Discoblog » Events

Can Your Dog Cut a Rug? The DISCOVER Dancing Pet Challenge

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:21:10 +0000

Snowball the dancing, Backstreet Boys-loving cockatoo is more than a web meme: he is a scientific conundrum. Bobbing in time to music is a shockingly rare behavior, and even monkeys, capable of learning very complex tasks, find it impossible to get down to the beat even after more than a year of training. It’s marvelous evolutionary serendipity that humans dance, thinks neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, who has found that our hearing system and motor control are intimately linked. In DISCOVER’s 2011 special issue on the brain, Patel discusses his idea that that animals needed a vocal-learning brain in order to get their groove on:

The implication is that dogs and cats can never do it, horses and chimps can never do it, but maybe other vocal-learning species can do it. I proposed that idea, but it was purely hypothetical until a few years after, when along came Snowball [in 2007].

But more importantly (drumroll), he issues a challenge:

If your pet really does have rhythm, he wants to know about it. “If someone has a dog that can dance to the beat, it will totally refute my hypothesis,” he says, “and that’s progress in ...

NFL Hopefuls’ New “Smart Shirts” Know Them Inside & Out

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:36:16 +0000

The game may be the same, but the gear is different: This Saturday, as NFL prospects try to impress coaches at the Combine workouts, a few players will don smart shirts–souped-up sports attire that measures everything from players’ heart rates to g forces of acceleration.

Designed by Under Armour and Zephyr, this sophisticated shirt is called the Under Armour E39. It weighs less than 0.3 pounds and boasts a load of sensors that sit just below the athlete’s sternum; the sensors include a triaxial accelerometer, a heart-rate monitor, and a breathing-rate monitor. As an athlete practices, trainers can follow the player’s vital signs on their smartphones, laptops, or any other device that can receive Bluetooth data. As Wired explains:

“What we have is something very close to the body’s center of mass that’s measuring the accelerometry data from that center of mass,” Under Armour vice president Kevin Haley told Wired.com.

This smart shirt innovates trainers’ and coaches’ performance evaluation by allowing them to see exactly how runners accelerate–and whether a player’s stride can be improved to gain speed. It does this by separately measuring acceleration and direction change on the left and right sides of a player, ...

Scientists Look for DNA on Envelopes That Amelia Earhart Licked

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:50:18 +0000

Researchers hope to collect spit from someone who died more than 70 years ago: the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. By extracting the famous flyer’s DNA from old envelopes, researchers hope to finally put to rest one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries.

Earhart disappeared–along with her navigator, Fred Noonan–in 1937, when she was trying to become the first female to fly around the globe. Communication with her plane was lost as she flew near Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. government searched in vain for the two adventurers’ remains, and on January 5, 1939, Earhart was officially pronounced dead. But speculation never stopped on whether the duo died in a crash at sea, or whether they survived for some time on a deserted island.

Just two years ago researchers from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery found bone fragments on Nikumaroro Island that could be part of Amelia Earhart’s finger. The finding is controversial because a dead sea turtle was also found nearby, raising suggestions that the purported piece of Earhart actually belongs to a turtle. According to National Geographic:

Right now, “anyone ...

Docs Say a Migraine—Not a Stroke—Caused Reporter’s On-Air Babbling

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:36:00 +0000

It turns out that the news reporter who suddenly began speaking gibberish as she covered the Grammy Awards wasn’t suffering from a stroke–doctors conclude that a migraine is to blame.

Serene Branson, a reporter for KCBS-TV, began speaking incoherently during her coverage of the annual music awards ceremony. “As soon as I opened my mouth I knew something was wrong,” Branson told MSNBC. “I was having trouble remembering the word for Grammy…. I knew what I wanted to say but I didn’t have the words to say it.”

Many internet viewers thought she was stricken by an on-air stroke, but physicians from the University of California at Los Angeles scanned her head and tested her blood, and discovered that she was simply the victim of a migraine. It all started with a strong headache, Branson told MSNBC, but then it escalated:

“At around 10 o’clock that night I was sitting in the live truck with my field producer and the photographer and I was starting to look at some of my notes,” she said. “I started to think, the words on the page are blurry and I could notice that my thoughts ...

Japan Wants to Send a Tweeting Companion-Bot to the Space Station

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:44:59 +0000

It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.

It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.

The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.

And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.

Finally, the bot could take up that crutial task: manning a Twitter feed. The researchers note that NASA’s bot has a Twitter feed, but ...

Triumph: Fake Astronauts Walk on Fake Mars!

Patrick Morgan — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:59:56 +0000

The simulated eagle has finally landed, and today, two men have walked upon the red sands of fake Mars. This jaunt along a sandpit in Moscow, the latest episode in the Mars500 project designed to test human endurance, gives the cosmonauts a respite from their past eight months of windowless confinement.

As the BBC reports:

“We have made great progress today,” commented Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who was watching a video feed of the two men. “All systems have been working normally.”

Organized by Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, the Mars500 project seeks to better understand how humans would endure the psychological and physical effects of the isolation and confinement necessary for a real mission to Mars. The ’500′ in Mars500 indicates the mission’s time frame–the organizers estimated that it would takes 250 days to travel to Mars, and then allotted 30 days for surface exploration before a 240-day return trip. (Technically, the project’s name should be Mars520.)

The six crew members have been conducting experiments during their mission, which began last June, and ...

Shocker: Artist’s Implanted Head-Cam Causes Medical Problems

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:04:04 +0000

Just as Beethoven suffered through hearing loss and Hemingway struggled with depression, an artist at New York University is also suffering for his art, but in a slightly different way: his body has rejected part of the camera that he implanted in his head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKoRMWdESTo&feature=player_embedded

Back in November, Wafaa Bilal, an NYU photography professor, embarked on a novel art experiment: he went to a Los Angeles tattoo shop and had a titanium base inserted behind the skin on the back of his head. Three posts that extended from this insert were then attached to a camera that snapped pictures once a minute, viewable to everyone on his website.

Nobody sticks a camera into his head without a reason–and Bilal had at least two, or maybe three. After the 1991 Gulf War the Iraqi artist became a refugee, and eventually immigrated to the United States. Being on the move so much made him want to keep a record of his past, and there’s no better way to see where you’ve been than to have a camera snapping shots from the back of your head. His other reason has to do with living in the present, as The Chronicle of Higher ...

Video: See the First Aerial Footage of an Uncontacted Amazonian Tribe

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:41:19 +0000

In the rainforest along the border between Brazil and Peru, an indigenous tribe is ignoring the 21st century and living life the old-fashioned way. Experts believe this “uncontacted tribe” has had no direct contact with mainstream society, but the Brazilian government has known about the tribe for 20 years and routinely flies above the settlement to check on the inhabitants’ well-being.

NOw, the BBC has released the first ever video footage of this tribe, which had previously only been seen in photographs:

The footage was filmed in cooperation with the Brazilian government, and was featured on the BBC’s Human Planet series. It was shot in the summer of 2010 along the Peru-Brazil border using a zoom lens that allowed the crew to film from more than a half-mile away.

The Brazilian government flies over the settlements once a year to check on the tribe. As José Carlos Meirelles, the Indian-affairs specialist who led the video expedition, explains to National Geographic:

“They always get scared when they see an aircraft, but this tribe is used to seeing commercial flights—Boeings and local jets—flying over the region…. I prefer to get them scared once a year—and make sure they are healthy, growing ...

Crowdsourcers Trounce ESPN Pundits on Fantasy Football Picks

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:23:47 +0000

Feel free to thump your chest and exchange high-fives before Sunday’s big game, because thanks to crowdsourcing, common folk have outsmarted the ESPN experts.

This past summer, a crowdsourcing company called Crowdflower wanted to see if the wisdom of crowds could best ESPN pundits by making better predictions of the season’s best football players. Against the power of crowdsourced labor from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, the ESPN list didn’t stand a chance. The results show that the crowdsourcers beat the experts hands down, and the outcome is especially clear in the top 25 players’ ranking.

New Scientist reports:

Before the season started, Crowdflower had 550 workers vote on which one of a pair of players would be the more valuable member of a fantasy league team. Stats on the players were available for those who wanted help, but complete novices were warned off. “If you think football is a game where you’re really only allowed to touch the ball with your feet, this probably isn’t the job for you,” read the advert.

But how exactly does crowdsourcing harness such soothsaying ...

Facebook Addicts, Rejoice: Airplanes Offer Free Access in February

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:16:02 +0000

For all those penny-pinching, world-traveling Facebook-users out there, you’re in luck: you’ll be able to check Facebook during your flight and not pay a dime if you fly during the short, sweet month of February.

Of course this means we all need to prepare ourselves for the inane status updates. Like: “I can see my house from here!” And: “Clouds… wow.”

Participating airlines–including American Airlines, Delta, United Airlines, AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, Virgin America, and U.S. Airways–are partnering with Gogo Inflight Internet and Ford to provide airline passengers with free Facebook access. As Mashable reports:

It’ll work like this: Once the travelers are allowed to turn on tablets, phones, laptops and other personal electronic devices, they will be able to access the Gogo Wi-Fi network, and then click on the Ford/Facebook banner to access Facebook.

Of course, the ulterior motive is that you won’t want to stop just at Facebook, in which case you’ll be charged for internet access, starting at around $5. And in March, the Facebook free ride will be over, too.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Map of Facebook Friend Connections Lights Up the World

Fake Mars Astronauts Are Approaching Fake Mars!

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:13:01 +0000

With less than 10,000 miles to go until they reach fake Mars, the fake mission to the Red Planet is going as planned. Which is to say, the space travel simulation project known as Mars-500 project is full of mishaps and surprises, as the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems tests the fake astronauts’ ability to handle anything outer space could throw at them.

The next milestone: the fake arrival in Mars orbit on February 1.

And for being confined to a 1,800-square-foot test module for 520 lonely days, the crew members are doing a stellar job. In their last update, published on the official Mars-500 website on January 14, they give a terse but positive appraisal of their condition:

226th day of the experiment. Scientific equipment is in operable condition. Clarification for implementation of special experiments is carried out. There are no alterations of health state which can interfere with participating in the experiment and realizing of scientific program.

The list of experiments is long, and they’re all meant to test the many difficulties involved in actually traveling to Mars, from astronauts’ overall health ...

Ping Pong Night at the Museum: Grab Your Paddle and Talk Science

Shannon Palus — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:56:52 +0000

It wasn’t your typical American Museum of Natural History crowd: yesterday evening, a handful of kids and the standard science nerds were joined in the Hall of Ocean Life by ping pong aficionados.

Five ping pong tables—courtesy of co-host SPiN ping pong club—were set up in the hall for the event, “This is Your Brain on Ping Pong.” The evening included time for guests to practice the sport, as well as a panel discussion moderated by museum icthyologist Melanie Stiassny.

The evening’s attempts to connect ping pong and science were, well, a little weak. Stiassny ran through a brief history of life on Earth, with references to the sport dotting her speech like product placements: 500 million years ago the first organisms with nervous systems are on the scene—hey, you need a spinal cord to control a ping pong paddle! “Clearly evolution has a purpose, and that purpose is ping pong,” said Stiassny.

One panelist was legendary actress Susan Sarandon, perhaps most beloved for her role as Janet in Rocky Horror; she’s also an investor in SPiN. Why does she think SPiN is so popular? Sarandon claimed that ...

Google’s First Science Fair Seeks Volcano-Builders From Around the World

Eliza Strickland — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:30:39 +0000

Science geek teens of the world: Google wants to see what you can do.

This morning, the company announced its first worldwide science fair for students between the ages of 13 and 18. Students can participate from anywhere by posting a write-up of their project on the Internet (Google got one high school senior from Oregon to create an example). In its announcement, Google says it hopes this project will encourage talented young scientists to pursue their ideas:

In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered?

This science fair sounds fancier than your average high school competition–prizes include a trip to the Galapagos and a jaunt to the physics mecca, CERN. ...

Great Space Balls of Fire! How to Explain Weird Sightings Over Australia?

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:29:08 +0000

Those “green UFOs” that caused a stir in Australia four years ago? Researchers say they definitely weren’t alien spaceships (not like they were going to say anything different), but they still aren’t sure what they actually were.

The three green fireballs were spotted by more than 100 people in the sky over Queensland, Australia on May 16th, 2006. The potential abductees said the lights were brighter than the moon, but not as bright as the sun. A single farmer claims to have seen one of the green balls bouncing down the side of a mountain after hitting the earth.

Stephen Hughes, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, has just published a paper on the phenomenon in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He explained to LiveScience that the main fireballs were most likely caused by a meteor breaking up and burning in earth’s atmosphere:

In fact, a commercial airline pilot who landed in New Zealand that day reported seeing a meteor breaking up into fragments, which turned green as the bits descended in the direction of Australia. The timing of the fireballs ...

USB Ports on New York City’s Streets: Plug in if You Dare

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:05:19 +0000

Click here to view gallery

Halloween Costume Idea: Pretend You Have a Portal in Your Torso

Eliza Strickland — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:09:02 +0000

There are still a few days before Halloween costume frenzy will reach its peak, but we think we have a winner. Forget all those Lady Gaga and Chilean miner costumes: We’re taken with Ben Heck‘s ingenious see-through portal t-shirt.

This high-tech costume makes it look like the wearer has a hole in his torso, thanks to a tiny camera on his back, and an LCD screen on his chest that shows the image captured by the camera. Want your own? Here’s a blow-by-blow video of how to build it. There are a few digressions into other projects, but we encourage you to watch through and get all the info you need to avoid the fate of being just another Gaga.

Image: Ben Heck

The Guggenheim/YouTube Art Experiment: See Winning Videos Here

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:17:16 +0000

In June, the Guggenheim Museum announced a collaborative video contest with none other than YouTube. Yes, you read that right: YouTube, the video website overrun with videos of cats and each tween’s latest shopping spree.

The contest was open to anyone and everyone who has made a video in the last two years. A total of 23,000 videos were submitted and judged by a panel of artists and curators, and the competition’s 25 winners were announced last night. These 25 videos will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through the weekend, and all the shortlisted videos will stay online indefinitely. While there was some excitement about the prospects of such a venture, the New York Times isn’t impressed by the final product:

At the time of the announcement, there was much talk about originality and discovery, which sounds rather hollow now, compared with the low quality of the 25 finally selected.

Ouch! When the competition was announced, some feared that it would dumb down the video art world, while others dreamed that it would break the community open to embrace ...

“Dance Your PhD” Winner Knows the Molecular Moves

Eliza Strickland — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 21:10:26 +0000

Have you ever seen an amino acid really get down? If not, now is your chance. The winning video produced for Science‘s Dance Your PhD contest features an amino acid that knows how to shake its molecules. The contest asks brave researchers to explain their PhDs in the language of dance.

This year’s winner is Maureen McKeague, a chemistry Ph.D. student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She’ll collect a $1,000 prize ($500 for being a finalist, $500 for winning) from Science. With no further ado, here’s the video:

Did you get all that? If a little more explanation would help, here’s how ScienceNOW sums it up:

The lab is exploring a chemical technique called SELEX–systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment–which generates short segments of DNA and RNA called aptamers. These nucleic acids can be designed to stick to almost any target molecule. For McKeague’s Ph.D. research, the target molecule–played by undergraduate student and Scottish folk dancer Charlotte Bradley–is the amino acid homocysteine. High levels of this amino acid are an indicator of cardiovascular disease. McKeague’s aim is to use SELEX to create aptamers to cheaply and accurately measure homocysteine in blood samples.

How & Why to Write a Bacterial Opera for the Ig Nobel Awards

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:04:02 +0000

Marc Abrahams enjoys writing operas, but until a few years ago had never even been to one. Abrahams is the editor and co-creator of the Annals of Improbable Research, the science humor magazine that gave birth to the Ig Nobel awards, a marvelous celebration of quirky but intelligent scientific breakthroughs. For the last 15 years Abrahams has been tasked with writing a scientific opera for the ceremony.

This year’s theme was bacteria, so naturally Abrahams wrote an opera about the bacteria living on a woman’s tooth, and their (eventually tragic) efforts to escape. The video of this year’s Ig Nobel ceremony is below (skip to the following times to view the four acts of the bacterial opera: Act I at 54:30, Act II at 1:07:20, Act III at 1:29:10, and Act IV at 1:52:00). Discoblog talked with Abrahams to get the scoop on the bacterial-opera-writing business.

Discoblog: This is the 15th Ig Nobel opera–why did you choose to do operas instead of a ballet, slam poetry session, haiku contest, or something else?

Marc Abrahams: In the Ig’s second year, we realized that we had ...

Ig Nobel Awards Honor Pioneering Work on Bat Fellatio, Whale Snot, & More

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:15:26 +0000

The list of wacky science discoveries from the Ig Nobel awards announced last night includes teams who made strides in vital fields like bat fellatio and curing diseases via roller coaster rides.

The awards are given out every year for discoveries that made us both laugh and think. Here’s a full list of the winning teams and projects:

Physics: A group of researchers in New Zealand found that wearing your socks over shoes improves your ability to walk on ice. Team member Lianne Parkin explained to Fox News the reason for her work:

“We live in the south of New Zealand in a very hilly city (we have the steepest street in the world!), and intermittent icy conditions in winter can create major havoc,” she said.

Management: A mathematical study by researchers in Italy found that in some business situations, it is better to promote randomly than the choose the most qualified candidates.

Engineering: A team based in the UK and Mexico found the perfect way to collect whale snot–send a remote controlled helicopter in to do it for you. The ...

Scientist Dance Styles: Glee Episode, Spanish Whodunnit, Internet Love Orgy

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:56:19 +0000

In its third year, the Dance Your PhD contest is proving that maybe, just maybe, scientists can dance. From the contest’s website:

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You take a deep breath and launch into the explanation. People’s eyes begin to glaze over…

At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form?

Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the competition has announced the judges-chosen finalists, chosen from the 45 entries in four science sections–and now the viewers get to choose their favorite from among them. Each finalist gets $500, and the crowd favorite gets an additional $500. The winner will be announced on October 19th, so go watch the finalists and get your vote in.

The chemistry category’s finalist, “Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment,” is danced by Maureen McKeague and company with an accompanying pop ...

Jimmy Carter’s Infamous Solar Panels Won’t Return to the White House Roof

Eliza Strickland — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:41:42 +0000

Funny how a couple of slabs of silicon can become a national symbol.

In 1979, in the midst of an oil crisis, then-president Jimmy Carter tried to lead the nation to a brighter future powered by alternative energy via a symbolic gesture: installing solar panels on the roof of the White House. But instead of being inspired, the American people were freaked by Carter’s proposed program of conservation, carpooling, and cardigans, and promptly kicked him out the of Oval Office. Ronald Reagan shelved most of Carter’s ambitious energy plans, and in 1986 removed the solar panels from the roof.

Then this week, environmental activists made a bold pitch to the Obama administration in an effort to get those panels back on the president’s house.

For decades, the abandoned solar panels have been in the custody of Maine’s Unity College, which used them to heat water for a dining hall. This week, activist Bill McKibben and a handful of students took a road trip to DC in a biodiesel-fueled van. The mission, which went by the name Put Solar on the White House, succeeded in scoring an interview this ...

Sneak Peak: The Bad Astronomer Blows Things Up

Eliza Strickland — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:55:38 +0000

What happens when you give a brainy, hyperactive astronomer his own TV show? Well first off, explosions happen.

The excitement here at Discover headquarters is palpable–only three days until we get to watch our Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, tear up the Discovery Channel with his new TV show, Bad Universe. In the inaugural episode Phil examines the threat of an asteroid impact on Earth, and gets his hands on a whole lot–seriously, a whole truckload–of explosives to model the potential disaster. But it’s not all doom and gloom; he also explains what we can do “to keep an impact from ruining our whole day,” as he says.

The show premieres this Sunday, August 29th at 10 p.m. Here’s a sneak peak:

Would You Like Your Star Wars on Blu-Ray, Blaxploitation Style, or as Silent Film?

Joseph Calamia — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:22:32 +0000

At “Star Wars Celebration V” this past Saturday, George Lucas announced that LucasFlims will release Blu-ray versions of all six Star Wars films in fall of 2011. He told The New York Times that he was waiting to see if Blu-ray really would catch on.

To some fans’ chagrin, the set will include the “Special Edition” versions of New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi–you know, the version which features Hayden Christensen superimposed over Anakin’s ghost and killed that awesome Ewok song. Lucas said to The New York Times that releasing the originals would be “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”

If you can’t wait for 2011, it seems some other very special editions are making the Internets rounds. Oh, and a deleted scene.

Lando Calrissian, Blaxploitation-style:

[via Wired]

Silent film style:

[via Geekologie]

Lightsaber fix-it deleted scene style:

[via Tom's Guide]

Check DISCOVER out on Facebook.

Related content:
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Discoblog: At the the Houston Museum of Natural Science thousands of visitors are lining up for the smell of rotting bodies. They want a look at a five-foot-tall plant affectionately called the “corpse flower,” or more specifically, Lois. The flower will bloom for the first time in seven years and release its stench for an expected three days.

The flower, native to Indonesia, will be the 29th to bloom in the United States; another bloomed last summer at San Francisco State University. Sporting buttons that say “Bring on the Funk” and “Amorphophallus titanum (Latin for AWESOME),” 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day have been coming to the Houston museum to sniff, Reuters reports. In its pre-bloom phase, it smells a bit like rotting pumpkins–which is disappointing to museum visitors with a nose for rancid corpses, museum spokeswoman Latha Thomas told Reuters.

“They want to smell the flower. I think that’s why they keep coming back over and over because they are so excited about smelling it.”

The AP reports that not everyone is excited. Jessica Zabala has booked the museum for her wedding this ...

The Man Who Drops the Mentos: Meet the Host of “Joe Genius”

Joseph Calamia — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:45:12 +0000

What do you get when you mix homegrown science videos, an expert comedian, and experiments made for your garage? Discover Magazine’s new web television show, Joe Genius.

We chat with Jonah Ray, the show’s host, about the show, his start in comedy, and his favorite video games.

Discover Magazine: Could you describe your road to Joe Genius? How did you get your start as a comedian?

Jonah Ray: When I was 19, I moved from Hawaii ["born and raised"] to Los Angeles to do comedy…. I started just working at record stores and being a roadie for my friends’ bands, going on little tours. It took about a year to realize that was a horrible life! (laughs) I looked into some open mics in the LA Weekly and started going almost every night.

Discover: How did stand-up lead to your other work?

Ray: I started doing stand-up primarily. UCB [Upright Citizen’s Brigade, a sketch group] opened out here in LA, and I started taking some classes. Just from doing stand-up, I got more attention from people. I became a writer’s assistant on The Andy Milonakis Show which was ...

Photo Gallery: When Artists Take Over the Science Fair

Eliza Strickland — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:32:27 +0000

NEXT>

Who doesn’t miss the excitement, the curiosity, the baking soda volcanoes of the typical grade-school science fair? Even the cutting-edge artists behind NYC’s Flux Factory got a little nostalgic recently, and decided to host a science fair of their own–but the displays are decidedly atypical, and there’s nary a volcano in sight. Try quantum physics and robots instead.

The science fair art exhibit was inspired by “the similarity between the creative and scientific process,” according to the organizers. And did we mention the trophies? Shiny awards were handed out to artists at an award ceremony last night for the best projects in such categories as “Big Violence,” “Most Empirically Rebellious,” and “Most Metaphysically Pursued.”

Science Fair runs through this weekend, so head over to Queens to check it out. Or you can click through this gallery for a selection of our favorite projects.

NEXT>

World Science Festival: Untangling String Theory

Emily Elert — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:35:43 +0000

On stage at the World Science Festival on Saturday night, festival co-founder Brian Greene recalled the early days of string theory–the theory that brings together competing ideas in physics by postulating that there exist six or seven extra dimensions beyond space and time.

Greene was a graduate student in physics when string theory got its start, and remembers waking up early each morning to run to the mailbox in search of news of harmony and peace; that is, for signs that the long, obdurate conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics was resolving itself into a beautiful universe of tiny vibrating strings.

That was in the 1980s. Now, almost thirty years later, the conflict continues, and the strings—though beautifully imagined by artists and scientists—still haven’t made themselves apparent in the form of a testable prediction. This is a big problem for skeptics like Lawrence Krauss, who insist that untestable scientific theories are—well, not really science.

But Krauss, presumably out of deference to his host, didn’t say that on stage on Saturday. Instead, he took a soft approach, presenting the audience with a picture of an anthropological find, a 33,000-year-old wood ...

World Science Festival: Will Scientists Ever Know Everything?

Jennifer Barone — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:35:16 +0000

A mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, and an artificial intelligence expert get together to define the limits of human knowledge. Chaos ensues.

That’s the short version of Friday evening’s World Science Festival discussion, The Limits of Understanding, where panelists Gregory Chaitin, Rebecca Goldstein, Mario Livio, and Marvin Minsky bravely tackled the scientific and philosophical implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for a packed house.

Gödel’s work has perplexed thinkers for decades, but the on-stage team dispensed with the basics pretty quickly. As philosopher Goldstein put it, Gödel’s infamous proof from 1931 revealed that “there are true propositions [in mathematics] that can’t be proved.” Livio took a stab at incompleteness via analogy to physics: “We physicists look for a theory of everything in physics; Gödel showed that there is no theory of everything in math.”

In keeping with the theme of a theorem that overflows with philosophical implications, the ensuing conversation leapt from Gödel’s proof to evolution, the effectiveness of mathematics at describing the universe, and even the nature of consciousness. (Consciousness, Minsky insisted, is not a single thing, but is actually a ...

World Science Festival: The Science of Star Trek

Eliza Strickland — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:54:56 +0000

On Friday evening, in the midst of the upscale boutiques and trendy cafes of Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, a crowd filled the Galapagos Art Space for a sold-out show titled “The Science of Star Trek,” organized as part of the World Science Festival.

The crowd—scarf-wrapped, martini-sipping, not a single costumed fan in sight—was far from what one might expect at a Star Trek themed event (“closeted fans,” remarked one audience member after the show). Nonetheless, the packed space burst into applause as the night’s speakers were introduced: There was Laurence Krauss, a physicist from Arizona State; Seth Shostak, an astronomer with SETI; and Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft.

Moderating the discussion was the peppy Faith Salie, a regular on public radio but better known to Star Trek fans as the beautiful, genetically enhanced, Serena Douglas on the series spinoff Deep Space Nine.

Salie first steered the speakers into a conversation about whether the star ship Enterprise’s main means of navigating the galaxy—Warp Drive—is physically possible.

“We can’t travel through space at faster than the speed of light,” said Krauss the physicist, “but space can ...