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Weekly Web Watch: July 24 2009
Editors' blog
Friday July 24th 2009
Andy Checkley brings you a collection of this weeks finest links and curiosities from the intertubes, including the earthquake that moved New Zealand closer to Australia and body luminescence
Friday July 24th 2009
Schematic illustration of experimental setup showing bodies emitting light. Image: Kyoto University; Tohoku Institute of Technology; PLoS ONE
Let's begin with an extraordinary piece of work – a lifesize image of a blue whale from The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. The largest mammal on earth, blue whales can grow up to 100 metres long, 170 tonnes and can live for 150 years. To put things in perspective, the largest dinosaur, Argentinosaurus, managed only 110 metres and up to 100 metric tonnes.
To continue with the natural wonders theme, Live Science has published findings that human beings literally glow, emitting tiny amounts of visible light as a result of biochemical reactions. Japanese scientists used highly sensitive cameras able to detect single photons on five healthy, bare-chested 20-year-old men who stood in complete darkness for 20 minutes every three hours for three days. Human bioluminescence apparently peaks at 4pm and is at its weakest at 10am. The face glows the most, likely due to its exposure to sunlight – melanin, the pigment behind skin colour (and tanning) has fluorescent components.
Philadelphia this week replaced 700 public bins with 500 solar-powered compactors. The 32-gallon "BigBelly" will condense trash, reducing collection trips by 75% and saving the city authority, which faces a $1.4 billion budget deficit over five years, $875,000 per annum. The devices will hopefully be deployed across 20 countries this year.
North Korea reaffirmed its status on Thursday as an international outcast. A state official responded with a barrage of bizarre insults to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's likening of the country's missile tests to an unruly, attention-seeking teenager. "We cannot but regard Mrs Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community," a foreign ministry spokesman told the state's official news agency. "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping." The quote continued with the devastating: "Her words suggest that she is by no means intelligent."
New Scientist has published findings from a University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute study claiming that American vehicle efficiency has barely improved since the Ford Model T, first produced in 1908. Michael Sivak and Omer Tsimhoni analysed the fuel efficiency of the entire US vehicle fleet of cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses from 1923 to 2006.
They found that between 1923 and 1935, fuel efficiency stayed around 14 mpg before falling to 11.9 mpg by 1973. By 1991, however, efficiency of the total fleet had risen 42 per cent from 1973 levels to 16.9 mpg. The 1991 improvements are attributed to the 1973 oil embargo by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Despite the West's environmental awakening, progress has since stalled – average efficiency improved by only 1.8 per cent to 17.2 mpg between 1991 and 2006. Sivak and Tsimhoni believe a financial payoff to encourage the scrapping of older vehicles in favour of new ones (as used by the UK government) would prove more useful than improvements to new cars alone.
A landmine left in a donation box forced the evacuation of a mall in Denver, Colorado, say MSNBC. Workers at Goodwill became suspicious when a green, rectangular box with the words "Front Toward Enemy" appeared on Tuesday.
Police say the Claymore anti-personnel mine, widely used during the Vietnam war, didn't go off and was safely defused by a bomb squad. They say it is unclear whether it was operational and that no suspects have been identified.
Scientists' have confirmed that a massive earthquake last week has moved New Zealand closer to Australia. Apparently, the 7.8 richter quake has moved New Zealand's southwest 30cm closer to its neighbour. "Basically, New Zealand just got a little bit bigger is another way to think about it,'' said Ken Gladhill of GNS Science. Though the earthquake was the largest recorded in 78 years, very little damage has been caused. A 7.8 richter incident in 1931 killed 256 people.
Lastly, a study from Brigham Young University covered by Science Daily suggests that babies can understand dogs. Infants were shown two different pictures of the same dog, one showing an aggressive stance and the other friendly. Then researchers randomly played recordings of aggressive and friendly barks. “They only had one trial because we didn’t want them to learn it on the fly and figure it out,” said psychology professor Ross Flom.
While the recordings played, the 6-month-old children spent most of their time staring at the appropriate picture. Older babies usually made the connection instantly with their very first glance. The study shows that babies babies recognize and respond to the emotional tone of their surroundings long before learning speech. It follows a study from the same university showing that infants can detect mood changes in Beethoven's symphonies. “Emotion is one of the first things babies pick up on in their social world,” said Flom.
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