit Tuesday night. A camera on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle captured the spacecraft, most of them tiny CubeSats, as they tumbled into orbit—the most placed into orbit by a single vehicle. A majority of the satellites belong to a U.S.-based company called Planet which hopes to establish a network of tiny satellites to provide near-real-time imaging of Earth. [embedded content] An Indian cartography ...read more
The Fantasy of Connecting Two Spinal Cords
A peculiar new paper proposes the idea of “connecting two spinal cords as a way of sharing information between two brains”. The author is Portuguese psychiatrist Amílcar Silva-dos-Santos and the paper appears in Frontiers in Psychology. Frontiers are a publisher with a troubled history of publishing dubious science. But this paper is unusual, even by Frontiers’ standards, because it contains virtually no science at all. In a nutshell, Silva-Dos-Santos suggests that it w ...read more
Facial Recognition Software: The Next Big Thing in Species Conservation?
(Credit: Stacey Tecot) How do you care for the creatures you love? You shoot them with tranquilizer darts, capture them in cages, embed microchips, pierce their ears or make them wear funny collars. For scientists who monitor endangered species, these are tried-and-true methods to count and track individuals in a given population—along with photography and experts’ sharp eyes. But capturing or sedating an animal is stressing (and could cause physical harm), and boots-on-the-ground ...read more
Flashback Friday: Facial attractiveness is predicted by parental income during childhood.
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Rebirth and Recovery in the Shadow of Chernobyl
Contamination map of the Chernobyl region in 1996. Twenty one years later the hottest areas remain off limits, but quasi-normal life has returned in the less affected “unnamed zone,” including the Rivne Province at the west (left) end of this map. (Credit: CIA Factbook/Sting/MTruch) Regular readers of this blog know that I normally focus on cosmic topics: comets, exoplanets, dark matter, the search for alien life, and the like. I don’t tangle so much with the everyday challen ...read more
Even without a boost from El Niño, January 2017 was 3rd warmest such month in records dating back 137 years
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How a Classic Audio Illusion Messes With Our Brains
(Credit: ra2studio/Shutterstock) When we hold a conversation, it’s not just our ears that are paying attention. We may not realize it, but our eyes are picking up on visual information as well to give us a better idea of what we should be hearing. It’s not necessary, of course, we can easily carry on a conversation in the dark, but it’s a form of redundancy that helps to make up for any aural lapses. Our brains integrate information from both senses to compile a complete ...read more
NASA's New Solutions for Problems 1 and 2
Astronaut Ron Garan has no time to come back in for a bathroom break during a spacewalk in 2011. (Credit: NASA) When you’ve gotta’ go you’ve gotta’ go. But what if you’re on a space walk when nature calls? “Spaceflight is not always glamorous,” said NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio in a video released on the HeroX crowdsourcing site in October which introduced NASA’s Space Poop Challenge—yup, space poop. The goal for participants, aside from ...read more
Collective False Memories: What's Behind the 'Mandela Effect'?
Would you trust a memory that felt as real as all your other memories, and if other people confirmed that they remembered it too? What if the memory turned out to be false? This scenario was named the ‘Mandela effect’ by the self-described ‘paranormal consultant’ Fiona Broome after she discovered that other people shared her (false) memory of the South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Is a shared false memory really due to a s ...read more