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Codecs have always been a pain in the butt. This package takes from the best, all the big name creators, several small guys too, and compiles all this into a single pack. All possible conflicts are already dealt with, many user suggested default settings are implemented.

This package does not contain a media player. This package does not associates filetypes. With this package installed, you will be able to use any media player to play DVD´s, movies and video clips such as quicktime, realmedia, avi, mpeg, Flv, swf, wmv, etc. Streaming video can be played within web browsers. By default, you shouldn´t need to make any adjustments to enjoy playback immediately.

Users now have the ability to choose what is installed using the public redistributable and after an unattended install, you can select to remove specific portions without removing the entire package. Future releases will recognize previous releases and perform upgrade installations.

This package contains QuickTime components with the tray icon permanently disabled.

This package currently supports 15 localized installations: The default install is English including support for the following other languages; Chinese Simplified/Traditional, Japanese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Polish and Turkish.

What’s New in version 5.6.6:

• update gabests filters 1774
• update ffdshow 3343
• update Haali 1.10.120.15
• fix high CPU usage

Homepage: http://shark007.net/
Download: VistaCodecs_v566.exe
File Size: 22.04MB

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• Vista Codec Package x64Components 1.6.3

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Since the ancient Romans first strapped treated goat’s bladders to their peckers, the venerable condom has been protecting people from pregnancy, itchy giblets and worse for hundreds of years. And while modern condoms are fairly reliable and allow much more sensitivity than the old multi-use sheep’s intestine jobbies ever did, they’re still far from foolproof. So we’re always impressed when somebody steps up and tries to improve on a time-honoured design – in this case, Sensis has announced a new technology that gets condoms on faster, safer and cleaner – making them more effective, and crucially cutting down on the mood-killing awkwardness we’re all familiar with. ..

Tags: Condom,
Medical,
Sex

Related Articles:

• World’s largest condom on display
• The Spray-On Condom
• Condometric – the condom that measures the size of your penis
• AIDS-preventing gel to protect women in resource-poor areas
• The Molecular Condom – vaginal gel releases Anti-HIV drug when exposed to semen
• Charity motorcycle adventures in Africa

For the first time in more than a century, a California condor chick successfully hatched inside a federal park that once was a domain of the endangered species.

Biologists at Pinnacles National Monument in Central California celebrated the milestone announced Wednesday in the slow recovery of the birds.

But their enthusiasm was tempered because the egg did not belong to any adult birds in the park.

A pair of condors there had conceived an egg in March that biologists then took for safekeeping and replaced with a plastic egg. Biologists later discovered the embryo had died seven days into its development.

"It wasn’t surprising the egg wasn’t viable," said Daniel George, manager of the condor program at Pinnacles. "That can happen with first-time breeders."

The pair in Pinnacle later hatched an egg that was slipped into their nest after being produced by a pair of condors in the San Diego Wildlife Park captive breeding program.

The chick emerged from its grapefruit-sized shell on March 24. Its sex will be determined soon with blood tests done when it receives its West Nile virus vaccine.

"It’s a good step forward for the program," said biologist Joe Burnett of Ventana Wilderness Society, a partner in the recovery program.

Removing new eggs from nests so the gangly birds with nearly 10-foot wingspans don’t accidentally destroy them is just part of the tedious recovery effort. Biologists don’t want this first generation of new birds to become discouraged if their mating efforts don’t pay off.

"It’s a tenuous process because you don’t know if they will accept it," George said. "So far all of their instincts seem to be operating properly."

Biologists and the public were able to monitor the progress of the birds’ 57-day egg-sitting from Scout Peak above the cliff-side nest. Tourists have flocked from as far as Kentucky to see the rare sight, which has not occurred in an area in free view of the public since the recovery program began.

Two days before the hatching, visitors witnessed the sometimes-comical reaction of the birds as the egg began to move and emit noises.

"They’ll get up all of a sudden and look at it, then try to reposition it," George said.

In 1982, the last 22 California condors were placed in captive breeding programs. Since then, hunters and lead poisoning from bullets left in carcasses have hampered the recovery of the birds, which currently number 350. Over the past decade, the birds have been released at three sites around California and one in Arizona. Without parents in the wild to teach them safe behavior, some of the newly hatched birds have been caught and placed in breeding programs after repeatedly perching on power lines or coming too close to people.

The arrival announced Wednesday occurred after a male condor released in 2004 at Big Sur and a female released the same year at Pinnacles began exhibiting mating and nesting behavior last year. Condors generally mate for life.

So far, the new parents are adapting to life with child. George said they take turns nestling their offspring to keep it warm, just as they did the egg.

While one waits, the other forages for food. However, the potential that they could bring back bits of a carcass tainted with lead bullets is a threat to the survival of the youngster.

Of the 77 eggs laid in the wild since 2001, 33 lived for at least six months — long enough to fly. If the newest one survives, its wings will grow from their current thumb size to a span of at least 9 1/2 feet.

The young condor will live with its parents for a year. The adults will wait two years before producing another egg.

"For first-time parents they’re doing a good job," George said.

— Associated Press

Stay up-to-date on animal news: Follow Unleashed on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: A condor inspects its egg at Pinnacles National Monument. Credit: Gavin Emmons / National Park Service

Realclimate has Martin Vermeer’s reflections on the making of his recent sea level paper with Stefan Rahmstorf. At some point I hope to post a replication of that study, in a model with the Grinsted and Rahmstorf 2007 structures, but I haven’t managed to replicate it yet. The problem may be that I haven’t yet tackled the reservoir storage issue.

At Nature Reports, Olive Heffernan introduces several sea level articles. Rahmstorf contrasts the recent set of semi-empirical models, predicting sea level of a meter or more this century, with the AR4 finding. Lowe and Gregory wonder if the semi-empirical models are really seeing enough of the dynamic ice signal to have predictive power, and worry about overadaptation to high scenarios. Mark Schrope reports on underadaptation – vulnerable developments in Florida. Mason Inman reports on ecological engineering, a softer approach to coastal defense.

A lot of people have trouble with Michael Medved’s mustache, calling it a “hateful & contemptible lip-douche.” They ask questions like, “what did that hideous sewer caterpillar ever do to you that  made you want to crucify it under your nose?” Myself, though, I approve of it. A mustache like that says to the world, “hello, world! I’m a sanctimonious prick, let me annoy you with my dipshit self-righteous opinions.” It’s a real time-saver, frankly.

Anyway. Medved has this emanation up at Townhall where he presents the case to the sullen, surly inmates that there are Key Differences between Canada and Nazi Germany, and that therefore Barack Obama is not “evil,” he just wants to do evil things that you shouldn’t call “evil” because that’s not nice, so let’s just politely agree that he deep down hates America, like all Leftists. It doesn’t make very much sense, but maybe if you stare at the mustache long enough, it will become clear.

Contrasting attitudes toward the United States of America characterize the great divide in this country between right and left, but the similarly crucial distinction between mainstream conservatives and right wing hysterics reflects their radically different assessments of… Canada, of all places. For the first time since the War of 1812, in fact, debate about the true nature of our terminally bland neighbor to the north plays a significant role in American politics.

Medved actually has sort of a point here. If Canada’s single payer healthcare system is not Tyranny but merely, you know, a policy enacted by a democratic state to handle an important public issue, then pretty much all of the Teabagging drama suddenly becomes so much abject hysterical bullshit. Which it is! Medved is significantly aware of consensus reality to concede this basic point, stressing that a healthcare system like Canada’s is not inherently “evil,” and hence neither is Obama for wanting something like that (which he in fact does not, but leave that be for a moment).

The idea that neither the president nor single-payer are “evil” has the entirely predictably hilarious Townhall comments results:

It is freedom and the exceptionalism of the United States citizens that kicked the tories out of the US after the Revolution and moved them to Canada. The woosies have been building a nanny state ever since. I would argue that the reason they are less repressive then their elite lefties would like is the long boarder with the much larger and more dynamic US has kept them from totally smothering the Canadian people’s desire for freedom.

No doubt. But I’m more interested in the wingnut honey that Medved feels impelled to coat his post with, so as to make the bitter pill of ludicrously obvious fact (Canada is not Maoist China) easier for the crazies to swallow (not that they didn’t spit it out anyhow). To wit, Medved quotes this nonsense from Norman Poohoreitz:

I think it fair to say that what the Left mainly sees when it looks at America is injustice and oppression of every kind – economic, social, and political. By sharp contrast, the Right sees a complex of traditions, principles, and institutions that have made it possible for more freedom – and even factoring in periodic economic downturns – more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society known to human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending against attack.

Bullshit. What the Right “sees” when it “looks at America” is that it is infested with Evil-doers who are so twisted with hate for Uncle Sam that they want insurance companies to not be able to refuse to cover sick kids. Or something.

The American Right is nothing without its demonization of an imaginary “Left.” As I’ve said before, imagine how freaked out these guys would be be if the American left actually had any influence on policy in this country. Horrors!

 

Filed under: Advice, Health, Healthy Eating, Hormone Diet

Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That’s Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how … Read more

 

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The reason krill oil is more effective than other marine oils is the amount of omega-3 fatty acids, phospholipids and extremely potent antioxidants. It’s the unique combination of these essential ingredients that provide the greatest health benefits.

Krill oil has been shown to outperform fish oil supplements when it comes to lowering your bad low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. Patients who took 1 to 1.5 grams of krill oil a day—compared to three times the dose of fish oil—showed a significantly greater decrease in bad cholesterol than the fish oil patients.

In an Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) test, krill oil was shown to contain 300 times the amount of vitamin A and E, plus 48 times the antioxidant power of standard omega-3 fish oils.

Omega fatty acids are essential for your diet—and should be supplemented since your body doesn’t produce them on its own. These fatty acids are the best source to help prevent blood clotting, lower blood pressure and relive inflammation.

Krill oil contains a healthy balance of omega-3 fatty acid and omega-6 fatty acid—which helps fight infection. These two fatty acids need each other and work together to prevent other inflammation-related ailments like heart disease, arthritis and diabetes.

Phospholipids are fats that help keep your cells functioning by providing a protective membrane around each cell to block out toxins and disease-forming free radicals. The fats found in krill oil most closely resemble the phospholipids found in your brain that are responsible for maintaining the brain chemical that controls your memory, muscle function, mood, sleep patterns and organs like your heart.

Results from laboratory tests show that krill oil contains a powerful cocktail of antioxidants, which are not only beneficial for your continued health, but also sustain the shelf life of the oil.

Krill oil provides you with an ample supply of vitamins A, E and D, plus minerals such as potassium, sodium and zinc. And it also contains large amounts of the B-complex choline.

However, the most powerful antioxidant in krill oil is astaxanthin. This nutrient is responsible for fighting free radicals within the body and protecting the blood-brain barrier—which means it protects the eye, brain and central nervous system from free radical damage.

Krill Oil for Your Aching Joints
If you suffer from creaking, cracking joints… stiff hands and fingers… lingering back pain… or sore swollen legs due to recurrent inflammation, then krill oil may be the miracle you have been searching for.

In a double-blind study, 45 patients with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis were administered 300 mg of krill oil. After only seven days, inflammation was reduced by 19 percent, pain was reduced 24 percent, stiffness was reduced by 21 percent and immobility was reduced by 16 percent.

How does this all-natural pain reliever work so well? It’s the combination of the trio of anti-inflammatory ingredients—omega fatty acids, phospholipids and numerous powerful antioxidants.

Ease Your Symptoms of Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)
In a randomized, double-blind study, researchers in Montreal studied the effects of krill oil on PMS, and patients reported a significant improvement in all 10 physical and mental symptoms examined and measured. The findings show that krill oil can help:

• Ease abdominal pain and uterine cramps
• Relive nausea, bloating and fatigue.
• Alleviate headaches as well as joint and body aches.
• Lessen PMS-related breast tenderness.
• Improve erratic mood swings and food cravings.
• Prevent PMS-related feelings of anxiety, depression and stress.

In fact, the women who consumed krill oil during the study period reported that they consumed fewer dangerous over-the-counter pain relievers to help with their PMS symptoms.

Reduce Your Chances of Heart Disease
High total cholesterol and high “bad” LDL cholesterol can be major risk factors for heart disease or a fatal heart disaster.

In a clinical study conducted by Canadian researchers from the University of Montreal, the findings show that Neptune krill oil significantly reduced several risk factors for high cholesterol.

In fact, the results showed a:

• Reduction in total cholesterol by 13 percent
• Decrease in bad LDL cholesterol by 32 percent
• Deduction in triglycerides by 11 percent
• Increase in good high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol by 44 percent

For much-needed relief from joint pain and PMS symptoms, plus reduced LDL cholesterol levels, I recommend nature’s amazing anti-inflammatory and antioxidant remedy—krill oil. Once you see and feel the results you might never look for standard fish oil supplements again.

—By Michael Cutler, M.D.

Still trying to sell his Obamacare plan in Charlotte, N.C., last week, President Obama responded to a simple question with a not-so-simple answer.

Is it, a woman named Doris wanted to know, a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the healthcare” package? “We are over-taxed as it is,” she said.

More than 17 minutes and 2,500 words later, Obama still hadn’t addressed her question.

According to The Washington Post, Obama “wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, ‘F-Map’). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as ‘FICA’).”

He continued making points after he ticked off three points after saying he had to make one more point—seven points in all.

Finally, even Obama seemed to realize he had gone on too long. As The Post explains, he apologized—in keeping with the spirit of the moment, not once but twice.

“Boy that was a long answer. I’m sorry. I hope I answered your question,” Obama said.

While he didn’t answer Doris, his non-answer soliloquy was answer enough. Besides, he answered it during the campaign when he responded to a similar question from Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher. “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Obama said.

Spreading the wealth around is his goal, but he’s not about to say it that plainly anymore. Besides, he still believes that the majority of Americans oppose Obamacare because they don’t understand it. So he’s going to talk it up and talk it up.

“Here comes the Orator! with his Flood of Words, and his Drop of Reason,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1735.

It looks like old Ben spotted Obama not just a mile away, but about 275 years away.

Start the countdown, folks. Tomorrow at 10 A.M. sharp, Apple will finally be dropping the curtain on iPhone OS 4.0 – and we’ll be there, reporting live. We’ll get to the ol’ Infinite Loop bright and early, armed to the teeth with laptops, cameras, an array of 3G USB dongles, and all the other gear necessary to bring you the best liveblog around.

The event starts at 10 A.M Pacific, though we’ll probably fire up the live blog a bit early to bring you commentary and images from the front line.

Can’t get enough of the live blog goodness? Be sure to tune in on Monday, April 12th at 10 A.M, when Microsoft is expected to announce whatever it is they’ve been working on with Project Pink. It’s gonna be a fun few days – be sure to tune it for all of it!

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes that “Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply” and Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng finishes the thought: More »

Filed under: Morning Scoop

Each morning, we dish out a few links we love.

Before you hit the ‘send’ button on that email, consider this: Studies show that simply walking to your colleague’s office will help you slim down.

Get your butt outside — getting more vitamin D … Read more

 

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— Bizarre new trend: Surfing with animals. Okay, we will accept that some dogs seem to actually enjoy the sport — but what of other species that are seemingly less suited to surfing? Like, say, an alpaca? Peruvian surfer Domingo Pianezzi recently made headlines when he surfed a beach near Lima with an alpaca named Pisco. (Apparently some locals reacted positively to the stunt, but others argued that Pianezzi had acted cruelly by making an alpaca — a mountain-dwelling species related to camels and llamas — enter the water.) But this wasn’t the first time Pianezzi had surfed with an unusual animal, and he’s not the first to have done so. "I’ve surfed with a dog, a parrot, a hamster and a cat, but when I was at a competition in Australia I saw people surfing with kangaroos and koalas," he told an interviewer. "So I thought that, as a Peruvian, it would be interesting to surf with a unique animal that represents Peru." (Reuters)

— Musical theater composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and talk show host Graham Norton have teamed up for a BBC reality-TV show in which the pair and a panel of judges will cast the role of Dorothy for an upcoming West End production of "The Wizard of Oz." The show also aims to find a talented animal actor to play another iconic Oz role: Toto. About 400 would-be Totos arrived Tuesday for a rigorous two-day audition in the English county of Warwickshire. Among the tasks they had to complete to be considered for the part: Walking on a leash for about 15 minutes. (Doesn’t sound so hard, but dogs who stopped walking, barked or jumped up were immediately eliminated from the competition.) Forty were asked back for the second day of auditions, and the top 10 will appear on the BBC show this Saturday. According to instructions provided to the animals’ owners, "the Toto panel are looking for a true star. The winning doggy will have bags of personality and not be afraid to show it off." In other words, a latter-day Skippy. (Telegraph)

— Can animals commit suicide? It might, on the surface, seem like an odd question, but it’s one that’s been inciting debate recently, in part because of a new study published in the British journal Endeavour. One prominent animal advocate, Ric O’Barry of the Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," has often shared the story of the day he decided it was wrong to keep dolphins in captivity for humans’ entertainment. O’Barry trained the dolphins featured in the TV show "Flipper"; one day, he has said, the show’s main dolphin star, Kathy, looked him directly in the eye before sinking to the bottom of her tank and purposely stopped breathing. "The [animal entertainment] industry doesn’t want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain," O’Barry told Time Magazine. "If life becomes so unbearable, they just don’t take the next breath. It’s suicide." (Time)

— A boxer-pit bull mix named Piggy who gets around with the aid of a doggie wheelchair is inspiring the children she visits through a therapy program at Shriners Hospital for Children in Salt Lake City, Utah. Piggy, a 6-year-old rescue dog whose rear legs became paralyzed following a hit-and-run auto accident in late 2007, was nearly euthanized when it appeared that she would be unable to recover from her severe injuries. But owner April Hollingsworth was heartened when some of Piggy’s reflexes began returning after the accident, and today she is sometimes able to use her rear legs, thanks in part to physical therapy. Hollingsworth and Piggy now make regular visits to the children at Shriners, many of whom struggle with their own disabilities. "I feel she’s a gift I have to give," Hollingsworth said of Piggy, whose visits are said to help Shriners’ young patients feel more comfortable in the hospital environment. (Salt Lake Tribune)

— Tyler Weinman, the 19-year-old charged last year with felony animal cruelty and other offenses in relation to a string of cat killings in South Florida, will face additional charges for the deaths of two cats that weren’t previously included in a prosecutor’s report. In total, Weinman now faces 21 counts of felony animal cruelty, 21 counts of improperly disposing of an animal’s body and four counts of burglary in connection with the string of cat killings. Weinman is due back in court May 5. His attorney has issued strong denials of Weinman’s alleged involvement in the cat killings and told the Associated Press last year that his client "welcomes his day in court, so that he will be completely vindicated." (NBC News Miami)

— People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, never a group to miss out on a chance for publicity, is at it again. This time, PETA hopes to capitalize on a recent analysis from the journal Pediatrics that suggests hundreds of infant deaths and illnesses could be prevented if more mothers breastfed their babies. PETA says it’s negotiating with outdoor advertisers in Lexington, Ky., with the hope of installing a billboard in the city depicting the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus alongside the text: "If It Was Good Enough for Jesus … The Breast Is Best. Dump Dairy. PETA." Why Kentucky? The state has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the U.S. Of course, the billboard’s message isn’t just about breastfeeding — its aim is also to draw attention to PETA’s assertion that many cows are abused on dairy farms. "Our billboard aims to show Kentucky residents that by fortifying human babies and saving the lives of cows, breast milk is also the blessed milk," writes PETA blogger Logan Scherer. (The PETA Files)

— Lindsay Barnett

Stay up-to-date on animal news: Follow Unleashed on Facebook and Twitter.

Video: ITNExtreme via YouTube

A diplomat who works at Qatar’s embassy in Washington has been taken into custody after possibly trying to ignite something on a flight from Washington to Denver, a source told Fox News.

The source said it does not appear the man, identified as Mohammed al Modadi, was trying to light an explosive substance or explosive device. Instead, the source said, the suspect may have been trying to light something aboard United Airlines Flight 663 in an attempt to cover up another smell.

Authorities have not made final conclusions about the incident and continue to investigate, the source said.

The Transportation Security Administration said in a statement that it was “monitoring an incident” after receiving “initial reports that a Federal Air Marshal responded to a passenger possibly causing a disturbance on board this aircraft.”

Two F-16 fighters intercepted the Denver-bound aircraft at about 8:45pm ET, according to a statement from the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The flight landed safely in Denver about five minutes later, according to TSA and NORAD.
 
Law enforcement officials are still on the scene, and “all steps are being taken to ensure that safety of the traveling public,” according to the TSA.

It’s unclear whether the man in custody will face any charges.

Filed under: Friends & Family, Advice, Happiness, How to Be Happy

On her blog and subsequent book, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin spent years test-driving every possible piece of wisdom, science and popular opinion about how to be happier, from Aristotle to Oprah. Four years after she started, Rubin spoke … Read more

 

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Filed under: Advice, Health, Healthy Eating, Holistic Recipe

It’s no secret that increasing fibre in your diet is a sound strategy for happy bowels. Just about every single packaged cereal advertisement on TV sings the praises of a high fibre diet listing benefits ranging from lowering cholesterol to … Read more

 

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This is hardly a surprise, but with the Google Book search lawsuit/settlement with authors and publishers still under discussion, it seems that photographers have decided to file their own lawsuit. This was, in large part, driven by the judge in the existing case, who excluded photographers from the current lawsuit/settlement, because the photographers have a very different perspective and demands concerning the scanning.

Via The Trademark Blog, we get a look at the actual filing:

While Google decided to cave rather than fight the good fair use fight on regular book scanning, it would be interesting to see if they decide to fight the photographers on this one. I would think they have a very strong fair use case — and there is at least some case law to support this position. I know of two recent cases that had at least somewhat similar fact patterns, involving commercial entities using copyrighted images as part of an aggregated product — and both were found as fair use.

Just last year, we wrote about a book that used old magazine covers drawn by artist Basil Gogos that looked at Gogos’ artwork. The magazine that originally published the artwork claimed copyright violations, but the district court found a strong fair use claim in noting that it was “fundamentally transformative in nature.” The other case, involves old Grateful Dead posters, where someone published a book of the posters, but was sued by the Bill Graham Archives, claiming copyright infringement over those posters. Once again, the court said this was fair use, despite it being a commercial endeavor. Again, part of the reasoning was that this was an aggregation of the content, and the overall quality of the images did not match up to the original posters. Given the low-fi quality of Google book scans, it seems likely that the same claim makes sense for photographic/visual media works that Google scans in books as well. It’s worth noting, also, that the Grateful Dead poster decision took place in the same district court (Southern District of NY) where this new lawsuit is being filed.

Even so, this whole thing seems confusing, and feels like a pure moneygrab by photographers. The images from a Google book scan are not high quality in any way. They’re certainly not going to replace or act as a substitute for the original works. In fact, it’s difficult to see how they would do anything but increase the interest in the original, higher quality, works.

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For a long time now, my day job has been “theoretical physicist,” as a quick glance at my papers will confirm. But it was not always thus! Very few people are actually born as theoretical physicists. When I was an undergraduate astronomy major at Villanova, I wasn’t thinking about quantum field theory or differential geometry; I was working on photometric studies of variable stars. My personal favorite star was Epsilon Aurigae, a mysterious eclipsing binary. One of the very few stars out there that has both a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. And now Epsilon is in the news again!

Among this star’s claims to fame is that it has the longest period of any known eclipsing binary: over 27 years. But it’s not just about facile record-holding; this system is truly puzzling, especially the nature of the secondary (the thing that eclipses the primary star). The basic problem is that the eclipse has a fairly flat bottom, as seen in this light curve from the previous eclipse in 1982-84.

A flat-bottomed light curve is usually associated with a total eclipse; the secondary completely blocks the light from the primary for a while. But in this case, the spectrum of the system seemed to remain unchanged, indicating that most of the light was still coming from the primary star, even in the middle of the eclipse. This led Huang in 1965 to propose a clever model, in which the secondary is actually a disk seen edge-on; the eclipse is therefore not total, but the disk blocks out part of the light without emitting much of its own. And indeed, with modern infrared telescopes we can discern the light from the secondary — it does look like a relatively cold disk, about four astronomical units in radius, with a hot central star.

The 1982-84 eclipse raised a problem with Huang’s model, however. If you look closely at that light curve above, you’ll notice that it gets brighter right near the middle. (The gap in data is from when the star was behind the Sun and unobservable.) Your first guess is that this is probably just a fluctuation in the in brightness of the primary star; but it turns out that this can’t be right. The primary is indeed variable, but its color changes in lockstep with its brightness, an effect that can be measured by observing with different filters. And the mid-eclipse brightening shows no variation in color. It’s not due to variability in the primary; somehow the disk is letting more light past, right during mid-eclipse.

This is where I come in, as an undergrad doing research under Ed Guinan. For my undergraduate thesis, we tried to put together the most sensible picture we could manage of Epsilon Aurigae; our picture has now become the consensus model. (One difference is that we thought the primary was a supergiant, but now it appears that it’s likely to be a smaller star.) As far as the disk is concerned, we built on a variation of Huang’s disk model, due to Wilson in 1971. Wilson suggested that the disk should be thin and tilted, rather than thick and edge-on, with a semi-transparent inner region. In that case, we could imagine that the central star (presumably holding the disk together) could clear out a region near the center, and light passing through that hole could account for the brightening. I wrote a simple computer program (QuickBASIC on an IBM PC!) to calculate the light curve in this model, and we were able to get an extremely good fit to the data. Here’s the killer plot from our paper, with three different models: edge-on thick disk, opaque tilted disk with a central hole, and tilted disk with a central hole surrounded by a larger semi-transparent region.

And now, it’s eclipse time again! (I’m getting old.) Epsilon started going into eclipse in August 2009, right on schedule, and the eclipse is predicted to last until May 2011, so we’re just a bit before mid-eclipse right now. Here’s the current light curve. But technology has advanced quite a bit since my student years. Nowadays, we don’t need to puzzle out the meaning of a light curve and come up with an elaborate story involving tilted disks; we can just take pictures of the thing.

And that’s just what we did. Under the leadership of Brian Kloppenborg and Robert Stencel at the University of Denver, we put together a proposal to observe the eclipse using CHARA, the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy. CHARA is an array of optical telescopes on Mt. Wilson that act as an interferometer, enabling extremely high-resolution imaging of astronomical objects. And by “we,” I do mean that I was included in the proposing team — a little return to my roots. My contributions to the final results were not zero, but they were small; the lion’s share of the credit certainly goes to Brian and Bob and the rest of the team.

And our results just appeared in the form of a paper in Nature. Unfortunately behind a paywall, but there is an extensive NSF press release. But who cares about the words? The stunning things are these pictures — you can actually see the disk begin to move across the surface of the star. There’s even a video where you can compare a model to the actual data. Click to embiggen.

I have to admit that, while these images are unambiguously amazing, the result is somewhat bittersweet for me. John Monnier, another one of the team leaders, admits that he was skeptical about all this tilted-disk business; it just seemed like a house of cards. But I wasn’t skeptical for a moment, having gone through the work of trying to fit the data with various different possibilities. The extraordinary thing to me about observational astronomy was always how you could put together an apparently baroque model of some complicated system, just on the basis of a precious few data points, and yet have some degree of confidence that you were on the right track. Reality is very constraining. So in some perverse sense, it almost seems like cheating to actually take pictures of the thing. Where’s the fun in that? (Of course it’s a great deal of fun.)

And now we need to see what happens at mid-eclipse! I predict we’ll be able to image that small central hole we posited many years ago. Not at all certain about that — I suspect the star at the center of the disk is pretty active itself, and there are probably significant variations in the opacity of the central disk region. That’s what data are for. I will always love being a crazy-eyed theoretical physicist, but there’s something uniquely rewarding about digging into the data and coming to an understanding of far-flung pieces of our universe.