When you think of the great court cases in the past century where science meets the law, you’re probably thinking about cases like Roe v. Wade or the Scopes Monkey Trial—not Commonwealth v. Fennie. And that’s deservedly so, because this latest science-in-the-courtroom case sounds more like science meets clown: A judge passed his verdict after he methodically proved that pizza’s state of matter is indeed a solid.
It all started last October, when 20-year-old William James Fennie III apparently chucked a pizza slice at a passing car in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He then went on to resist arrest, forcing two officers to Taser him to the ground.
Now, based on the fact that Pennsylvania law clearly states that it is illegal to throw “any solid object” toward a roadway, you might think President Judge James P. MacElree’s decision was an easy one: After all, it doesn’t take a degree in pizza mechanics to conclude that pizza counts as “any solid object.” But Fennie’s attorney argued that the legal definitions are vague and pizza shouldn’t legally count as a “missile.”
This prompted Judge MacElree to undertake a high-stakes experiment, with the starting question: Is pizza a solid object?
It’s a sad day for aspiring kingpins and Mafia godfathers–it turns out that you can’t dissolve a corpse within minutes by dunking it in sulfuric acid. If that’s not bad enough, scientists have also shown that even if you wait days, acid alone cannot fully destroy “the evidence.”
This Mafia technique of disintegrating human flesh is known as a “white shotgun” (or “lupara bianca”) murder, a term that entered public parlance in the early 1980s when police in Palermo, Sicily, discovered vats of acid in a Mafia boss’s digs. The crime leader, Filippo Marchese, had his goons kill their victims and dissolve the bodies in a room known as “the chamber of death.” But violent people tend to meet violent deaths, and Marchese was himself dissolved in acid sometime in 1982.
If one London art gallery is correct in predicting the future of police surveillance, we may have to redefine the meaning of ‘sting’ operation: one artist’s mock-interview with a (fake) beekeeping police officer describes how bees can be used to track down growers of illegal plants–and the scary thing is that this art video is only a hop and a skip from reality.
An exhibition called “High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture” at London’s Wellcome Collection features a short film by artist Thomas Thwaites, entitled “Policing Genes,” in which a mock police officer explains the latest in surveillance trickery. Essentially, the police officers tend bee hives, and when the bees return from their daily pollen-hunt, the officers not only check the bees for pollen from such plants as marijuana, but can also use software to decode the dance of the honeybee. And since pollen-laden bees dance to tell the other bees where they found the pollen, decoding the dance would tell the police the exact location of the illegal plants.
It turns out self-flagellating medieval monks had it right (sort of): there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned, self-inflicted pain to cleanse your conscience, according to the latest research.
Researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, led by psychologist Brock Bastian, wanted to see whether feelings of guilt diminish with pain. To test this, they split a group of 62 volunteers into three groups and asked two of the groups to write about a scenario in which they rejected another person; the control group was asked to write about a non-guilt-ridden encounter. After assessing their guilt via a questionnaire, they had some volunteers dip their hands in warm water and others to dip their hands in ice water. Finally, the researchers assessed the subjects’ guilt levels once again, as well as their self-reported pain levels. As New Scientist reports:
Participants who had written about rejecting another left their hands in the ice bucket for longer than those who had written about a normal interaction. They also reported more pain – regardless of how long their hand was in the ice. Crucially, participants who placed their hand in ice later had less than half as much guilt, as measured by the questionnaire, as those who had put their hand in warm water.
One researcher, Rob Nelissen from Tilburg University, Netherlands, has a Harry Potter-inspired name for this odd pain-guilt-relief link: the “Dobby effect.” From New Scientist:
He says that self-punishment might relieve guilt by functioning as “a signal by which a transgressor shows remorse to his or her victim when there are no other less painful means available, such as giving a bunch of flowers…. In line with this view, excessive forms of self-punishment could be perceived as a consequence of unresolved guilt,” Nelissen adds. [New Scientist]
But please, don’t go flagellating yourself the next time you feel a twinge of guilt–a simple sorry might be a better option.
Online flashers could soon be out of a hobby, thanks to a team of software engineers from the University of Colorado and McGill University. The team is developing a system called SafeVchat, which is meant to detect and filter out obscene images, foiling even the fastest of flashers.
The team tested their algorithms at Chatroulette, the infamous online video-chat service that lets you communicate with randomly-selected strangers, and the results looked good.
As you can probably guess, the problem with seeing video images of random strangers is that some of these people are all-too-eager to show off their flesh. Despite the age restrictions on some video-chat sites and the noble-yet-feeble first attempts at creating filtering software, flashers still peddle their wares with ease and have seemed as unstoppable as a bad rash.
A shaft of green laser light spears out from a cargo ship, targeting a small skiff bobbing in the ocean almost a mile away. The armed miscreants aboard the skiff take one look at the dazzling light and shield their eyes with cries of distress. How can these pirates attack if they can’t see?
That’s the idea behind an anti-pirate laser cannon being developed by a UK defense company in response to the increase in hijackings off the coast of Somalia. The laser would be used in conjunction with ships’ high-frequency surface radars that detect the small vessels used by Somali pirates, and it would function as a kind of warning shot across their bow. New Scientist reports that the laser isn’t intended to fry pirates to a crisp, nor even to blind them forever:
In a completely shocking and unexpected turn of events, the company behind Power Balance wristbands has officially admitted that the product isn’t backed by any scientific studies–and that the company’s advertisements were misleading. And right after the holographic technology to improve “balance, strength and energy” was named CNBC’s Sports Product of 2010!
Did you catch that? That was sarcasm. And while we here at DISCOVER may have our own opinions, the product was endorsed by SHAQ (whose name is also spelled in all caps). SHAQ, how could you lie to us after we supported you through the Kazaam! days?
Power Balance claims that the holograms (which are exactly like the ones in your credit cards) embedded in their wristbands or pendants have some sort of “energy flow” which can be manipulated to “resonate” with the body’s natural “energy flow.” In quotes in the Daily Mail, Power Balance co-founder Josh Rodarmel explains how they “work”:
“Everything in nature has a set frequency. The body has a frequency and things which cause negativity to the human body – like mobile phones and radio waves – break down its natural healing frequency. My brother and I worked out a way of putting good frequencies into our holograms so they balance out the body, making it stronger and more flexible. It works in different ways for different people. Athletes say they can last longer on the field, that they have better balance and that their muscles recover quicker. Non-athletes say it works for them, too, giving them that extra boost off the field, in many areas of life including the office and in the bedroom.”
We’ve caught that frequency before, Rodarmel–it’s the frequency of pseudoscientific hogwash. The company never provided any proof that the bands worked, or any logical reason why they should.
A very similar company’s product demonstration has also been debunked by the Australian skeptic Richard Saunders. See his video below:
Checking your wife’s email to see if she’s cheating on you: It definitely makes you a snoop, and possibly a bad husband. But a hacker?
That’s the label prosecutors are trying to lay on Leon Walker, charging the 33-year-old man with breaking a statute that’s more normally applied to people who want to steal your credit card numbers or your identity rather than prove your infidelity. From the Detroit Free Press:
Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Leon Walker. “The guy is a hacker,” Cooper said in a voice mail response to the Free Press last week. “It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way.”
Mr. Walker is indeed a computer technician, but his defense rests on arguing that his wife had no expectation of privacy because he used the computer in question for work—it wasn’t hers alone. Furthermore, he says, she kept her passwords in a notebook next to the computer (Public service announcement: Don’t ever do this).
The Chevy Volt is taking aim at the green market. Not only did it nab the 2010 green car of the year award, but it’s also helping to clean up the mess that big oil company BP made in the Gulf of Mexico.
GM is recycling 10,000 pounds of oil-soaked booms from the gulf into parts for the Volt. Instead of sending the booms to landfills, their absorbent polypropylene (which bears plastic-recycling #5) filler will be cleaned and recycled, GM said in the press release:
“This was purely a matter of helping out,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience.”
It seems wind turbines aren’t just stirring up energy, but a fair bit of emotion, too. And when that emotion comes in the form of gunshots, it makes the news.
In early December someone sabotaged poor wind turbine number 8 in a wind farm in Bingham township, Michigan by taking out its transformer. The Huron Daily Tribune reports:
A hole found in the transformer’s radiator resulted in damage, which caused oil to leak out. The exact amount of damage to the $50,000 transformer was not reported. The hole in the transformer, according to police, appears to be from a small caliber firearm…. Huron County Sheriff Kelly J. Hanson said the damage to the transformer appears to be “intentional sabotage.”
The hole in the wind turbine’s transformer caused it to break down, which resulted in the turbine overheating and automatically shutting down. The shooter remains on the lam, and his motives are not clear, says Treehugger:
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
When you think of the great court cases in the past century where science meets the law, you’re probably thinking about cases like Roe v. Wade or the Scopes Monkey Trial—not Commonwealth v. Fennie. And that’s deservedly so, because this latest science-in-the-courtroom case sounds more like science meets clown: A judge passed his verdict after he methodically proved that pizza’s state of matter is indeed a solid.
