The visible universe—including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies—is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms. Perhaps one of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century was that this ordinary, or baryonic, matter makes up less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe.

The rest of the universe appears to be made of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter (25 percent) and a force that repels gravity known as dark energy (70 percent).

Scientists have not yet observed dark matter directly. It doesn’t interact with baryonic matter and it’s completely invisible to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making dark matter impossible to detect with current instruments. […]

Dark energy is even more mysterious, and its discovery in the 1990s was a complete shock to scientists. Previously, physicists had assumed that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe over time. But when two independent teams tried to measure the rate of deceleration, they found that the expansion was actually speeding up. One scientist likened the finding to throwing a set of keys up in the air expecting them to fall back down-only to see them fly straight up toward the ceiling.

Scientists now think that the accelerated expansion of the universe is driven by a kind of repulsive force generated by quantum fluctuations in otherwise “empty” space. What’s more, the force seems to be growing stronger as the universe expands. For lack of a better name, scientists call this mysterious force dark energy.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

“Chris,” a Chicago high school student and gang member and gunslinger, explains exactly how easy it is for he and his fellow gang members to obtain firearms, even if they have criminal records:

“I will make a call and say I need a gun. I will ride down the street on my bike and get it — five minutes.” . . . Chris calls them the “gun guys.” The cops have another name for them: “straw purchasers.”

“Gun guys” have clean records allowing them to obtain Illinois firearm owner’s identification cards. With FOID cards, they can legally buy guns at stores in the suburbs.
Then they illegally sell them to gang members banned from owning guns because of their criminal backgrounds.

Most of the guns recovered in crimes in Chicago were bought in suburban gun stores, according to a new University of Chicago Crime Lab study of police gun-trace data.

As Chris points out, many of these straw purchasers’ full-time job is trading on their clean criminal record to buy guns and then resell them at a markup to dangerous felons. Such professional straw purchasers should be easy to catch. Because federal law requires most gun purchasers to undergo criminal background checks before they can buy a firearm, it should be an easy matter for law enforcement to check whether the same person is purchasing guns over and over and over again.

Except that the so-called “Tiahrt Amendments” thwart such checks by requiring the Justice Department to destroy the record of any gun buyer whose purchase was approved within 24 hours. As a result, law enforcement is often blind to straw purchasers who are flooding the streets with guns right under their noses.

Nor is this the only aspect of federal law that “gun guys” can take advantage of. An estimated 10 percent of all guns used in a crime by juveniles were sold at a gun show or flea market where many of the dealers do not have to conduct criminal background checks on their customers. Indeed, federal officials are often forced to charge straw purchasers with paperwork violations due to the absence of an appropriate law criminalizing unlicensed gun trafficking.

{ Think Progress | Continue reading }

related { Another responsible gun owner just doing his thing }

{ Eight things to consider before intervening in Syria }

The evidence for a flat earth is derived from many different facets of science and philosophy. The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us. The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world.

[…]

People have been into space. How have they not discovered that the earth is flat?

The most commonly accepted explanation of this is that the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and exploration.

{ Flat Earth Society | Continue reading | More: The Flat Earth Society now has a podcast! }

A surge of electrical activity in the brain could be responsible for the vivid experiences described by near-death survivors, scientists report.

A study carried out on dying rats found high levels of brainwaves at the point of the animals’ demise.

US researchers said that in humans this could give rise to a heightened state of consciousness.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Analyzing data from 60 earlier studies, Solomon Hsiang from the University of California, Berkeley, found that warmer temperatures and extremes in rainfall can substantially increase the risk of many types of conflict. For every standard deviation of change, levels of interpersonal violence, such as domestic violence or rape, rise by some 4 percent, while the frequency of intergroup conflict, from riots to civil wars, rise by 14 percent. Global temperatures are expected to rise by at least two standard deviations by 2050, with even bigger increases in the tropics.

{ The Scientist | Continue reading }

How much do you like courgettes? According to one Facebook page devoted to them, hundreds of people find them delightful enough to click the “like” button – even with dozens of other pages about courgettes to choose from.

There’s just one problem: the liking was fake, done by a team of low-paid workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose boss demanded just $15 per thousand “likes” at his “click farm”. […]

That particular Facebook page on courgettes was set up by the programme makers to demonstrate how click farms can give web properties spurious popularity. […]

Sir Billi, a British cartoon film voiced by Sir Sean Connery, has more than 65,000 Facebook likes – more than some Hollywood films.

Although it has so far only been released in South Korea, Facebook data suggests the city of Dhaka is the source of the third-largest number of likes. (The Egyptian capital, Cairo, is presently the source of the highest number.)

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

On a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an unremarkable gray box protrudes from a telephone pole. Inside the box lies a state-of-the-art airflow-sampling device, one part of an experiment to track how a gas disperses through the city’s streets and subway system. […]

The goal of the project is to develop a model for how a dangerous airborne contaminant, such as sarin gas or anthrax, would spread throughout the city in the event of a terrorist attack or accidental release.

The scientists released tiny amounts of a colorless, nontoxic gas at several locations around the city. The airflow samplers, located at various points throughout the city, measured the gas to determine how fast and how far it spread.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

unrelated { Eproctophilia is a paraphilia in which people are sexually aroused by flatulence. The following account presents a brief case study of an eproctophile. | Improbable }

In Japan, where palm reading remains one of the most popular means of fortune-telling, some people have figured out a way to change their fate. It’s a simple idea: change your palm, change the reading, and change your future. All you need is a competent plastic surgeon with an electric scalpel who has a basic knowledge of palmistry. […]

From January 2011 to May 2013, 37 palm plastic surgeries have been performed at the Shonan Beauty Clinic alone. Several other clinics in Japan offer the surgery, but almost none of them advertise it.

{ The Daily Beast | Continue reading }

photo { Brendan Baker }

The objective of this study was to determine test characteristics (i.e., intra- and interobserver variability, intraassay variability, sensitivity, and specificity) of an evaluation of odor from vaginal discharge (VD) of cows in the first 10 days postpartum conducted by olfactory cognition and an electronic device, respectively. […]

The study revealed a considerable subjectivity of the human nose concerning the classification into healthy and sick animals based on the assessment of vaginal discharge.

{ Journal of Dairy Science }

An executive at Tiffany & Co. allegedly stole $1.3 million worth of jewelry from the company. How did she do it?

Very slowly, it seems. Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun, 46, worked as the vice president of product development at the jeweler’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters from January 2011 to February of this year, when her position was terminated due to downsizing. […]

“She was careful to only keep items that were valued at under $10,000.” […] “Tiffany’s has a policy of only investigating missing inventory that’s valued over $25,000. […]

Ice-T (né Tracy Marrow), the longtime rapper, actor, and former professional jewel thief, suspects that Lederhaas-Okun may have had a buyer in advance.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

The Terminal Event Management Policy is an official policy of Wikipedia detailing the procedures to be followed to safeguard the content of the encyclopedia in the event of a non-localized event that would render the continuation of Wikipedia in its current form untenable.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

porcelain { Livia Marin }

In August 2009, scientists in Israel raised serious doubts concerning the use of DNA by law enforcement as the ultimate method of identification. In a paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, the Israeli researchers demonstrated that it is possible to manufacture DNA in a laboratory, thus falsifying DNA evidence. The scientists fabricated saliva and blood samples, which originally contained DNA from a person other than the supposed donor of the blood and saliva.

The researchers also showed that, using a DNA database, it is possible to take information from a profile and manufacture DNA to match it, and that this can be done without access to any actual DNA from the person whose DNA they are duplicating. The synthetic DNA oligos required for the procedure are common in molecular laboratories.

The New York Times quoted the lead author on the paper, Dr. Daniel Frumkin, saying, “You can just engineer a crime scene… any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Dr. Frumkin perfected a test that can differentiate real DNA samples from fake ones. His test detects epigenetic modifications, in particular, DNA methylation. Seventy percent of the DNA in any human genome is methylated, meaning it contains methyl group modifications within a CpG dinucleotide context. Methylation at the promoter region is associated with gene silencing. The synthetic DNA lacks this epigenetic modification, which allows the test to distinguish manufactured DNA from original, genuine, DNA.

It is unknown how many police departments, if any, currently use the test. No police lab has publicly announced that it is using the new test to verify DNA results.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ How Much is Your Gmail Worth to Attackers? | The Value of a Hacked Email Account }

Eyewitness error is the leading cause of wrongful felony convictions. For example, eyewitness error played a role in 72% of the 302 DNA exoneration cases, and it is estimated that one-third of eyewitnesses make an erroneous identification. In this article, we discuss why jurors and legal professionals have difficulty evaluating eyewitness testimony. We also describe the I-I-Eye method for analyzing eyewitness testimony, and a scientific study of the I-I-Eye method that shows it can improve jurors’ ability to assess eyewitness accuracy.

{ The Jury Expert | Continue reading }

Forget patenting an invention. These days, companies patent conceptual categories for future inventions.

During the first dot-com boom, Amazon famously patented the concept of buying things online with one click. More recently, companies have patented concepts such as scanning documents to an e-mail account, clearing checks electronically and sending e-mail over a wireless network.

The problem with these kinds of abstract patents is that lots of people will independently discover the same basic concept and infringe by accident. Then the original patent holder — who may not have come up with the concept first, or even turned the concept into a usable technology — can sue. That allows for the kind of abusive litigation that has been on the rise in recent years.

A lawsuit over an Internet advertising patent offered a key appeals court an opportunity to rein in these abstract patents. Instead, the court gave such patents its endorsement on Friday, setting the stage for rampant patent litigation to continue unchecked.

A firm called Ultramercial claims to have invented the concept of showing a customer an ad instead of charging for content. The company has sought royalties from a number of Web sites, including Hulu and YouTube. Ultramercial’s patent isn’t limited to any specific software algorithm, server configuration or user interface design. If you build a Web site that follows the general business strategy claimed by the patent, Ultramercial thinks you owe them money.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.

{ Sianne Ngai/Cabinet | Continue reading }

What is an electron? […]

Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s answer, in 1927, epitomized his beloved concept of complementarity: in some circumstances electrons are best described as particles, with definite positions; in others as waves, with definite momenta. Either description is valid and useful, yet according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle they are mutually exclusive, as positions and momenta cannot be known accurately at the same time. Each depiction captures an aspect of the electron’s nature, but neither exhausts it.

Modern quantum theory reinforces Bohr’s conclusion that what you see depends on how you choose to look. […]

Theoretical calculations have become intricate, now including fluctuations in fluctuations in fluctuations. […]

Attempts to pin down an electron’s position more accurately than this require, according to the uncertainty principle, injecting so much energy into the electron that additional electrons and anti-electrons get produced, confusing the issue.

{ Frank Wilczek | PDF }

related { First particle containing four quarks is confirmed }

fiberglass and pigment { Anish Kapoor, Void, 1989 }

Normally, tracking a criminal using DNA requires, at a minimum, that the perpetrator leaves behind a DNA sample in some form or other. As they are not often so accommodating, the role of DNA in crime busting, while significant, has its limits.

Applied DNA Sciences (ADNAS) has developed a new approach to solve crimes using DNA tagging. The difference is that instead of tagging the objects being stolen, they tag the pilferer with DNA. While this has been tried before by applying the DNA to a fleeing criminal with a gun, ADNAS has adopted a more subtle approach. […]

DNA Fog is an airborne suspension of artificial DNA molecules with a known but biologically inert sequence. The DNA molecules (Applied DNA’s SigNature DNA) are artificially constructed, so that a strand of DNA with 20 base pairs can have over a trillion unique combinations. A security system could use one sequence per location, one sequence for each area within the location, or even use RFID tags to instruct a sophisticated spraying device to spray a unique DNA signature for each item stolen.

Once released, DNA molecules attach onto a malefactor’s clothing, shoes, hair, and skin, as well as the objects stolen.

{ Gizmag | Continue reading }