It’s easy to guess what The Hovercraft was built for just by looking at it: The short swallowtail and the big blunted nose all scream “powder hound.”
I did my first series of tests in early December up in Lake Tahoe, and there was a lot more crust, ice and grooms than powder, so I took it out without expecting much. I got waaay more than I figured I would: The board held its edge just fine in the groomers, but there was no surprise there. The shock came when I crossed over to the shaded side of the mountain, when the soft groomers turned into icy crud. I was fully expecting the Jones to sketch out and leave me butt-checking all over the place, but The Hovercraft’s edge sliced right into the ice and held it as well as it did the soft stuff. No transition, no adjustments — the board just went from soft snow to ice without skipping a beat.
It was so odd that it took me most of the morning before I really trusted it. But by lunchtime, I was flying down the mountain at speeds I wouldn’t dare with any of the other boards we tested. The board’s great bite is thanks to the Jones’ underfoot camber and so-called Magne-Traction edges, which essentially act like a serrated blade to bite into hard snow. These features combine to give the board a huge amount of precision and control in hard snow.
A few weeks later, I was finally able to take it out on Mt. Shasta’s backcountry to hit some deep stuff. It excelled there as well (entirely as expected) thanks to the rockered and blunted nose, which let the board float on top of the soft stuff, while the short, stiff tail made it easy to kick back and keep the nose up.
Bottom line: I’ve never seen a board perform so well in such a wide range of snow conditions. During my multi-mountain testing session of The Hovercraft snowboard, I let one of my friends ride it. He echoed my own thoughts with one simple statement: “This thing just does whatever you ask it to do.”
WIRED Simply some of the best all-mountain performance I’ve seen. Great float on powder, plus a locked-in grip on ice and crud. Seamlessly transitions from soft to hard snow. Shockingly lightweight construction.
TIRED Blunt nose and swallowtail design means you’re not gonna be riding a lot of switch.
Informally known as the "Soap Bubble Nebula", this planetary nebula (officially known as PN G75.5+1.7) was discovered by amateur astronomer Dave Jurasevich on July 6th, 2008. It was noted and reported by Keith Quattrocchi and Mel Helm on July 17th, 2008. This image was obtained with the Kitt Peak Mayall 4-meter telescope on June 19th, 2009 in the H-alpha (orange) and [OIII] (blue) narrowband filters. In this image, north is to the left and east is down.
PN G75.5+1.7 is located in the constellation of Cygnus, not far from the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888). It is embedded in a diffuse nebula which, in conjunction with its faintness, is the reason it was not discovered until recently. The spherical symmetry of the shell is remarkable, making it very similar to Abell 39.
Image: T. A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF [high-resolution] Read NOAO Conditions of Use before downloading
On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated. In this image, the bluish glow in the sky above the Sun would be visible to us if we were there, but an artifact of the Pancam's infrared imaging capabilities is that with this filter combination the redness of the sky farther from the sunset is exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the martian sky. Because Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the Sun appears only about two-thirds the size that it appears in a sunset seen from the Earth. The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop "Jibsheet", a feature that Spirit has been investigating for several weeks (rover tracks are dimly visible leading up to Jibsheet). The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 km (50 miles) in the distance.
This mosaic is yet another example from MER of a beautiful, sublime martian scene that also captures some important scientific information. Specifically, sunset and twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the martian dust extends, and to look for dust or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long martian twilight (compared to Earth's) is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere.
Leprosy has plagued humans for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean it has revealed all of its secrets. A new study in mice suggests the disfiguring disease employs a bit of biological trickery to do its damage: It reprograms certain nerve cells to become like stem cells and uses them to infiltrate the body’s muscle and nervous systems. This is the first time that scientists have seen bacteria reprogram cells in this way, and experts say the find could lead to the development of new treatments for leprosy and other neurodegenerative diseases.
More than 200,000 people worldwide are diagnosed with leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) each year. Despite its ancient origins and almost mythic status, however, leprosy remains mysterious. Researchers know that it’s caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, and that it leaves sufferers with deforming lesions and a debilitating loss of sensation in their hands and feet. But they don’t know how the infection spreads throughout the body or why it damages nerves so extensively. In part, that’s because it’s hard to investigate: the bacterium that causes leprosy can’t be grown in a lab, so it can only be studied in infected humans, armadillos, and genetically engineered mice.
To answer some of those lingering questions, biologist Anura Rambukkana of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and his colleagues seized on another known detail of the disease: its predilection for infecting Schwann cells, specialized cells that sheathe the nerves and help transmit nervous system signals. The researchers isolated Schwann cells from mice and infected them with M. leprae—and were soon surprised by what they saw.
The bacteria transformed the cells, turning off genes that were expressed in mature Schwann cells and turning on genes associated with earlier stages of cell development. The cells became immature and, like certain kinds of stem cells found in bone marrow and other tissues, could now turn into bone and muscle cells. “We thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is a vehicle for going anywhere in the body,’ ” Rambukkana recalls.
When the team reintroduced the altered cells into the mice, some of the cells migrated to muscle tissues and spread the bacteria wherever they went. The results suggest that M. leprae hijacks Schwann cells, destroying their ability to insulate and support the nervous system, so it can use them to infiltrate other tissues in the body, the team reports online today in Cell.
Rambukkana hopes that future studies will shed more light on how the leprosy bacterium transforms Schwann cells. Understanding the process could help doctors diagnose leprosy at earlier stages and possibly stop it in its tracks, he says. “It can also help us find new ways to generate stem cells for therapeutic approaches, so we can treat other neurodegenerative diseases,” such as multiple sclerosis.
There’s one caveat, says developmental neurobiologist Michael Wegner of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany who was not involved in the study. The study doesn’t prove that M. leprae co-opts human Schwann cells in the same way, he notes. But it does offer a plausible mechanism in “a fascinating study that uses state-of-the-art methodology.”
Dermatologist and leprosy researcher Robert Modlin of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees. “I was amazed—this is a really creative, out-of-the-box study,” Modlin says. “It raises mind-provoking questions about how it could relate to humans. It has real potential.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
Poachers are slaughtering elephants across Africa at an unprecedented pace. But scientists tracking the animals’ carcasses—their faces and ivory hacked away—are seldom able to explain in detail what these deaths mean to the pachyderms’ populations and social structure. Now, a 14-year study of elephants in northern Kenya concludes that the adult behemoths are more likely to die at the hands of humans than from natural causes. At the same time, the elephants have responded to the heavy poaching with a baby boom, providing the researchers some hope for the jumbos’ survival.
“Clearly it is the most detailed and comprehensive demographic analysis undertaken for any elephant population, and perhaps any wildlife population, at least in Africa,” says Norman Owen-Smith, an ecologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. It provides a base “for modeling the potential impacts of increased poaching” on other African elephant populations, which are also suffering from illegal killing.
In 1997, the scientists began a study on elephant behavior in two adjacent national reserves, Samburu and Buffalo Springs, which together measure 220 square kilometers. The parks’ elephants were accustomed to vehicles and easy to study; they had also recovered from heavy poaching in the 1970s. At the beginning of the study, illegal killing was rare. “We might lose one big male a year,” says George Wittemyer, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and the study’s lead author. “We thought the population was stable.” That changed in 2009 as poachers began shooting elephants en masse. The scientists then shifted their study to look at the effects the poaching was having on the elephants they knew.
At the study’s outset, the researchers focused on 934 individuals (509 females and 425 males). The team used a standard method for identifying each elephant, noting each animal’s unique markings on its ears and face, as well as the shape of its tusks. Then each week, from 1997 to 2011, the researchers drove along five, 20-kilometer routes inside the reserves and recorded the presence or absence of the study elephants. They considered any animals that they didn’t spot for more than 3 years to be dead. The scientists seldom found the carcasses of these animals, but they investigated any dead elephants reported by tourists or rangers that were inside the parks or within 10 kilometers of the reserves’ boundaries.
Although the elephant population was increasing when the study began, it began to decline as poachers targeted the animals. The older elephants, which have larger tusks, were especially hard hit. In 2000, there were 38 males over 30 years old in the study population. By 2011, their number had dropped to 12—and of those, seven had matured into this age class. Older females also suffered huge losses, with almost half of those 30 years old dying between 2006 and 2011. By 2011, 56% of the elephants that were found dead had been poached, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE.
The poaching spree has also altered the elephants’ social organization, the study shows. When the work began, males made up 42% of the population; by 2011, they had been cut down to only 32%. And 10 of the 50 elephant family groups that the scientists were studying were effectively wiped out. “They no longer have any breeding females,” Wittemyer explains. “And so, the family group has disappeared, leaving surviving juveniles on their own.” These youngsters may join other families, or, without a leader to guide them, try to survive in sibling groups typically led by the oldest sister.
“Some elephants died from a bad drought that hit the region between 2009 and 2010,” Wittemyer adds. “But at least half of these deaths were due to poaching.” The poaching took place outside the reserves on lands that are largely unpatrolled. In addition to the reserve, the elephants roam over a vast area of more than 3500 square kilometers.
As grim as the data are, Wittemyer says they are “more representative of elephant populations across the continent today” than data collected in areas such as Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, where scientists have studied elephants since 1972. The Amboseli elephants are better protected than those in Samburu, although, they, too, have suffered significant losses from poachers. Long-term studies of elephants in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, where elephants have been culled but not poached, have focused more on the animals’ population dynamics than on individuals. The new Samburu study provides “a good comparison” with these studies, Wittemyer says, and is particularly useful these days because nearly all elephant populations are facing similarly high rates of poaching.
Wittemyer and his colleagues also suggest that their data show that the Samburu elephants have responded to the pressure from poaching with a baby boom. “There was a big jump in births in 2012,” Wittemyer says, “and a hiatus for a few months in the killings. So it looked like we were on the up-and-up.”
“Any evidence that contributes to understanding how or if elephant populations will be able to recover from these extreme mortality events is highly significant—and this paper does that,” says Phyllis Lee, an animal behaviorist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom.
But, Owen-Smith says, the Samburu elephants’ super reproductive performance is likely nothing more than a sign that their population is “well below the carrying capacity limits” of the region—meaning that a landscape that was once dense with elephants is now largely empty. And the killing has started again: Poachers shot 20 elephants in recent weeks in the Samburu region. As Joyce Poole, an ethologist and expert on elephant behavior in Nairobi, who directs the conservation organization ElephantVoices, puts it: “The study’s interesting population dynamics are overshadowed by a gruesome reality.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
What Mario Kart fan hasn’t secretly dreamed of playing a real-life version of the Mario Bros-themed racing game? But while most people would be content with renting regular go-karts and using their imaginations really, really hard, two Texas engineers, Hunter Smith and Ben James, decided to make the dream a reality by creating an ingenious live-action version of the Mario Bros-themed racing game.
Where things really get amazing, however, are the RFID-embedded power-up item boxes suspended over the track by pieces of rope, which allow the player to collect items like bananas and turtle shells modeled on the original Mario Kart game — and actually affect their performance in the race. The mushroom item, for example, wirelessly activates tiny Servo motors that enable go-karts to speed up by accessing 100 percent of their throttle power.
“Ben and I grew up playing Mario Kart on Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 so we’re both big fans,” Smith, the co-founder of Austin Texas-based Waterloo Labs, told Wired. We got the idea for the real-life Mario because we work with First Robotics Competition and they use same controller, software and motors. We got a few extra kits so we asked ourselves ‘What can we do with these competition kits that would be fun?”
The system details and source code for the project are available on the Waterloo Labs website, which volunteers that while there is no permanent set-up for Real-Life Mario Kart for enthusiasts to visit, “we would be happy to help you build your own!”
Some artists send out a press release when they have a new single. Justin Timberlake invests in an old social network, helps relaunch it, and makes his new track the first thing that loads up on the homepage.
After months of private beta previews, the new Myspace emerged to the public today, with a fresh redesign and a new focus on helping artists post music to share with fans. The first thing you’ll see, in multiple places, is Timberlake’s first new single since 2006′s FutureSex/LoveSounds, “Suit & Tie, FT Jay-Z,” which streams on Myspace for free with an iTunes purchase link below it.
By promoting his new single with the launch of an entire social network, Timberlake appears to be sending a message to other artists about what the new Myspace is for: posting music for free, and trying to upsell it to downloads. The new site makes it super-easy for any user to repost any song they find from their own profile, which Timberlake no doubt hopes will become something people do quite a bit.
In other words, it’s back to the original vision of MySpace, which it supplanted MP3.com as the default place for artists to upload their music, and became, for a while there, the best place to research and hear any band. (Remember, this was before YouTube became a licensed music service, and way before anything like the free version of Spotify).
If you remember your old password and have access to your old email address, you can log in with those or a new email address — or just use Twitter or Facebook credentials, a clear sign that the new Myspace envisions itself not as a competitor to those two services, but rather as a new music-focused social network.
After you get past a couple of screens featuring Timberlake’s own jam, you’ll see plenty of other artists in the Discover section, which includes trending items (artists, users, videos, and so on), as well as a prominent music-specific section (high rotation, new albums, artists, and recommended). The new Myspace also has a streaming radio function, in case you get tired of looking for stuff, with the ability to play artist or genre stations. Finally, a mixes section lets people share playlists.
The new Myspace is everything the old one wasn’t towards the end: Simple, non-confusing, modern, clean, and focused. It looks great, as noted in October, when the new version emerged in beta.
Will anyone care? If they like Justin Timberlake, they will care for today, at least. Myspace appears to have all the tools it needs to become a player in the free, promotional music space, but of course, a social network is nothing without people, and there’s obviously no way to tell whether they will come to rely on Myspace to discover music and find out more about artists. As crazy as it would have seemed a few years ago, when Myspace was floundering, it does appear to stand a chance, especially given this initial boost from Timberlake’s star power.
Justin Timberlake played Sean Parker in The Social Network. Does he think he is Sean Parker now?
When Wired interviewed Justin Timberlake in 2010 at the launch of his fashion brand, he said, “We get creative with a lot of different brands but they’re so specific to each other. I don’t cross-promote anything of mine unless it genuinely feels organic. For instance, I have one of my bands playing the music for the fashion show, but that makes sense. I wouldn’t do something that was pushing something that wasn’t organic.”
In this case, he appears to be playing by those rules.
Master Chief from the Halo series is one of the most fearsome computer-generated characters of all time, as well as a popular product license for everything from action figures to desk toys. When Funko licensed characters from the iconic Xbox franchise to make bobble heads, they recruited CAD/3-D printer artist Khurram Alavi to handle the mini-makeover.
Alavi grew up on a steady diet of animated shows and videogames from the ’80s and ’90s and dreamed of becoming a comic book artist. After earning a design degree in Pakistan, he joined a local animation firm where he discovered ZBrush, a powerful CAD package developed for the entertainment industry. “The world of 3-D just opened up to me,” says Alavi. “It was as if I was sketching, but with actual clay. I started using the software and began entering online contests. I won a few and managed to get some gigs with Marvel- and Sega-based characters.”
He went on to model characters from Star Wars and completed projects for Valve Software, but the Halo bobble head project proved to be more difficult to manage than an evil mutant or fearsome Street Fighter because it had to be cute. “Trust me when I say this — cute and small is not as simple as you may think,” says Alavi. “In fact, it is very challenging as the simplified forms and curvature need to be perfect in every way. I’ve spent days on the simplest of designs just to get the curves right.”
The character and a rough idea for a pose are all Alavi had to work with. “Funko sends over rough ideas for the pose and that’s about it.” says Alavi. “It’s my job to translate it and make it work in 3-D.” Funko also provided the original 3-D models used in Halo 4, but they were of limited use because of the differing requirements in videogames and design for manufacturing. “I could barely use those models as they were made for the game, but they did help speed up with sculpting process.” he says. “I was able to nail the costume elements and details very quickly.”
The model had to capture Masture Chief’s unique look, but was also required to be manufacturable at a low cost, which required great artistry from Alavi. “When you bring more than 40 individual costume elements into the mix, it gets far more complicated,” he says. “Then to make sure that the parts are thick and detailed enough and will be produced properly is another challenge within itself.”
In order to test his models, Alavi turned to 3-D printers and worked with a firm in Hong Kong called Ownage Manufacturing, which specializes in 3-D printing complex ZBrush models. “The approval process is usually very painful, with a lot of back and forth between myself and the licensor,” says Alavi. “They want their designs to be as accurate to the source material as possible, and rightly so. A one-week job can go up to two months sometimes in the collectibles business.”
Fortunately for Alavi, working in pixels has huge benefits over modeling with plasticine clay. “The digital sculpt is very fast in this respect as we can make changes very on the fly and takes less time when compared to making changes to a physical real world sculpture.”
CAD software and 3-D printers have essentially become a “reset” button for the real world.
Spoiler warning: Firefly ended over 10 years ago and it’s been 7 years since its subsequent film, Serenity, came out, so the spoiler statute of limitations is officially up. Proceed at your own risk.
Like many fans of the Joss Whedon space western Firefly, Kyle Hill was shocked by the end of the Serenity movie, when fan-favorite character Wash (Alan Tudyk) was unceremoniously impaled by a Reaver harpoon. Unlike most fans, Hill — a research assistant with a degree in Environmental Engineering and a contributor at Scientific American — decided to try and rewrite (fictional) history by proving that Wash’s death was scientifically impossible, using the power of math, physics and fandom. His article originally appeared online at Scientific American, and Wired publishes this updated version with permission.
I was late to Firefly. Nearly 10 years after the show first aired and then was subsequently cancelled, I holed up in my room, coffee and external hard drive in hand, aiming to blaze through one of the most beloved sci-fi series.
A mix of science fiction and “spaghetti-western” genres, Firefly was wonderful. It certainly awakened the fanboy in me, and I quickly understood why my girlfriend envied me for being able to watch the series for the first time.
It all ended abruptly, due to early cancellation, with the last episodes of Firefly barely answering any central questions or exploring the rich universe that had been so lovingly crafted by creator Joss Whedon. It was to my delight to learn that in 2005 there was a full-length movie in response to public (and private) outcries for more of Serenity and her crew.
Watching Serenity let me spend a bit more time in the ‘verse, and the film thankfully resolved a number of outstanding loops justwaiting to be closed. But the forced end of Firefly also forced Joss Whedon’s hand. He put in scenes that would only have appeared in a last hurrah like Serenity. One scene in particular shook me, like the unexpected sight of a Reaver ship. It’s a scene that drove me to NASA forums and technical reports, glass manufacturers, my calculator, and eventually to this post.
Late in Serenity, after crash-landing at the mysterious base of “Mr. Universe,” pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne meets his end at the tip of a Reaver spear. The immediacy of the violence, and his wife Zoe’s touching reaction, kept my mouth agape well into the next few minutes of the film. One of my favorite characters just died, as Firefly died. I couldn’t stand it. I had to be sure.
What if the Reaver spear couldn’t plausibly make it through the forward windows of Serenity? The movie may have been set in the future, but we too have built spacecraft with windows, and they are made to withstand impacts. If I could prove that a modern shuttle window (assuming that a future window would be even better) could withstand the impact that killed Wash, I could have the ultimate in fanboy closure: the movie is “wrong,” and my version of the story lives on.
Objects in Space
In terrestrial situations, a speck of paint is less than harmless. In space, it’s deadly. Travelling at a blistering 10,000 meters per second in orbit, the equations deem it lethal. It becomes a “hypervelocity” bullet.
Our spacecraft obviously must account for this deadly debris. Tens of thousands of pieces of extraterrestrial trash litter the orbit of Earth [PDF], meaning that a shuttle’s final impact could come from an errant hex nut. Shuttles today are outfitted with shielding to prevent such disasters, and feature two-and-a-half inch thick windows—the thickest pieces of glass ever produced in the optical quality for see-through viewing.
The largest impact to a shuttle window occurred when a fleck of paint struck STS-92—a flight to the International Space Station. A shuttle window has never been penetrated by a hypervelocity impact, but it doesn’t have to be. A deformation large enough could eventually cause window failure upon repeated take-offs and re-entries.
After engineers examined the crater in the window of STS-92, the shape that best explained the damage was a sort of miniaturized plate. But to begin making comparisons, I’ll consider the fleck of paint to be a similarly sized metal sphere. This will bring the numbers in line with the hypervelocity testing that NASA has already conductBased on the size and the speed of the fleck that hit STS-92, I calculated that the window weathered an impact with around 20 Joules of kinetic energy—equivalent to four milligrams of TNT or a decently thrown baseball. It created more than enough damage to warrant a window replacement. And such replacements from serious impacts are commonplace. Robert Lee Hotz notes in the Wall Street Journalthat “NASA shuttle engineers have replaced the spacecraft’s debris-pitted windows after almost every flight since since 1981, at a cost of about $40,000 per window.”
Such little flecks can be catastrophes. An orbiter unlucky enough to be hit by anything much larger than the paint chip that hit STS-92 is in for some trouble. Debris measuring five centimeters in diameter packs the punch of a bus collision. Any larger than that and we begin making comparisons to sticks of dynamite.
The shuttle windows are tough, to be sure, surviving nearly 1,400 impacts intact over 43 sampled missions, but are they strong enough to save Wash? Tiny particles are elevated to terrifying status because of their ridiculous speeds, not their mass. Conversely, the Reaver spear that killed Wash was larger, but moving much more slowly. A few assumptions and some physics equations would determine if I could save him.
I Am A Leaf on the Wind…
To get the general dimensions of the spear that killed Wash, I had to (unfortunately) go back to the scene in question, excruciatingly slowing down an emotional moment to be replayed over and over.
Diving back into Serenity, I used an earlier Reaver chase scene to guesstimate the spear size and speed. If Reavers shoot spears slow enough to be dodged (which they do), the spear that kills Wash can’t be moving much faster than a Major League fast-ball, putting the upper limit on speed around 100 miles per hour (45 m/s). This is orders of magnitude slower than the hypervelocity impacts that a shuttle deals with, but the spear is thousands of times more massive than a fleck of paint. Assuming it’s fashioned out of an “average” metal, and given its size, I’d guess it’s around 100-200 pounds (45-90 kg).
Kinetic energy is easy enough to calculate. The kinetic energy of a moving object is one-half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity.
This equation gives the Reaver spear a frightening 45,500 Joules at the low end. This is over 3,700 times the energy of the largest recorded impact to a space shuttle window — equivalent to a detonation of a pencil made of TNT or a medium sized anvil dropped on it.
What are the risks? via Aerospace.org
Based on hypervelocity testing undertaken by NASA, the Reaver spear would be like an aluminum sphere with a one-centimeter diameter hitting the window at 10 kilometers per second (assuming that the tip of the spear is comparable to a 1cm diameter point). Seeing that the damage threshold for a shuttle window based on this testing is 0.004 centimeters, my hopes quickly vanished. With this kind of energy, the Reaver spear could pierce a shuttle’s wing, its thermal protection tiles, or even its crew cabin.
The math doesn’t lie—Wash didn’t stand a chance.
Watch How I Soar…
I thought I had found the perfect fanboy out. The windows in Serenity looked flimsy and thin, surely not something a space-faring craft would be outfitted with. If the windows were anything like what we use to traverse the ‘verse today, perhaps all that would have happened is a jolt of fright from a deflected Reaver spear, or so I hoped.
But even delving through a hundred page NASA technical report [PDF] on impact shielding couldn’t ease my psyche.
Now, this is at its core a fanboy rant. No matter what I found, Wash dies in the movie. It’s part of the larger story and serves as a plot point, not a meaningless killing-off. But I selfishly wanted closure; I needed to resolve the dissonance between a character’s death and the fact that we know he wouldn’t have died if the networks saw better numbers from Firefly.
Maybe this is a testament to the enduring qualities of the show. To create characters important enough, and in only fifteen short stories, to warrant hours of research and calculation that ultimately proves useless in the larger story is an outcome of a great narrative. It’s typical of a fan base that will still pack a Comic-Con panel ten years after the airing of the show.
In the end, I like the story better this way. It takes a great narrative to make someone care so much about a character that he takes real world steps to resolve his own dissonance. If I could have ‘proved’ that Wash wouldn’t have been killed, a whole can of worms would open. What about the fact that Serenity was an old ship with sub-optimal gear? What about space-age technologies like super-strong window polymers? The scene obviously resonated with people (especially me), and the fact that I failed is a better story than a discussion of faulty film physics.
A federal judge late Friday blocked enforcement of a California voter-approved measure that would have dramatically curtailed the online, First Amendment rights of registered sex offenders.
Proposition 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote in November, would have required anyone who is a registered sex offender — including people with misdemeanor offenses such as indecent exposure and whose offenses were not related to activity on the internet — to turn over to law enforcement a list of all identifiers they use online as well as a list of service providers they use.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco also said the measure was overbroad.
“The challenged provisions have some nexus with the government’s legitimate purpose of combating online sex offenses and human trafficking, but the government may not regulate expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals,” he wrote.
The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would also have forced sex offenders to fork over to law enforcement their e-mail addresses, user and screen names, or any other identifier they used for instant messaging, for social networking sites or online forums and in internet chat rooms.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately filed suit after its passage. The measure would currently affect some 75,000 sex offenders registered in California, but the law also requires those convicted of human trafficking to register as sex offenders, thus widening the pool of people affected.
The measure carries three-year prison penalties.
Henderson had tentatively blocked enforcement of the measure immediately after it passed. His decision Friday is in the form of a preliminary injunction. Next up is a trial on the lawsuit’s merits, if it gets that far.
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
LAS VEGAS — Electric vehicle owners eager to charge up in the greenest, most economical manner plug in during off-peak hours when rates are lowest. Ford wants to extend the concept of off-peak power to home appliances, further reducing an EV owner’s electric bill and CO2 footprint by allowing them to tap into the cloud and a proprietary power-tracking database.
Here at CES 2013, the automaker announced MyEnergi Lifestyle, a sweeping collaboration with appliance giant Whirlpool, smart-meter supplier Infineon, Internet-connected thermostat company Nest Labs and, for a green-energy slant, solar-tech provider SunPower. The goal is to help people understand how the “time-flexible” EV charging model can more cheaply power home appliances, and how combining an EV, connected appliances and the data they generate can help them better manage their energy consumption and avoid paying for power at high rates.
Because the electric grid experiences its heaviest loads during daytime hours when people are most active, consumers pay more for juice because utilities must produce more of it — an expensive proposition for all involved. For that reason, many utilities offer discounted rates for off-peak consumption to encourage customers to shift their energy usage patterns to nighttime or early-morning hours. Discounted rates typically apply between midnight and 5 a.m. and, according to Ford, can cost half as much.
The use of smart electrical meters in more than 40 million homes across the U.S. allows households to better take advantage of off-peak rates, said Mike Tinskey, Ford’s global director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure.
“We launched in 19 markets last year with our Focus Electric,” he says. “Of those, 16 had a timing use rate available and that’s all been driven by smart power meters.”
Appliances are getting smarter, too. Some of the most power-hungry appliances, such as a water heater and the ice maker in your freezer, can now schedule their most energy-intensive activities at night. Nest’s Internet-connected thermostat can help homeowners save energy while their away. While some of the appliances and devices within MyEnergi Lifestyle launch early this year, others are available now, Tinskey said.
“One of the key points we wanted to make is that this isn’t expensive stuff,” he said. “This is aimed at mid-America.”
The MyEnergi Lifestyle project also aims to tie these threads together and make it easier for EV owners make to manage and track of their electrical consumption using cloud-based data collected by smart appliances and meters. Users enter info such as their location and local utility rates into the database via the participants products, such as the MyFord Mobile app for the automaker’s EVs. And then they get results on the best charging times and the potential energy savings.
“When we put all these things together, we were astonished by what you can actually do,” Tinskey said.
Ford and its partners worked with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology to create a model that calculates the electricity usage of a typical single family home for one year and the savings that could come from using off-peak electricity. It predicted a 60 percent reduction in energy costs and a 55 percent reduction in CO2 generated. That’s more than 9,000 kilograms of CO2. MyEnergi Lifestyle collaborators also announced plans to award a “typical” American family with the delivery and installation of energy-saving products from each company to create a real-world example of how the effectiveness of the program.
Researchers estimate that having every home in the U.S. implement energy-saving technologies like those promoted by MyEnergi would be the equivalent of taking every home in California, New York and Texas — around 32 million — off the grid. That’s a significant savings, but it still requires a significant initial investment on the part of the average homeowner. And it still may not be reason enough for some to buy an EV.
While making music with computers is nothing new, it’s rarely quite so literal as the melodies of Youtube user MrSolidSnake74, who transformed eight floppy disk drives into an orchestra of MIDI magic. In the gallery above, you can hear his arrangements based on popular themes from Super Mario Bros, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Mega Man, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Game of Thrones and more, as performed by his floppy disk “instruments.”
“The concept behind this is basically getting the stepper motor to operate a certain frequency (getting the motor to step a certain amount of times in a second) which generates a pitch. Then we arrange those pitches together and we get a song,” he explained.
After creating his own arrangements of songs, he uses code written by a Youtube user named Sammy1Am to transform MIDI files into serial data packets, and sends them to an Arduino — an open-source microcontroller board – which routes the information to the floppy drives.
Want to make your own musical disk drives? Check out the Sammy1A how-to video:
LONG BEACH, California — By closely mapping the mass of an enormous galactic collision, astronomers may have uncovered a type of force that only affects dark matter.
The results come from observations of the Musket Ball Cluster, a vast celestial object located about 5.23 billion light-years away in the constellation Cancer. Galaxies are usually gravitationally bound to other galaxies, creating massive galactic clusters. The Musket Ball Cluster is an example of what happens when two such galactic clusters – each composed of hundreds of individual galaxies – crash into one another.
Scientists know the visible stars in these galaxies make up only about two percent of the total mass in the cluster. About 12 percent of the mass is found in hot gas, which shines in X-ray wavelengths, while the remaining roughly 86 percent is made of invisible dark matter. Because the galaxies make up so little of the mass of the system and the spaces between them are so large, they don’t really do much of the crashing. Odds are that they will simply sail by one another as the clusters merge. It’s mostly the gas that collides, causing it to slow down and fall behind the galaxies.
The dark matter is mapped using a quirk in Einstein’s theories of gravity. According to General Relativity, the gravitational fields of massive objects like galaxies bend light. If there is a large galaxy in the way of a distant light source, observers on Earth will see that light distorted, often into a ring-like shape, like the Hubble image at left. By looking at how light from a distant object is bent by the Musket Ball Cluster, scientists can infer where the dark matter is.
But when astronomers did this with high precision, they discovered something odd: The dark matter clumps were slowing down relative to the visible galaxies in the cluster.
“We see this offset between the dark matter and the galaxies of about 19,000 light-years,” said astronomer William Dawson of the University of California, Davis, who presented his team’s result during a talk Jan. 7 here at the American Astronomical Society 2013 meeting.
The reason this is strange is that dark matter is thought to barely interact with itself. The dark matter should just coast through itself and move at the same speed as the hardly interacting galaxies. Instead, it looks like the dark matter is crashing into something — perhaps itself – and slowing down faster than the galaxies are. But this would require the dark matter to be able to interact with itself in a completely new an unexpected way, a “dark force” that affects only dark matter. This would be a new fundamental force of the universe, in addition to the four known forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces.
Such a force has been speculated theoretically in previous work and even searched for in small colliders but, if Dawson’s results turn out to be true, this would be the first observational evidence of its existence. Though the dark force is not part of any current model of physics, it could help explain certain behavior seen in dark matter.
In particular it would help solve the core/cusp problem, an outstanding mystery seen in dwarf galaxies and star clusters. If dark matter only feels the force of gravity, it should tend to clump in the center of these objects. But astronomers over and over observe the opposite: The dark matter in dwarf galaxies and star clusters is evenly distributed. If dark matter can interact through some sort of dark force, it can bump into itself and puff out, like a hot gas.
The finding could help open up observations of the so-called “dark sector,” a hypothetical set of forces and particles that don’t affect our own ordinary matter. Though dark matter models tend to assume the particles are simple and have no extra forces, there’s no particular reason this should be. Dawson suggested imagining some alien, scientific beings composed entirely of dark matter, who might not even consider that our version of matter has so many complex forces and interactions because they can’t detect them.
While agreeing that the results are neat and have a potentially huge payoff, astronomer Douglas Finkbeiner of Harvard, who was not involved in the work, isn’t completely convinced by them yet. “It is good to remember that every such hint of exotic dark matter particle properties has always been wrong,” he wrote in an email to Wired.
Finkbeiner should know. In 2008, he was part of research team that thought it had glimpsed a signal of a dark force in data from the PAMELA satellite. The results ended up being discounted a few years later.
Dawson knows his findings are preliminary, and even he is fairly skeptical of the dark force interpretation. His team can say with roughly 85 percent confidence that what they are observing is due to dark matter interacting with itself.
“Those are good odds in Las Vegas, but as scientists we can’t make grand claims with there still being a 15 or 20 percent possibility of this being noise in the measurement,” he said. The bending of light by massive objects is very tricky to observe, and it could turn out there is some problem in the team’s measurements.
For now, Dawson is working with his collaborators to analyze data from other massive galaxy cluster collisions and also discover new ones. If they see the same results on these systems, it would bolster the idea of a possible dark force. Otherwise, it will mean that dark matter is fairly simple and scientists need other explanations for the core/cusp problem.
“We need observations to either reign in the theoretical musings or motivate people to think harder about their dark matter models,” said Dawson.
LAS VEGAS -- Ah, CES. We're waiting for the real action to start today, so we spent Tuesday taking one cab after another to press conferences, waiting in epic lines for events we'd already RSVP'd to and eating finger foods like mini crab cakes and cheesecake on a stick.
Still, we managed to get some quality time with the latest tech and toys, including new robo-Legos, a wireless charger and yet another FitBit. And a light switch. Because, you know, we love light switches.
Here's the best and brightest, and weirdest, we saw at CES on Day 2
The Chinese calendar might have it pegged as the year of the black snake, but investors are already calling 2013 the year of the enterprise IPO. Not nearly as catchy as something reptilian, but hopefully a lot more profitable than the newly public consumer companies, Facebook chief among them, that took a beating in the public markets in 2012.
Consistent with the enterprise theme, we already know that data-center networking company Gigamon and solid-state storage business Violin Memory have filed their S-1 forms. Other enterprise plays will follow. And just because the smart money is betting on companies that get paid selling to other companies, doesn’t mean some well-known consumer outfits, including Twitter, Square, and Evernote couldn’t try their luck with an IPO in 2013.
We picked nine private companies with public market potential to watch in 2013. For each we weigh the odds of whether, market conditions permitting, of course, they have a shot or not.
Above:
Odds of an IPO: Looking good, but only if it can close its next round
This startup is the darling of the collaborative consumption movement, allowing anyone to put up their house or apartment for travelers to rent. While it’s been close to 18 months since its taken venture capital, Airbnb is already up to $230 million. Rumor has it that the company is vying for a $100 million third round of funding at a $2 billion valuation, and has plans to go public once it closes a new round.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
Galileo false-color image of the Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Serenitatis areas of the Moon. The picture was made from four exposures taken during Galileo's second Earth/Moon flyby.
The colors are enhanced to highlight compositional differences.
Mare Tranquillitatis at left appears blue due to titanium enrichment. Orange soil in Mare Sarenitatis at lower right indicates lower titanium. Dark purple areas at left center mark the Apollo 17 landing site, composed of explosive volcanic deposits.
Red lunar highlands indicate low iron and titanium. Mare Serenitatis is roughly 1300 km across and North is at 5:00. The 95 km diameter crater Posidonius, centered at 32 N, 30 E, is at the middle of the bottom of the frame.
Jose Rodriguez thinks the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is “well worth seeing.” But the retired CIA veteran has reservations about its gut-churning portrayal of the CIA’s treatment of detainees. Which is rich, coming from the man who destroyed the video footage documenting many of those brutal agency interrogations.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post on Friday, the former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and its clandestine service takes issue with Zero Dark Thirty’s torture scenes. Those scenes are admittedly hard to watch. They show terrified, disoriented and bloodied detainees kept awake for days on end by having their arms painfully suspended from the ceilings of secret jails; stuffed into tiny wooden boxes when they don’t cooperate with their inquisitors; and waterboarded on soiled mattresses while interrogators bark questions. They also largely match up with the minimal public disclosure of how the post-9/11 program actually operated.
But they offend Rodriguez, who describes himself as “intimately involved in setting up and administering” a program he has steadfastly denied amounted to torture. Most CIA detainees weren’t subject to what he euphemistically calls “enhanced interrogation.” Those who were experienced “harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention.” And director Kathryn Bigelow left out all the bureaucratic red tape CIA interrogators encountered: “To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington.”
Except there’s a problem with Rodriguez’s account that he sidesteps in calling the film inaccurate. While at the CIA, Rodriguez himself destroyed nearly 100 video recordings of brutal interrogations, including those of two al-Qaida figures who most definitely were subjected to “harsh measures,” Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. If Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are in the dark about torture — like the rest of the country — Rodriguez is a big part of the reason why.
It took a Justice Department inquiry to reveal even the outlines of the destruction of the torture tapes. In 2009, the government disclosed that Rodriguez in 2005 ordered the destruction of 92 videotapes of interrogation footage totaling hundreds of hours’ worth of footage. As the New York Times noted, Rodriguez’s order came at a time when “Congress and the courts were intensifying their scrutiny of the agency’s detention and interrogation program.” The destruction was a deliberative process: Rodriguez wrote in his memoir last year that he used a shredded packing “five spinning and two stationary blades” capable of chewing through “hundreds of pounds of material in a single hour.”
Rodriguez claims he ordered the destruction on his own after his bosses vacillated on whether the tapes ought to be destroyed. His stated rationale for liquidating evidence that was relevant to a potential criminal investigation was to protect his interrogators. It had the effect of destroying a major aspect of the historical record. When Rodriguez swears in his op-ed that the torture program worked as he says it did, he left observers with few independent ways to check his claims.
Ultimately, a Justice Department special prosecutor opted to abandon criminal cases against CIA interrogators who had received authorization from senior government officials for the interrogation program. Rodriguez himself never faced criminal charges for the destruction of the tapes.
Despite the destruction, Rodriguez’s insider account isn’t the only one that has survived. Phil Zelikow, a former aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, told Danger Room last year that the CIA’s brutal interrogations amounted to “war crimes,” an assessment he conveyed during an internal 2006 debate about the CIA program. One of the CIA interrogators involved in the program’s early days has lamented that he “destroyed a man’s life” through the abusive techniques.
There are other reasons to doubt aspects of Rodriguez’s accounts. He writes that “When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped — forever.” But three powerful senators who helped helm a four-year classified study of the CIA program, Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin, wrote to the CIA on December 19 that “The CIA detainee who provided the most accurate information about the courier [to Osama bin Laden] provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.”
Feinstein, McCain and Levin have now turned their focus to the CIA’s cooperation with a movie that they believe conveys the mistaken impression that torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Rodriguez makes no secret of what he thinks about Congress prying into the CIA’s dark corners. He singles out a scene in Zero Dark Thirty when an agency employee threatens to alert a congressional committee about her boss’s seeming failures. “Now that,” Rodriguez writes, “would be torture.”
A study of school design has discovered that school layouts can influence a child’s development by as much as 25 percent — positively or negatively — over the course of an academic year.
The 751 pupils using 34 classrooms across seven primary schools in Blackpool were studied over the 2011-12 academic year by the University of Salford’s School of the Built Environment and architecture firm Nightingale Associates. Standardised data — such as age, gender and academic performance — were collected on each child at the start and end of the year, while each classroom was rated for quality on ten different environmental factors, such as orientation for natural light, shape, colour, temperature and acoustics.
The results, published in Building and the Environment, revealed that the architecture and design of classrooms has a significant role to play in influencing academic performance. Six of the environmental factors — colour, choice, connection, complexity, flexibility and light — were clearly correlated with grade scores.
Architect Peter Barrett, the study’s lead author, said: “This is the first time a holistic assessment has been made that successfully links the overall impact directly to learning rates in schools. The impact identified is in fact greater than we imagined.” According to the results, once the differences between the “worst” and “best” designed classrooms looked at in the study were taken into account, it was found the be the equivalent to the progress a typical pupil would be expected to make over a year.
The results are particularly interesting as the coaltion U.K. government has introduced a controversial range of standardised templates for new school buildings, with the expressed purpose of reducing the costs of hiring architects. An insistence on a range of strictly-defined design features — including a ban on curved walls and certain kinds of insulated wall and ETFE roofs, sticking to one size for windows and doors, encouraging stacking of blocks on top of each other, and an emphasis on “basic” finishes to interior decorations like balustrades — replaces the previous Labour government’s more architecturally extravagant Building Schools for the Future programme, which was cancelled by education secretary Michael Gove.
He has claimed that his department’s new Priority School Building Programme, and its basic plans, will put an end to a situation which he believes existed only to “make architects richer”.
Unsurprisingly, the design proposals have been met with disapproval from architects. The Royal Institute of British Architects issued a statement criticising the templates for introducing a “one size fits all” format that ignored the needs for flexibility in modern teaching environments. It also worried that the standard corridors would be too small for large numbers of students, the environmental impact of the buildings would be higher than expected, and that the templates ignored the statutory requirement to be accessible for students and teachers with disabilities.
A Beijing building project by London-based architect Zaha Hadid is proving so popular that the structure is being pirated elsewhere in the country.
Hadid’s Wangjing Soho is an office and retail complex which uses three curved towers to echo the intricate movements of Chinese fans. But, according to Der Spiegel, the architect’s firm is being forced to compete with pirates to get the original structure finished before the copy.
“Even as we build one of Zaha’s projects, it is being replicated in Chongqing,” said Zhang Xin, the property developer who commissioned the structure. “Everyone says that China is a great copycat country, and that it can copy anything.”
Hadid herself seems a little more relaxed about the use of her work, provided the results contain a certain amount of innovation, saying “that could be quite exciting.”
The project director for the Wangjing Soho, Satoshi Ohashi, added that without the detailed architectural plans the building could only ever be an approximation of the original.
“It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project,” said Ohashi. “[From these] you could work out a similar building if you are technically very capable, but this would only be a rough simulation of the architecture.”
Hadid’s Wangjing Soho is scheduled for completion in 2014.
More than 200,000 people worldwide are diagnosed with leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) each year. Despite its ancient origins and almost mythic status, however, leprosy remains mysterious. Researchers know that it’s caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, and that it leaves sufferers with deforming lesions and a debilitating loss of sensation in their hands and feet. But they don’t know how the infection spreads throughout the body or why it damages nerves so extensively. In part, that’s because it’s hard to investigate: the bacterium that causes leprosy can’t be grown in a lab, so it can only be studied in infected humans, armadillos, and genetically engineered mice.
