Author: Discover Main Feed

The agricultural revolution may have started earlier than we thought.

What’s this? Two outstanding and surpassingly beautiful Cassini images in one day?

Yeah, because this is how much I love you guys. Check. This. Out:

[Click to embiggen.]

That is so cool! It’s Saturn’s moon Dione passing in front of Tethys as their mutual motion, combined with Cassini’s, give us this incredible view of what astronomers call an occultation (also called a “mutual event”… but you can just think of it as an eclipse).

There’s so much awesomeness in this picture. For one, see the faint glow on the “dark” side of Tethys? That’s reflected light from Saturn, which is well off to the right in this picture. But we don’t see any reflected light on Dione. Why not?

Even though the two moons look about the same distance away, that’s very misleading: in this image, Tethys is 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Cassini, while Dione is 400,000 km (240,000 miles) closer. That’s enough to significantly change the geometry of the situation, so that we don’t see Saturnlight on Dione.

Note that while both moons are roughly the same size (Tethys is 1062 km (660 miles) across, and Dione is 1123 km (700 miles) in diameter), Dione looks bigger because it was closer to Cassini when these shots were snapped. If they had been at the same distance from Cassini, you’d just barely be able to tell Dione is bigger. Sometimes distance matters, not size.

And sometimes size matters too. It’s hard to miss the vast Odysseus crater on Tethys, a terrifying 400 km (240 miles) across. That’s the size of Ohio. An impact that large on Earth would pretty much wipe out every living thing on the planet’s surface.

For another little dose of coolness, these images were taken about one minute apart, covering just two minutes of Cassini’s tour of Saturn and its armada of moons. Imagine what you’d see if you could be there, staying at a hotel orbiting Titan? What wonders would befall your eyes if you had years to explore?

Hmmm. Come to think of it, we don’t have to wonder about it. Cassini is showing us.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In the new version of the Unscientific America talk, I also tried to make more explicit the reasons why we think “scientific literacy,” broadly defined, is essential to American democracy, and something every citizen should strive for. What’s so great about it? Well, here are my answers:

1. Knowledge is a good in and of itself. The more anyone has of it, the better.

2. Empowerment: The more Americans know about science, and the methods of critical thinking about evidence that it imparts, the better off they’ll be when it comes to making choices in their own lives, e.g., in the medical arena.

3. Citizenship: The more scientifically literate our citizens are, the more they’ll be able to access and engage with the scientific aspects of key public policy issues like climate change.

4. Policy: There is a reality out there, and we need our decisions to be aligned with it. Ultimately, 3 should lead to 4, as more citizen engagement with science reverberates in the decision-making process. And that’s what matters most of all.

Any questions or objections? Or does that about encompass it?

I think that traditionally, most of the emphasis in “scientific literacy” discussions has been on 1 & 2. What I like think is different about the approach that we take in Unscientific America is that it much more strongly stresses 3 & 4.

At some level, I understand the motivations of people who promote “alternative medicine”. They may very well be altrustic, seeing what they perceive as a massive failing of so-called Western medicine, and feeling strongly that they know how to fix the situation, if only people would seek alternatives. I know that when I feel strongly enough about an issue, I feel morally obligated to speak up.

The problem is that for a lot of this so-called alternative medicine, there is no evidence it works, and in fact evidence it doesn’t work. Worse, a lot of its biggest purveyors actively try to denigrate real medicine, the stuff that, y’know, works, in an attempt to bolster their alt-med claims. And you have to be a little suspicious when they hawk their wares on their sites, too.

So I question the motivations of some of these people, including one Mike Adams, about whom I wrote a couple of days ago. When called out for what is apparently voter fraud for a Twitter Shorty Award, he threw an epic tantrum that displays a decided lack of grip on reality (assuming he honestly believes what he’s selling). After that fact-free diatribe he followed up with a rant about skeptics that’s so far off the mark that it’s hard to believe anyone could post something like that honestly. Steve Novella takes him down on that one.

And as if these word spasms from Adams weren’t enough, he posted a third article where he completely gets science wrong, claiming water and quantum mechanics are magic, and then a fourth about the Shorty Awards where he once again ramps up the paranoid conspiracy theories.

Sigh. The irony is that he makes my job easy since he’s self-debunking, but also makes it harder because so many people swallow what he says whole without even giving it a moment of critical thought.

Joe Mercola, the other “victim” professing to have the vapors over this Shorty Award nonsense, decided to jump into the fray as well. Instead of using facts — because why start now? — he thought it was a good idea to say that Rachael Dunlop is fat:

An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.

Rachael is a woman who has tirelessly fought quackery and the dangerous wares of many alt-med purveyors, and of course Adams and Mercola are squarely in her crosshairs. She has called out many an antivaxxer, and was a key player in the travesty involving Dana McCaffery (an infant who died of pertussis) and Meryl Dorey, an antivaxxer who claims no one dies from pertussis anymore.

So when faced with someone like Rachael who has years of experience and who wields science, evidence, and reality, Mercola decided to stick out his tongue and call her fat.

Wow, folks. There’s your alt-med hero.

And yes, I am engaging in an ad hominem, an attack directed at someone instead of their arguments. But it’s not always wrong to do so; in this case Steve Novella, Orac, Rachael, and many others, including me, have already shown that people like Mercola and Adams are full of it. But sometimes that’s not enough. I think it does a lot of good to see how vile these people can be, and something like this is not only warranted, but needed, especially when these alt-medders set themselves up to be victims, claiming to be sympathetic and only wanting to help. They don’t help; they hurt.

Happily, some of Mercola’s followers are starting to see through him.

Look. We’re not talking about goofy nonsense like ghost-hunting or UFOs here. We’re talking about people’s lives. Alt-medders like Adams and Mercola reject treatments that we know to work, that we know can cure illnesses, that we know can relieve pain and suffering on a massive scale, and that we know can save lives. That’s what you’re turning your back on when you listen to them.

And I still endorse Rachael for the Shorty Award in health. Keep fighting the good fight.

If you thought a zoo chimpanzee’s life was a simple sequence of “see banana… peel… eat,” then think again.

The BBC is set to air a new documentary titled “The Chimpcam Project,” that has been shot entirely by chimpanzees at Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. We’re guessing it won’t quite match the high-tech joys of “Avatar,” but the film is expected to provide fascinating clues as to how chimps view the world around them.

The movie was primatologist Betsy Herrelko’s idea. She introduced video technology to a group of 11 chimps living in a newly built enclosure at the Edinburgh Zoo. At first she just wanted to see if chimps could use a touchscreen to select different videos, thereby offering her a chance to study what images chimps liked.

The BBC reports:

Initially, the chimps were more interested in each other than the video technology, as two male chimps within the study group vied to become the alpha male, disrupting the experiment. But over time, some of the chimps learned how to select different videos to watch.

Then, Herrelko wanted to gauge if chimps could record images with a chimp-proof camera–a camera enclosed in an orange bash-proof box.

When the chimps were handed the “chimpcam” as a group, they carried it around the enclosure and were fascinated by the viewfinder. However, the BBC reported that the apes were not likely to have actively filmed any particular object or to have understood that they were making a film. But the researchers are confident the chimpcam will help garner new info on how chimps see the world.

The film will premiere this Wednesday on the BBC, but here’s a sneak peek at the list of chimps who made the end credits: Cindy, Ricky and Louis from Africa, Emma from Bedforshire, UK, and David, Kilimi, Kindia, Liberius, Lucy, Lyndsey, and Qafzeh who were all born at the Edinburgh Zoo.

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Image Credit: iStock Photo

We’re long overdule for an open-type thread around here, so let me provide the excuse by asking one of the world’s great questions: what’s the best way to make coffee?

I’m an eclectic coffee drinker; I like espresso but also enjoy a really good cup of American coffee, and I prefer coffee black but am willing to adulterate it with milk if I suspect the quality is not going to be that high. (Sugar under no circumstances.) For the past few years I’ve relied on the lowest-effort method I know of that is guaranteed to produce a good cup: freshly-ground dark roast beans, placed in a simple cone filter and hot water poured right in. Practically instant coffee, but a result that can be as good as the beans allow.

But I’d like to start mixing more espresso into my home coffee experience, so I’m in the market for a new espresso machine. If I were a physicist of means, I might go for a work of art like the Elektra Micro Casa Lever on right. Or would I? This is a spring-action lever machine, which is to be contrasted with the manual levers, not to mention the automatics and super-automatics, and then there’s the matter of boilers, switches, heat exchangers … a complete mess. The pumps are certainly elegant, but I’d also like something that is functional and doesn’t require constant pampering. So I am in the unusual position of being frozen with indecision about what kind of espresso machine to get. Any opinions out there?

The ground rules here are:

1. There’s no such thing as right or wrong; different people have different tastes, for which different approaches are appropriate.
2. Answers with specific comparisons of advantages and disadvantages are more useful than simple insistence on truth.

I do understand that this is the internet and rules are unlikely to be followed, but I feel I should try.

Obviously not all advice on such a topic is too be trusted. The Engineer’s Guide to Drinks thread featured a sobering (as it were) number of people who think a “martini” should just be chilled gin rather than a proper cocktail, and were proud to admit it in public! So caveat lector. And if you want to talk about something other than coffee, be our guest.

Despite the prevalence of post traumatic stress disorder, especially in veterans (an estimated one in five from Iraq and Afghanistan have it, according to the Department of Defense), it can be maddeningly tricky to diagnose. But in a new study in Journal of Neural Engineering, brain researcher Apostolos Georgopoulos argues that his team has found, through the brain scanning technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), a pattern in the brain associated with PTSD. In a MEG scan, researchers measure the magnetic fields generated by electric activity in the brain; the scans are far faster than those taken via MRI.

Georgopoulos and colleagues studied 74 U.S. veterans with PTSD and 250 people with no mental health problems. They scanned the brains of study participants looking for a signal that might distinguish a PTSD patient from a healthy volunteer [Reuters]. The researchers mapped the neural interactions for both groups, and they say that the resulting map of biomarkers allowed them to look at brain scans, without knowing whether the person had PTSD or not, and pick out the PTSD patients from controls with 90 percent accuracy.

The main upshot of finding reliable biomarkers for PTSD would be making diagnosis easier and more accurate. In addition, the map shows changes over time, which therapists could consult to see how well treatment is working. But for Georgopoulos, there’s something more: “This shows that PTSD is a brain disease,” he says. “There have been questions that this is a made-up disorder and isn’t a true brain disease, but it is” [TIME].

The biomarkers in question are patterns of tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything. These “synchronous neural interactions” have already been shown to distinguish signals from subjects with a range of disorders including Alzheimer’s [BBC News].

Not all are convinced that Georgopoulos is on to something: Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute who has studied PTSD, says she’s skeptical that there’s “a fixed neural signature” for the condition [TIME]. However, she says, Georgopoulos’ approach could become part of a more through PTSD diagnostic process, and he says he plans more ambitious studies beyond this first step. The researchers say they want to evaluate 500 vets and 500 civilians to further test their findings, and it will be important to investigate whether certain pre-existing conditions that are also PTSD symptoms, i.e. anxiety and insomnia, skew the results [CNET].

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Image: iStockphoto

Are you ready for some free fall?

Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner officially announced that sometime this year, he intends to jump from a balloon at a height of nearly 23 miles, breaking the 50-year-old world record for the highest parachute jump held by retired U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger. Kittinger is the Stratos mission’s capcom (short for capsule communicator), which means that he will be the voice in Baumgartner’s helmet. Kittinger’s advice to his successor: “Have fun, enjoy it, and tell us all about it when you get down” [Scientific American].

Baumgartner is a BASE jumper who once flew a glider across the English Channel, but he and his team say they have loftier goals than simply a world record and a huge adrenaline rush. If he makes the jump, Baumgartner could be the first person to break the sound barrier without the benefit of an aircraft, and his crazy stunt could provide valuable data on how that affects the body. Just as Kittinger did, Baumgartner will go up in a balloon, though his pressure suit, capsule and monitoring equipment will be much more advanced [Reuters]. Baumgartner says that a successful test would also benefit future spaceflight, showing that if astronauts had a problem as their craft entered the stratosphere, it theoretically would be possible for them to bail out and safely reach the ground.

Baumgartner’s pressurized, airtight suit is much like those worn by space shuttle astronauts, and Art Thompson, the project’s technical director, explains that it’s vital to his success. The jump height is above a threshold at [62,000 feet] called the Armstrong line, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that fluids start to boil. “If he opens up his face mask or the suit, all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy, oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film,” Thompson explained. “It’s just seconds until death” [New Scientist].

Hopefully Baumgartner has better luck than others who have tried to fall to Earth from the highest heights. The most recent attempt was made in 2008, by a former French paratrooper, Michel Fournier, who spent years preparing only to have the balloon that was set to take him up break from its moorings and float away [The Independent]. Fournier, however, pledges to try again this year, so it could be a race to jump from the stratosphere—if everybody remembers to keep their balloons strapped down until they’re ready.

Related Content:
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Image: Red Bull Stratos

Just a hair over ten years ago, the Cassini spacecraft caromed past Jupiter, stealing a tiny bit of the giant planet’s energy to hasten the space probe’s journey to Saturn. When it passed Jupiter at a distance of about 10 million kilometers (6 million miles), Cassini saw this:

[Click to enjovianate. Seriously, the full-res picture is jaw-dropping.]

This stunning shot is actually a mosaic of 27 images: 9 images to cover the planet in a 3×3 grid, and 3 images at each location to get red, green, and blue exposures to make this near true-color image. While the Voyagers (which also flew past Jupiter) and Galileo (which orbited the planet for about 8 years) took higher-resolution images, this is the sharpest color global view of Jupiter taken.

It’s one of my favorite shots of Jupiter, too, edged out by the crescent view of the planet from Cassini (with the added bonus of a crescent Io) as it left on its way to Saturn. You can see that image and more on the Cassini Jupiter Encounter page. The probe has been in orbit around the ringed planet for a long time now, but when you peruse those gorgeous images, don’t forget that in space, you can almost always get more than just one bird with one stone.

Tip o’ the Red Spot to Carolyn Porco, who mentioned this on her Twitter feed.

“STUDY OBJECTIVE: To determine the incidence of blunt trauma in northern New York City before and after the distribution of 25,000 baseball bats at Yankee Stadium… …MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Seventy-seven patients sustained bat injuries, 38 (49%) before and 36 (47%) after Bat Day. There were no significant differences between the two groups with respect to age, sex, time of injury, number and distribution of fractures and lacerations, incidence of loss of consciousness, source of history, or dispostion. There was a positive association between the number of cases on a given day and the average temperature that day (r = .5; P < .01). CONCLUSION: The distribution of 25,000 wooden baseball bats to attendees at Yankee Stadium did not increase the incidence of bat-related trauma in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. There was a positive correlation between daily temperature and the incidence of bat injury. The informal but common impressions of emergency clinicians about the cause-and-effect relationship between Bat Day and bat trauma were unfounded.”

Thanks to Timon for today’s ROFL!

Over the weekend, to prepare for my keynote at the Hope Summit 2010 in St. Louis, I went back through the Unscientific America PowerPoint and added a number of updates and new observations. I may blog a number of the changes, but I want to highlight one of them in particular–I added this figure from the latest Science and Engineering Indicators report out of NSF:

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the U.S. is producing an increasing, not decreasing, number of scientists and engineers right now. But China…whoa. The figures above only go through 2007, and in light of that slope, it may well be that China is producing more science and engineering Ph.D.s annually than any other country in the world by now.

What you’re looking at, folks, is the rapid birth of a science superpower.

So when you hear concerns about declining U.S. leadership in science, there is definitely something to it. In fact, those concerns aren’t just rearview mirror watching any more; China is the car that’s blowing past us in the left lane. Whether they are producing scientists who are as talented, as well-trained, or as interdisciplinary as American scientists, I can’t say. But boy are they ever producing scientists.

Here’s a talk I just gave on Big Think–about viruses, synthetic biology, and tapeworms that carry my name. The sound quality isn’t as good as I’d like, but I hope the words make up for it.

Apparently, I am Tom Baker. I had guessed I’d be David Tennant, but thinking on it carefully, Baker’s a closer fit to who I am; Tennant (at least up until the last episode, feh) was who — I mean, Who — I wanted to be.

Which Doctor Who are you?

Tip o’ the big floppy hat to regular BABloggee IVAN3MAN.

This week’s edition of The Science of Kissing Gallery features the custom of foot kissing as depicted on this woodcut ‘Passionary of the Christ and Antichrist‘ by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Submit your original photo or artwork to the gallery here and remember to include relevant links to blogs and events.

This story is too funny, but it takes a little background.

Mike Adams is an alt-med pusher; he writes at Natural News, a website chock-full-o’ nonsense about vaccines, homepathy, and so on. Regular readers may remember Mr. Adams from his particularly vile and horrific diatribe about real medicine after Patrick Swayze died. Adams claims to want to help people, but instead peddles all manners of treatments that are known not to work at all.

So that ought to give you a picture of how Adams operates.

The Shorty Awards are a popular new internet award for people who use Twitter. It allows tweeters to vote for someone in various categories like science, humor, celebrity, and, oh, say, health.

Adams, who tweets under the name HealthRanger, was doing well with votes in the Shorties last week, well ahead of everyone else. In second place was another alt-med antivax promoter named Joe Mercola. I’ve written about him before as well.

But then skeptic Tim Farley noticed something– a lot of votes going to Mercola and Adams were coming from brand new Twitter accounts with only one actual tweet: a vote for Mercola or Adams for the Shorties.

Hmmm.

Now, someone who may be a bit conspiracy-minded might assume that either Mercola or Adams, or their followers, might be working a campaign to stuff the ballot box by setting up fake Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of making sure these alt-med public health threats would win the Shorty award in health.

So Tim tweeted about it, and a bunch of us started to promote our friend Australian Rachael Dunlop, who has been tirelessly fighting alternative medicine quackery for years. Within a few days Rachael had moved into first place. Yay!

But there’s more! Tim (as well as several others, including me) reported Mercola’s and Adams’ voter fraud to the people at the Shorty Awards. Today it was announced that Adams was being removed from the contest due to this fraudulent ballot stuffing.

Adams, of course, took this all in stride and has been gracious and self-deprecating about it all.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my. Of course he hasn’t. Instead, he posted what can only be called a frothing rant about this, accusing the Shorty Awards and many of us reality-based people with all kinds of evil doing. You have to read his diatribe to believe anyone could post something so filled with rage, righteous indignation, logical fallacies, made-up transgressions, self-contradictions, and paranoid conspiracy mongering. It’s really a masterpiece of woo-based garment-rendering nonsense. He’s even threatened to sue!

Maybe he should win a Shorty Award for fiction.

To be fair, I actually don’t think Adams should have been disqualified; we don’t know who set up the fake votes for him. It might have been just one overzealous altmed fan. What should have happened was all the fake votes should have been struck from the count — a large fraction — and then let the most popular person win. It hardly matters anyway, since Rachael is so far out front that she’ll win anyway. But it would be the fair thing to do.

Not that this would assuage Adams anyway. Since he doesn’t deal with anything using facts and logic in the first place, he’ll just continue to post his nonsense as he pleases.

Orac posted a lovely satirical takedown of all this, which is worth reading. It’s always a good idea to keep yourself abreast of what these people are like. The alt-med movement talks a good game about the evil of Big Pharma and Western Medicine, and also claiming they want to help people out of the goodness of their hearts… but when you actually get a glimpse of what’s in their hearts, well, it’s not exactly rainbows and unicorns.

All of Caltech, and the cosmology community worldwide, is mourning the death of Andrew Lange. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, co-leader of the Boomerang experiment that provided the first precise measurement of the first acoustic peak in the cosmic microwave background. He took his own life Thursday night.

It’s hard to convey how unexpected and tragic this news is. Very few people combined Andrew’s brilliance as a scientist with his warmth as a person. He always had a sparkle in his eye, was enthusiastically in love with science and ideas, and was constantly doing his best to make Caltech the best possible place, not just for himself but for everyone else around him. He was one of the good guys. The last I spoke with him, Andrew was energetically raising funds for a new submillimeter telescope, organizing conferences, and helping plan for a new theoretical physics center. We are all walking around in shock, wondering how this could happen and whether we could have done anything to prevent it. Caltech has had several suicides this year — hard to make sense of any of them.

The message from Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau is below the fold. For any local readers, there’s contact info if you would like to talk to counselors for any reason.

—————————————

January 22, 2010

TO: The Caltech Community

FROM: Jean-Lou Chameau

It is with great sadness and regret that I must report to you the death of Professor Andrew Lange, a valued member of the Caltech faculty. Andrew was found this morning off campus, and it appears that he took his own life. Among the most difficult things that people have to deal with in life are tragedies of this sort, especially when they affect people that we know and care for; and Andrew was such a well-known, well-respected, and well-liked member of our community that many of us will be deeply affected.

Andrew came to Caltech in 1993 and was most recently the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. He was a truly great physicist and astronomer who had made seminal discoveries in observational cosmology.

Andrew was a valued colleague and a close friend to many of us. His death is a source of great sadness to us all and our deepest sympathy goes out to his family, friends, and colleagues, all of whom mourn his loss.

We know this tragic news will come as a shock to everyone — faculty, staff, and students alike, even those of you who knew that Andrew had been struggling with personal issues. Many of us feel the need in times like these to reach out and seek help in dealing with the shock, and I urge anyone who wants help to seek it from family members, friends, faculty, and/or professional counselors. This is not only a reasonable thing to do, it is an important thing to do. I want to emphasize in particular that counselors are always available, 24-hours a day. Students should call the Counseling Center at 626-395-8331, while faculty, staff, and postdocs, should call the Staff and Faculty Consultation Center at 626-395-8360. In addition, the Counseling Center will be open on Saturday and Sunday from 10-3pm.

Both Uranus and Neptune have quirky magnetic poles—they’re located about 60 degrees off the geographic pole rather than very nearby, like ours is. The reason, researchers suggest in a new Nature Physics study, could be that oceans of diamond—yes, oceans of diamond—cover our solar system’s two most distant planets.

The diamond idea isn’t a new one, but it’s a terribly hard question to study because you have to get diamond to melt in the lab to study it, and this experiment was the first to document the pressure and temperature at which that happens. The mineral is notoriously hard, of course, but there’s something more: Diamond doesn’t like to stay diamond when it gets hot. When diamond is heated to extreme temperatures it physically changes, from diamond to graphite. The graphite, and not the diamond, then melts into a liquid. The trick for the scientists was to heat the diamond up while simultaneously stopping it from transforming into graphite [Discovery News].

Doing so required not only extraordinary heat, but also extraordinary pressure. The researchers liquefied the diamond at 40 million times more than the pressure at sea level on Earth. When the pressure fell to only 11 million-times Earth sea level and temperatures dipped to 50,000 degress Celsius, solid chunks of diamond began to appear in the liquid [The Telegraph]. Because diamond is one of those rare liquids, like water, that is less dense as a solid than a liquid, solid diamond “icebergs” could float on to of the diamond seas on Neptune and Uranus.

Both planets have the conditions and the carbon to make this possible; each one is made from up to 10 percent carbon. And all that diamond would explain the out-of-whack magnetic pole, the scientists say. A huge ocean of liquid diamond in the right place could deflect or tilt the magnetic field out of alignment with the rotation of the planet [Discovery News].

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Image: NASA

It’s official. Even people in space are tweeting. NASA announced today that astronaut T.J. Creamer on the International Space Station has become the first person to tweet directly from space, making use of a brand new direct Internet connection. Creamer tweeted: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Yay. Space tweets. Sweet.

In the past, astronauts could use email and twitter–but they had to relay their messages to ground control in Houston, who then sent them on. But now, thanks to the new system of personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, astronauts can take advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and browse the Web directly.

Associated Press reports:

The International Space Station crew can now use an on-board laptop to reach a desktop computer at Mission Control, and thereby browse the Web. This remote Internet access is possible whenever there is a solid high-speed communication link.

So no more going through ground control if astronuats want to update their Facebook status. Which is great for them, as we imagine it must get a little lonely out there in space. If you want to follow what they’re up to on a day-to-day basis, follow their tweets here.

With direct internet access in space, we wonder if the World Wide Web has taken the first step towards becoming the Universe Wide Web. Also, if all the astronauts are online now–who’s manning the ship? Hello!

Related Content:
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Image: Twitter.com

Is your child practically a vampire? Avoiding the sun, holed up at home, and playing video games non-stop? Two scientists in Britain now suggest there might be link between such inactivity and rickets–a painful bone condition caused by lack of vitamin D, and which is much more common in malnourished children of the developing world.

Researchers Simon Pearce and Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have published a clinical review in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal blaming the rickets resurgence on our more interior lifestyle. According to The Guardian, Pearce said:

“Vitamin D levels in parts of the population are precarious. The average worker nowadays is in a call center, not out in the field. People tend to stay at home rather than going outside to kick a ball around. They stay at home on computer games.”

The consequent lack of vitamin D (which is produced in skin that’s exposed to moderately strong sunlight) could be the chief cause for the return of rickets in England, with 20 new cases reported each year from Newcastle alone.

But we might not have to unplug the game consoles and toss kids out into the sun. Researchers say that outdoor time could be topped up with a change in diet or vitamin D supplements. They even suggested to the British Department of Health that vitamin D be added to milk to get past picky eaters. (Currently, unlike the U.S., the UK does not add vitamin D to milk.)

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Image: iStockphoto